| Theodore L. Glasser | |
| Alma Mater: | University of Iowa |
| Employer: | Stanford University |
Theodore L. Glasser is an American academic. He is professor emeritus of communication at Stanford University, and the author of several books about American journalism.[1] His scholarship focuses on questions of press responsibility and accountability. Glasser believes journalists must put social justice advocacy above objective reporting because objectivity is a myth. Instead of ever achieving objectivity, Glasser and co-author James Ettema were the first to demonstrate that norms of professional journalism amount to an attempt to "objectify morality"[2] According to Glasser, Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it's hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.[3]
Theodore "Ted" Glasser is professor emeritus in the Department of Communication, Stanford University, where for several years he was also affiliated with the Modern Thought and Literature Program. For 14 years he directed Stanford's Graduate Program in Journalism.
His several books include Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies, written with Clifford G. Christians, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng and Robert A. White, which won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Award for Best Research-Based Book on Journalism/Mass Communication; Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue, written with James S. Ettema, which also won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Award as well as the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for Research about Journalism and Pennsylvania State University's Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism.
Glasser's research, commentaries and book reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including Journalism Studies; Journal of Communication; Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism; Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly; Critical Studies in Media Communication; Journal of Media Ethics; Policy Sciences; Journal American History; Quill; Nieman Reports and The New York Times Book Review. He is currently serving on the editorial boards of seven academic journals.
In 2002-2003 he served as president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). He had earlier served two terms as a vice president and chair of the Mass Communication Division of the International Communication Association. He has held visiting faculty appointments as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; as the Wee Kim Wee Professor of Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and at the University of Tampere, Finland.
On Stanford's campus, he was for 19 years a member of the board of directors of The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation, including a brief stint as board chair; and for nine years a member of the program committee of the John S. Knight Fellowships program for mid-career journalists. Locally, he served for 15 years as a member of the board of directors of Cable Co-op, the cooperatively owned and operated cable system that served Palo Alto, Stanford and neighboring towns. He continues to serve on the Advisory Council of the Mid-Peninsula Community Media Center.
Glasser came to Stanford in 1990 from the University of Minnesota, where he taught in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and served as the founding associate director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law. His first faculty appointment was at the University of Hartford. He received his Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of Iowa, where in 2011 he was inducted into the School of Journalism and Mass Communication's Hall of Fame, an honor he shares with, among many others, George Gallup, Wilbur Schramm and Hanno Hardt, his mentor and academic adviser at Iowa.