School of Media

Joel Simon, executive director of the international nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, will speak at Western Kentucky University’s School of Journalism & Broadcasting on April 3 at 7 p.m. in Mass Media & Technology Hall (MMTH) auditorium.

Simon will deliver the 13^th annual John B. Gaines Family Lecture Series, which has hosted lectures by professional journalists at WKU since 2004. Simon, who has worked as a journalist throughout Latin American and lead CPJ for 11 years, will speak about the non-profit’s work to advocate for journalists around the world and more recent efforts examining threats to freedom of the press in the U.S. His talk, “Trump & The Truth: Defending Press Freedom at Home & Abroad,” will put the U.S. in an international context, examining parallels and patterns the organization has seen around the globe.

Simon has written about press freedom issues for The New York Times, Slate, World Policy Journal, the Columbia Journalism Review and numerous other publications. His most recent book, “The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom,” was published in November 2014. Simon worked for many years as a freelance journalist in Latin America, where he covered the Guatemalan civil war and the Chiapas conflict in Mexico, among other issues. He is a graduate of Amherst College and Stanford University.   

The free lecture is open to students and the public. It is a swipeable event for students.