New York Times Editor To Speak At CWU

March 25, 2004

Contact: Dr. Elizabeth Street (509-963-2111/fax 509-963-3206/e-mail: streetl@cwu.edu)

ELLENSBURG, Wash.-- Just as the 2004 presidential race heats up, award-winning journalist Richard L. Berke, the Washington, D.C., editor for the New York Times, will visit Central Washington University to take the audience "Behind the Scenes of the 2004 Presidential Campaign."

His free, public presentation is slated for Monday, April 12, at 7 p.m. in McConnell Auditorium.

Along with his present post, Berke has served as a reporter and the national political correspondent at the Washington bureau of the New York Times since 1986. Before that he was with the Baltimore Evening Sun from 1981 to 1986, where he rose to the position of chief Washington correspondent. He also was a general assignment reporter with the Minneapolis Tribune in 1980.

Born in Washington, D.C., Berke, 45, received a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Michigan in 1980 and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1981.

In 2001, he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and served as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, as he had previously in 1997 and 1999.

In 1999, Berke was named a senior advisor to the Harvard University Institute of Politics of the Kennedy School of Government, the same year he was named by "Brill's Content" magazine as one of the 25 most influential people in American media.

Two years before that, he served as a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics and taught a course that focused on American politics.

In 1983, Berke received a first place award for enterprise reporting from the Maryland Society of Professional Journalists.

Berke has made frequent television and radio appearances on such programs as Nightline, the Today show, Good Morning America, Washington Week in Review and CNN's Inside Politics.

For more information about Berke's CWU presentation, or for persons of disability to arrange for reasonable accommodation, call (509) 963-2111, or (for the hearing impaired) TDD (509) 963-2143.