Andrea Elliott, recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for journalism, offers her perspective on Muslims in America.

Andrea Elliott, a New York Times reporter who has reported on Muslims in America since 2005, offers her perspective on the topic at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 28, in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

Presented by the Office of Intercultural Education, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-755-5980.

Elliott has been an investigative reporter for The New York Times since 2003. In 2005, she began covering Islam in America. Her series “An Imam in America,” which won Elliott the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, chronicled the life of Sheik Reda Shata, an immigrant Muslim leader in Brooklyn.

Reda came to relieve the previous imam, who was exhausted by the discrimination his congregants faced daily. Elliott poignantly chronicled Reda’s setbacks and successes in a manner that asked her readers to reconsider their conceptions of Islam.

Elliott has also published articles on Muslims in the American military, an examination of the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib and a special report investigating the lives of Moroccan suicide bombers. In 2009 she examined what had motivated 20 Somali-Americans to join the jihad in Somalia.

Along with the Pulitzer Prize, Elliot has received awards from the Overseas Press Club, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the New York Press Club. Her work was featured in the compilation Best Newspaper Writing 2007-2008 (CQ Press). In 2008, she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.

Before joining the Times, Elliott was a reporter at The Miami Herald. She earned a B.A. degree in comparative literature from Occidental College in 1996, and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1999, graduating first in her class.

The public is invited to attend this event free of charge. The panel concludes this fall’s Civic Forum series at Bates, presented by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the Bates office that coordinates projects linking the college and community. For more information, please contact 207-786-6202 or this kcloutie@bates.edu.

The panelists are Rex Rhoades, executive editor of the Lewiston Sun Journal; Thomas Fiedler, dean of Boston University’s College of Communication and former executive editor of The Miami Herald; and Justin Ellis, former columnist, staff writer and multimedia producer for the Portland Press Herald, and now on staff at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

Topics will include the role of journalism in holding government accountable; challenges journalists face today in carrying out that role; who should be the arbiter of journalistic standards; and the impact of the changing media landscape on our democracy.

Civic Forum presentations explore civic, political and policy issues significant to the local community, Maine and beyond. They often feature panels of local and national experts and lively question-and-answer sessions.

The New York Daily News gave staff writer Matt Gagne ’04 an assignment he’s been training for since his Bates days: Cover the NCAA men’s basketball tournament from a sports bar in Manhattan. With a couple of friends, including a chum from Bates, Gagne watched the first-round games from the ESPN Zone in Times Square. “Others came and went, but Mike and Dave were in it for most of the haul,” wrote Gagne in his story, peppered with Bates references. “They had dozens of bracket pages spread out all over the table, some neatly stored in a three-ring binder while others were crumpled like old ATM receipts. At times they looked like teachers correcting homework; other times it felt like our restaurant tab was riding on the last horse race at the Meadowlands.” [More...]

Facing the worst economic crisis in generations and an unpopular war in Iraq, President Barack Obama arrived in Washington shattering racial barriers and promising momentous change in the way the United States conducts itself at home and abroad. Reporters from around the globe have descended on the nation’s capital to document the unfolding historic drama.

American newspapers, meanwhile, are pulling their correspondents out.

Wracked by declining readership and advertising revenues, daily papers in every major American city have scaled back their Washington bureaus or closed them altogether. It is the latest sign of a decade-long financial skid in the American news industry, where austerity measures have become commonplace.

But as Washington correspondents vanish, troubling questions arise. If Thomas Jefferson was right that “a well-informed citizenry” is necessary for a healthy democracy, what happens when the American public is unaware of their elected officials’ work in Washington? Could the result be pay-to-play journalism, where information is increasingly available only to those able and willing to pay top dollar for it?

Brian McGrory ’84, metro editor at The Boston Globe and the paper’s former White House correspondent, explains the watchdog role of Washington-based reporters.

“Residents elect people to represent them in Washington, so we don’t want those politicians going off and forgetting where they came from,” he says. “We ought to keep close tabs on how they are spending their campaign money, who is giving them contributions, and whether they are fulfilling their campaign promises. To pull out of Washington and leave these guys uncovered would be a travesty.”

Yet few newspapers have been spared from the current cutbacks. The Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the San Diego Union-Tribune have pulled their reporters out of Washington. Cox Newspapers, which had 30 people in its Washington bureau including correspondents for The Austin (Texas) American-Statesmanand The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, announced it will close its D.C. operation in April.

The Tribune company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, combined the Washington bureaus of the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times, cutting in half a staff of what had been 70 people only a year ago. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post even reduced the width of their papers to save money on newsprint.

My own former employer, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, is keeping a two-person Washington operation intact even as its owner, the publishing giant Newhouse, closed its D.C. bureau in November.

To save money, newspapers fill their pages with stories from subscription wire services such as The Associated Press and Reuters. Yet wire services are designed to get news out broadly, not explain what a new federal budget means for public education, environmental protection, or police capabilities in, say, Lewiston.

“If you look at newspapers today, they are mostly wire stories that are national or international,” says Jeremy Pelofsky ’97, who covers Congress for Reuters. “You have to wonder if the interests of a city are being served by a wire report. And that’s coming from a wire reporter!”

The result of newspaper cutbacks will not be a news blackout, however. Quite the opposite. News of the Obama presidency and the work of the 111th Congress will explode out of Washington in such overwhelming volume that it will be impossible for all but the most dedicated hermits to ignore.

What will be lost is context and meaning. The main task of Washington correspondents has always been to stand at the center of power, politics, and policy and tell the folks back home what it all means to them. At their best, Washington correspondents aren’t merely reporters, but explainers, experts who “understand how the system works in D.C. and can apply that understanding to the issues and the political players most relevant to readers back home,” says Carolyn Ryan ’86, deputy metro editor at The New York Times.

Those explainers are the people who are losing their jobs.

At this writing, President Obama is talking about kick-starting the economy with a public works building spree reminiscent of FDR’s. It is a Washington correspondent’s job to find out which bridge and road projects back home will get green-lighted — and which won’t. It also falls to the Washington correspondent to see if the money is being disbursed equitably, what role politics is playing, and whether someone’s brother-in-law is getting a sweetheart deal to do the paving.

The value of a Washington bureau was never more evident to me than after Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005. With The Times-Picayune‘s downtown New Orleans offices flooded and abandoned, it fell to the Washington bureau to collect stories from reporters in the field and post them on the newspaper’s Web site. After the storm, the Washington bureau was also charged with tracking what Congress and the Bush administration were doing — and not doing — to aid in the recovery and the awesome task of rebuilding a major American city.

Former newspaper journalist Bill Walsh ’86 is now a senior strategic adviser for AARP in Washington, D.C.

In this photograph by Randy Goodman, William Worthy (center) sets up a question-answer session at a Tehran hotel with Hossein Sheikholislam (left) and Massoumeh Ebtekar (right), spokespeople for the students who held 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days.

Ebtekar, often interviewed by U.S. journalists during the crisis, was dubbed “Screaming Mary” by the media. Now a professor of immunology in Tehran, she talked to Matt Lauer of the Today Show last September about the status of women in her country. Sheikholislam, meanwhile, became Iran’s deputy foreign minister and ambassador to Syria.

As a journalist, Worthy was drawn to societies that had revolted against oppressive, U.S.-backed regimes. At the same time, he believed the U.S. media’s foreign coverage favored American interests. “You have to talk about the imperialist press when you talk about the mass media,” he told an MIT audience in 1973.

Perhaps because of this, Worthy had the U.S. government frequently nipping at his heels. In a well-publicized incident in the 1950s, he couldn’t get his passport renewed after traveling to off-limits China. To a Senate subcommittee investigating the affair in 1957, Worthy said, “I want my passport. And I want it now.”

Worthy, self-described as a pacifist and civil libertarian with a “rebel temperament,” never tired of the hassle nor wavered from a belief in the value of his work in a democratic society. For that, he recently received the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Photographer Randy Goodman traveled with Worthy and recalls that “he just never rested. Sometimes I’d just want to get something to eat,” she laughs.

Worthy did eat — often while working. One night in Iran, he interviewed Hossein Sheikholislam over dinner, seeking insights into both the crisis and Iran’s Islamic Revolution. As Worthy later reported in The Boston Phoenix: “Martyrdom is a concept very dear…. If one is killed in the struggle, one’s ideas live on, and one’s work is picked up and carried to fruition by others.”

Wright, author of Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam (Simon and Schuster, 1985) and In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade (Simon and Schuster, 1989), has covered nine wars and six revolutions during 20 years as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, the Sunday Times of London, CBS News, the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor. She has been nominated for five Pulitzer prizes for national and international reporting, and she won the Oversees Press Club Award for “best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initiative” for her coverage of the Angolan war.

Wright, who received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan, has been a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a visiting scholar at Duke University and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University.