Terence Smith, award-winning journalist and news veteran, will be speaking on campus tonight at the seventh annual Rosine Smith Sammons Lecture in Media Ethics. He has been a political reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and television analyst during his 40-year career. He has written about everything from presidential news conferences to the Vietnam War. His accomplishments and the diversity of his achievements make him one of the leading journalists in the world today.
Smith has spent 20 years working for the New York Times, including an eight-year stint in the Middle East and Far East where he covered four wars, peace negotiations and the day-to-day lives of people in more than 40 countries.
He served as Assistant Foreign Editor and Deputy Metropolitan Editor while working at the Times and served as diplomatic correspondent and chief White House correspondent in the paper’s Washington bureau.
After working with the New York Times he founded and edited the Washington Talk page. During his career in print journalism Smith won the Times’ Publisher’s Prize for outstanding writing an astounding 22 times and was even nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice.
In 1985, Smith worked at CBS News in Washington where he covered the Reagan administration for nine years for CBS Sunday Morning. His work on the show “48 Hours” earned him two Emmys and he shared in the George Foster Peabody Award given to the staff of CBS Sunday Morning.
Smith turned to public television in 1998 when he founded the media unit The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Smith broadcast 110 in-depth tape reports and anchored some 250 studio discussions on media issues. He and his team won 18 national awards and honors for media criticism and analysis during his seven years producing the show.
Today Smith is a special correspondent for “The News Hour” and is a frequent guest host on “The Diane Rehm Show” on National Public Radio. He speaks, writes and broadcasts on international affairs, national politics and environmental issues involving the Chesapeake Bay and ocean policies.
The Rosine Smith Sammons Lecture Series in Media Ethics is funded by a generous endowment from the Rosine Foundation Fund of the Communities Foundation of Texas, at the recommendation of Mary Anne Sammons Cree of Dallas.
The series is named in honor of her mother, Rosine Smith Sammons, an SMU alum who graduated in the 1920s with a degree in journalism. The endowment will provide resources for the Meadows School of the Arts to present annual lectures focusing on media ethics.
Tonight’s lecture will be in Caruth Auditorium (in the Meadows building), at 8 p.m. Tickets are free and are available through the Meadows Ticket Office.
All students who have an interest in journalism or current events in general are encouraged to attend.
Molly Palmison is a first-year Anthropology major. She can be reached for further questions or comments at [email protected].
