Mark Feldstein
Director, Journalism Program
Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs
Director, Journalism Oral History Project: Home Page

Phone: (202) 994-4632
Fax: (202) 994-5806
E-mail: feldy@gwu.edu
Office: MPA 411

Expertise

Journalism history and ethics, media law (including subpoenas of reporters), broadcast news, investigative reporting, free speech, and freedom of expression.

Courses Taught

JOUR 111, Reporting and Writing the News
JOUR 112 Advanced Reporting
JOUR 122, Broadcast News Reporting
JOUR 152 Journalism History
SMPA 250, History of Investigative Reporting

Selected Works

"Kissing Cousins: Journalism and Oral History," Oral History Review, v. 31, no. 1 (winter/spring 2004), cover story, pp. 1-22.

"Fighting Quakers: The 1950s Battle Between Richard Nixon and Columnist Drew Pearson," Journalism History, v. 30, no. 2 (summer 2004), cover story, pp. 76-90.

"Watergate Revisited," American Journalism Review, v. 26, no. 4 (Aug./Sept. 2004), pp. 60-67

"The Jailing of a Journalist: Prosecuting the Press for Receiving Stolen Documents," Communication Law and Policy, v.10, no. 2 (Spring, 2005), pp. 137-177.

"The Last Muckraker," Washington Post op-ed, July 28, 2004, p. A-18.

Background

For nearly 20 years, Mark Feldstein was on the other side of the camera as an on-air correspondent, specializing in investigative reporting at CNN, ABC News, NBC News, and local television stations in Phoenix, Tampa, and Washington, D.C.

As an investigative reporter, he has been beaten up in the U.S., detained and censored by government authorities in Egypt, and escorted out of the country under armed guard in Haiti.

Feldstein's work has won broadcast journalism's most prestigious prizes: two George Foster Peabody public service awards, the Columbia-DuPont baton for investigative reporting, the Edward R. Murrow broadcasting prize, 9 regional Emmy awards, and more than three dozen other journalism prizes.

He is regularly interviewed as a media analyst, appearing on live and taped broadcasts of CNN, C-Span, Court TV, HBO and NPR's "All Things Considered," as well as the BBC and other television networks and newspapers in Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Poland and Sweden. Feldstein comments frequently about journalistic coverage of politics, government, and public policy, especially involving TV news or investigative reporting on Washington scandals.

Now director of the journalism program and associate professor at George Washington University's school of media and public affairs, he is writing a biography of syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, focusing on the investigative reporter's bitter battles with President Richard Nixon.

Feldstein is best known in the nation's capital for his exposes of drug use and corruption by former Washington Mayor Marion Barry and his administration. His investigative reports have included subjects as varied as migrant farmworker slavery, abuses in nursing homes and halfway houses, political corruption, medical malpractice, social welfare abuses, environmental crimes, health care fraud, human rights atrocities, and police corruption. His exposes which have appeared on Nightline, Dateline, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Today, Headline News, Inside Politics, and Good Morning, America, have led to resignations, firings, multi-million dollar fines, and prison terms.

Feldstein has had extensive first-hand experience in media law. He has been subpoenaed on numerous occasions in civil and criminal cases by prosecutors, defendants and plaintiffs. Feldstein has conducted scholarly research on Branzburg v. Hayes and grand jury subpoenas of journalists and has provided expert witness testimony in media litigation. His stories involving grand jury secrecy during the federal probes of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski and Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry were cited as precedents in the Kenneth Starr independent counsel leak investigation. He has been a plaintiff in First Amendment lawsuits and has used hidden cameras, ambush interviews, and anonymous sources.

Feldstein has lectured at American University Law School, Duke, Georgetown, Northeastern, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina and Washington and Lee universities as well as to the FBI training academy, State Department, Justice Department, Customs Service and other law, government, and journalism organizations.

His work as a freelance writer has been published in The Washington Post, Time, The Washington Monthly, The Nation, and American Journalism Review. His scholarly work has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Oral History Review, Journalism History, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Communication and Booknotes Quarterly, where he is a member of the editorial board.

Feldstein has won top academic awards for his historical research from the American Journalism Historians Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He is also director of George Washington University's Journalism Oral History Project, which preserves on-line the eyewitness accounts of Washington reporters who have covered politics and government in the nation's capital.

He has traveled in more than two dozen countries and lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his son and daughter.

Education

Ph.D., Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002.

B.A., Government, Harvard University, 1979.