Iconic Hersh to help launch Media@McGill

Kathryn Haralambous

Media@McGill, the university's innovative media and communications studies program, will be launched October 26 in conjunction with a speech by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author Seymour Hersh.

A world-class interdisciplinary focal point for teaching and research in media and communication studies, Media@McGill receives support from various sources, most notably the Beaverbrook Fund for Media@McGill. Based in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, it will aid graduate students' work and professors' research. It also aims to further public awareness and discussion of pressing issues in media, culture and technology, such as education's role in cultivating citizenship in a technological society as well as the legal, aesthetic and technological problems involved in preserving and re-exhibiting media-based works of art from the past.

By creating an unparalleled environment for critical monitoring of the media and of media policy, Media@McGill will foster public awareness about the ethical, political, social and cultural importance of media and communications.

This is the second visionary gift by the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, which set up the Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media and Communications, held since 2004 by Marc Raboy, McGill graduate and media policy professor. The foundation's president is Timothy Aitken, a McGill graduate and grandson of Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964), the Canadian-born British newspaper magnate and politician.

Hersh is a tireless investigator of hidden truths, beginning with reporting the My Lai massacre, which changed U.S. public opinion on the Vietnam War, and, more recently, his 2004 exposé of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. He is a contributor to The New Yorker magazine on security and military matters.

Hersh is to speak at 6 p.m. Oct. 26 at Mount Royal Centre. For further information, contact norma.procyshyn@mcgill.ca.