John Maxwell
Hamilton, dean of LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication, has been awarded
the Goldsmith Book Prize by Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the
Press, Politics, and Public Policy for his recent book Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting. The prize annually honors the book that best contributes to the
improvement of the quality of government or politics through an examination of
the press or the intersection of press and politics in the formation of public
policy. Hamilton will receive the award,
which carries a cash prize of $5,000, during a ceremony at the Harvard Kennedy
School of Government on March 23, 2010.
Published by LSU Press in September,
Journalism’s Roving Eye provides a
sweeping history of American foreign news reporting from its inception to the
present day. The Dallas Morning News calls the book “a remarkable achievement” and
declares that it “deserves to be ranked as the definitive history of American
news coverage of the rest of the world.”
Additionally, the Columbia
Journalism Review says that “the book, in its scope, detail, and sheer
mastery, is a major achievement.”
Hamilton, whose career spans
journalism and government, has reported from the United States and abroad for
ABC Radio, the Christian Science Monitor, and other media outlets, in
addition to being a longtime commentator on public radio’s Marketplace.
He served in the Agency for International Development during the Carter
administration, and on the staffs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and
the World Bank. In the course of his career, he has had assignments in more
than fifty countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Hamilton is
dean and LSU Foundation Hopkins P. Breazeale Professor at the Manship School of
Mass Communication at LSU.