2009 Presenters

Callie Crossley

Callie Crossley draws on her rich experience as a an award winning journalist and documentary filmmaker to offer commentary on the media for National Public Radio, and on national television programs, including The News Hour on PBS, and Reliable Sources on CNN. She is a frequent guest on national radio programs including Tell Me More with Michel Martin, and On the Media.  On C-SPAN, she appears as a moderator for forums at the John F. Kennedy Library.  In Boston, she is a frequent commentator for the Fox 25 TV’s Morning Show. However, she is best known to Bostonians for her weekly television commentary on WGBH-TV’s media criticism program, Beat the Press, which examines local and national media coverage.

Producer of the Oscar® nominated hour of the acclaimed documentary series, “Eyes on the Prize,” Crossley has won nearly all of the top journalism awards, including a national Emmy, a Peabody, a Christopher, an Edward R. Murrow, and the Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia Gold Baton, the Pulitzer Prize of broadcast journalism.

A former producer for ABC News “20/20”, Crossley’s busy career now centers on public speaking and moderating. As a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, she is among the ranks of former diplomats, authors, and business leaders as a featured speaker on college campuses and universities. Crossley lectures about the transformation of new and old media, media and politics, media literacy, and the intersection of race, gender and media. Crossley is also a bibliophile who is frequently tapped to conduct author interviews. She has lectured about the importance of libraries, and delivered the keynote address for the Massachusetts Library Association.

Crossley has been quoted in some of the nation’s top periodicals including The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Newsweek. 

She has been published in a variety of magazines including Diversity Magazine, and Wellesley College Magazine. She is also one of several writers selected to pen an essay for a book to be published by the Cambridge Public Library in the fall of 2009. She is also the author of a wine blog, “The Crushed Grape Report”.

Crossley has been awarded two Harvard fellowships—a Nieman Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government— and holds two honorary degrees from Pine Manor College and Cambridge College.

APPEARING IN: The Tenor of Our Times