How can progressive, independent voices, and the publications that support them, maintain both viability and autonomy in this era of declining financial stability and growing media conglomeration? The Graduate Center’s Peter Beinart, senior political writer for the Daily Beast, discusses the health of progressive media with Katha Pollitt, longtime columnist for the Nation; Joy-Ann Reid, managing editor of NBC’s TheGrio.com; and Nermeen Shaikh, co-host of Democracy Now!.  

Katha Pollitt has been contributing to the Nation since 1980. Her 1992 essay on the culture wars, "Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me," won the National Magazine Award for essays and criticism. Her "Subject to Debate" column in the Nation, which debuted in 1995, won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary in 2003. Many of her contributions to the Nation are compiled in three books: Reasonable Creatures; Subject to Debate; and Virginity or Death!. She has also published two collections of personal essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories and The Mind-Body Problem. Joy-Ann (“Joy”) Reid is the managing editor of TheGrio.com and an on-air contributor on MSNBC. She is also a political columnist for the Miami Herald and editor of the political blog “The Reid Report.” Reid has worked in television and radio news since 1998 and has appeared as a political commentator on CNBC and Britain’s Sky News. Her columns have also appeared on Salon.com, TheGrio, and CommonDreams.

Nermeen Shaikh is a broadcast news producer and weekly co-host of Democracy Now!. A former managing editor at the Asia Society, she is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power. Shaikh serves on the editorial board of the Rome-based journal Development. She recently presented a TEDx talk in Budapest on the stories of dispossession underlying our civilization and has also worked at nonprofit organizations in London, Islamabad, and Tehran. Peter Beinart, the senior political writer at the Daily Beast, is the author of four books, including The Icarus Syndrome and, most recently, The Crisis of Zionism. He is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Beinart is also former editor of the New Republic and has written for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and many other periodicals.

This program is part of the yearlong initiative Cultural Capital: The Promise and Price of New York’s Creative Economy, produced by GC Public Programs in collaboration with the Advanced Research Collaborative.

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