Click on the Video Below and Sample a Session from a previous Digital Hollywood event. For Additional Video Sessions, Click Here Politics 2008: The Media Conference for the Election of the President Tuesday, October 14 10:45 AM - Noon Session I Media: Biased and Elitist? Or a Campaign Tactic to Dissuade Tough Questions? Dan Rather, Host and Global Correspondent, "Dan Rather Reports" Dorothy Rabinowitz, Columnist, Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize Winner David Sirota, Author, Columnist & Journalist, "The Uprising" Josh Silver, Executive Director, Free Press Bill Adair, Washington Bureau Chief, St. Petersburg Times and editor, PolitiFact Howard Kurtz, Media Reporter, The Washington Post, Host, CNN Reliable Sources, Moderator Dan Rather, Host and Global Correspondent, "Dan Rather Reports": Dan Rathertoobin replaced the venerable Walter Cronkite as the anchor for The CBS Evening News in 1981. Rather also served as reporter and host for prime-time news programs such as 48 Hours and 60 Minutes I (with Mike Wallace), making him one of American television's most prominent journalists for five decades. He started as a reporter for the Associated Press and for United Press International in the 1950s. After a brief stint at a Texas television station, Rather began working as a reporter for CBS News in 1962. He covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq. Rather has been in the news himself more than once, including during a strange 1986 incident in which a man attacked him in Manhattan while shouting "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" He has written several books, including The Camera Never Blinks (1977) and The American Dream: Stories From the Heart of Our Nation (2001). Rather is one of the most awarded figures within the journalism community. He has received numerous Emmys, several Peabody awards and several honorary degrees from universities. Dorothy Rabinowitz is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. She writes "Critic at Large," an occasional column for the Journal's editorial page, which also appears on OpinionJournal.com as "Dorothy Rabinowitz's Media Log." She won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in commentary for her 2000 articles on American culture and society. Ms. Rabinowitz joined the Journal in June 1990 as an editorial page writer and TV critic. She was named to the paper's editorial board in May 1996. Before joining the Journal, Ms. Rabinowitz was a freelance writer, syndicated columnist and commentator on New York's WWOR-TV News. She is the author of "No Crueler Tyrannies," a book about false child sex-abuse cases, published in 2004 by Wall Street Journal Books; "New Lives," a book about survivors of death camps, published in 1976 by Alfred Knopf; and "Home Life," a book about old age, published by Macmillan in 1970. Ms. Rabinowitz is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. She received the 1997 Champion of Justice Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in recognition of her journalistic achievements and commending her in particular for her writing on false sexual abuse charges. In 1993 she won the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors in the commentary category. A New Yorker, Ms. Rabinowitz earned a bachelor's degree from Queens College and did postgraduate work at New York University, while teaching in the English departments at NYU and the Pratt Institute. Josh Silver, Executive Director, Free Press: Josh Silver is the executive director of the media reform organization Free Press, which he founded with Robert McChesney and John Nichols in 2002 to engage public involvement in U.S. media policy debates. He leads all fundraising, campaign, and special project activities. Josh previously served as campaign manager for the successful ballot initiative for Clean Elections in Arizona; director of development for the cultural arm of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; and director of an international youth exchange program. He has published extensively on media policy, campaign finance and other public policy issues. Bill Adair is the Washington Bureau Chief for the St. Petersburg Times and the editor of the Times' fact-checking site PolitiFact. He has a weekly PolitiFact segment on MSNBC's Morning Joe and appears frequently on National Public Radio, CNN, CNN International and XM Radio's POTUS network. He's worked in Washington since 1997 and is the author of "The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a Crash Investigation" (2002, Smithsonian Press). He is the winner of the Everett Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. He lives in Arlington, Va. with his wife and three children. Howard Kurtz, Media Reporter, The Washington Post: Howard Kurtz is the host of the weekly CNN program Reliable Sources, which turns a critical lens on the media. Kurtz leads the scrutinizing of the media's fairness and objectivity by questioning journalists of top news organizations, including those at CNN. Kurtz is the media reporter for The Washington Post and writes a regular column called Media Notes. He joined the paper in 1981, after the demise of The Washington Star, and has covered urban affairs, the Justice Department and Capitol Hill. He has also served as The Washington Post's New York bureau chief. He has covered the media since 1990. Kurtz is the author of four books on the media. His most recent is The Fortune Tellers (Free Press), which takes a look at the relationship between the media and Wall Street. He is also the author of Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine (Free Press), a best-selling book about how the Clinton White House dealt with scandal and the press. Kurtz also has written Hot Air: All Talk All the Time, described by The New Yorker as "the definitive book on the talk show explosion." His first book, Media Circus: The Trouble with America's Newspapers, was voted the best recent book about the media by American Journalism Review in 1995. Kurtz has written for Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, New York Magazine, and Columbia Journalism Review. He is a native of Brooklyn, New York. David Sirota, Author, Columnist & Journalist, "The Uprising": David is a political journalist, activist, columnist and New York Times bestselling author living in Denver, Colorado. His weekly, nationally syndicated column now appears in newspapers with a combined circulation of more than 1.3 million readers. These include, among others, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Idaho Statesman, The Everett Herald, and the Idaho Falls Post Register. Sirota is widely known for his tenacious focus on working class economic issues that are often ignored by America’s political elites. Sirota began his political career as a fundraiser on Joe Hoeffel’s (D) first successful run for Congress – a run in which Hoeffel defeated a Republican incumbent in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, which is one of America’s most evenly-divided congressional districts. Soon after, Sirota moved to Washington where he became the press secretary to Vermont U.S. Rep. Bernard Sanders, the longest-serving independent in congressional history. In 2000, Sirota took a leave of absence from Sanders’ office to serve as a press aide to Brian Schweitzer (D), a farmer and first-time candidate who came within 4 percentage points of defeating Montana’s second-term U.S. Senator, Conrad Burns (R). Sirota then returned to Washington to serve as the chief spokesman for Democrats on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee – the panel that oversees all federal discretionary spending. Moving off Capitol Hill in 2003, Sirota accepted a position as one of the first employees of the Center for American Progress (CAP) – a national progressive think tank headed by former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. As CAP’s Director of Strategic Communications, Sirota created the organization’s main daily publication, The Progress Report. Sirota was also the principal author of Moveon.org’s Misleader (www.misleader.org), a daily publication that had 200,000 subscribers in the lead up to the 2004 presidential election. During the fall of 2004, Sirota returned to Montana to serve as a senior strategist to Brian Schweitzer in his successful run for governor. Schweitzer became the first Democrat elected to the governorship of Montana in 16 years. Now living in Denver, Sirota recently completed his second book for Random House’s Crown Publishers. The book is entitled “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.” It is due out in the Spring of 2008. Sirota’s first book, which was a New York Times bestseller, is entitled Hostile Takeover. It examines how political corruption has resulted in public policies that economically squeeze America’s middle class. Sirota is currently a senior editor at In These Times magazine. He also contributes regularly to The Nation and the American Prospect. Sirota is the full-time blogger for Working Assets, and a twice-weekly guest on The Al Franken Show. Over his career, his work has been published in, among others, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Hartford Courant, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Charlotte Observer, Knight Ridder Newspapers and The Washington Monthly (to see all of his work, go to www.davidsirota.com). Live Broadcasting by Ustream