The Role of Media

Topic: The Role of Media

Guest Speakers:
William McKenzie, a senior editorial advisor at the George W. Bush Institute, where he is working on editorial projects on democracy and freedom and education reform. He previously served as founding editor of The Catalyst: A Journal of Ideas from the Bush Institute.

As an adjunct journalism lecturer at SMU, he teaches a course on media and politics. He also has led a course on education policy and journalism.

Before joining the Bush Institute, the Fort Worth native served 22 years as an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News and led the newspaper’s Texas Faith blog. The University of Texas graduate’s columns appeared nationwide and he has won a Pulitzer Prize and commentary awards from the Education Writers Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Texas Headliners Foundation, among other organizations.

Before joining the News in 1991, he earned a master’s degree in political science from the University of Texas at Arlington and spent a dozen years in Washington, D.C. During that time, he edited the Ripon Forum.

Mr. McKenzie has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror, as a volunteer with and board member of homeless organizations in Dallas and Washington, and on governing committees of a Dallas public school. He is a member of the Fort Worth Independent School District’s Hall of Fame and an elder of the First Presbyterian Church in Dallas, where he lives with his wife and their twin children.

Rudolph (Rudy) Bush, A graduate of the University of Dallas, Rudy began his journalism career in San Antonio before departing for the Chicago Tribune in 2001. He spent the next six years writing on everything from gang crime to smuggled animals before being sent to the Tribune’s Washington Bureau as a national correspondent covering then-Sen. Barack Obama. Rudy returned to Chicago as federal courts reporter, reporting on the trial of one governor and the investigation of another. The nexus between politics and crime has been a focus of his career. Rudy returned to Texas in 2007 as city hall reporter for The News. In 2014, he joined the editorial board in a year that saw the paper reverse its longstanding opinion on the Trinity River toll road. Rudy returned to the newsroom in 2015 as city and enterprise editor, overseeing local news coverage as well as investigations and major narrative stories. In addition to his work for the newspaper, Rudy served as director of journalism at The University of Dallas from 2014-2022. He holds a BA in English, an MBA and an MA in Humanities from UD, where he studied Texas literature, with a focus on the novels of Cormac McCarthy. Rudy was named D Magazine's Best Columnist for 2014. In 2015, he was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Robert W. Decherd Award for Civic Journalism.

Moderator:
Bob Benson

Date: May 2nd, 2024

Time: 6:00pm - 7:30pm (Doors Open at 5:30pm)

Location: Boyer Elementary School, 1616 Montgomery Lane, Prosper Texas

Registration is required to attend.

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You are required to acknowledge the AUDIENCE ETIQUETTE with a signature.

AUDIENCE ETIQUETTE

• Listen respectfully, without interrupting.
• Speak thoughtfully and respectfully
• Listen actively and with an ear to understand others' views. (Don’t just think about what you are going to say while someone else is talking.)
• Criticize ideas, not individuals.
• Commit to learning, not debating. Comment to share information, not to persuade.
• Avoid blame, speculation, and inflammatory language.
• Allow everyone the chance to speak.
• Due to time constraints not all questions may be posed or answered.