PROGRAM

Please join us at Roosevelt House for the inaugural Jack Newfield Lecture – a discussion featuring New York Times White House correspondent and CNN commentator Maggie Haberman, the 2018 Jack Newfield Lecturer at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, and Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times Washington correspondent.

Two leading, Washington-based journalists discuss the relevance and influence of legendary journalist Jack Newfield’s investigative methods — and how the Newfield tradition animates their current coverage of the Trump White House and the President’s business and personal entanglements.

The Newfield lecture series is named for the late Village Voice columnist and social reformer Jack Newfield (1938-2004), whose career as a muckraking journalist spanned 40 years (highlighted by 700 columns for the Voice).  His fearless crusades earned him a reputation as one of New York’s — and the nation’s — most relentless investigative reporters and most influential commentators.  The father of a new kind of probing journalism, Newfield famously said in his 2002 autobiography, Somebody’s Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist: “The point is not to confuse objectivity with truth.” Honoring that mission for his entire career, Newfield also wrote memorably for the New York Post, New York Daily News, New York Sun, New York Magazine, and The Nation. Among the honors Newfield received were the George Polk Journalism Award for political reporting in 1980 and a 1991 Emmy for the HBO documentary, Don King: Unauthorized.

A Newfield Visiting Professorship was established at Hunter College in 2006.  Newfield Fellows have included the late Wayne Barrett, Tom Robbins, Charles Stuart, Errol Louis, Alyssa Katz, Barbara Nevins Taylor, Jarrett Murphy, and Andrea Bernstein. Beginning in 2018, the fellowship transitioned from a teaching program to a Roosevelt House lecture series with an emphasis on the values and issues that engaged Jack Newfield and can, through investigative journalism, contribute to the future of the city and country.

Tonight’s program is made possible through the generosity
of the family and friends of Jack Newfield.