For many
years, Meisler has contributed articles to leading American magazines
including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, the Nation, the
Reader’s Digest, the Quarterly Journal of Military History, and the Columbia
Journalism Review. While most of these articles focus on foreign affairs and
political issues, he also has contributed more than thirty articles on
artists and art history to the Smithsonian
Magazine.
From time
to time, he has contributed chapters to various anthologies and textbooks.
The latest is “The Massacre in El Mozote” in
Thinking Clearly: Cases in Journalistic Decision-Making
(Columbia University Press, 2003), edited by Tom Rosenstiel and Amy S.
Mitchell.
Meisler has
twice won the Korn-Ferry Award for Excellence in United Nations Reporting
and is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Area Training Fellowship in
African Studies. He conducted classes in international reporting at the
Columbia University School of Journalism in 2003 and 2004.
He began
his journalism career in 1953 as a reporter for The Middletown Ohio Journal
and went on to work as a reporter with the Associated Press from 1954
to 1964. He was deputy director of the Office of Evaluation and Research of
the U.S. Peace Corps in Washington before joining the Los Angeles Times in
1967.
Meisler
received a B.A. in English Literature from the City College of New York in
1952 and undertook graduate studies in both English Literature and African
Studies at the University of California in Berkeley.
Stanley
Meisler is married to Elizabeth
Fox, development communication expert and editor of the book Latin
Politics, Global Media.
regarding journalism:
textbook:
Thinking Clearly: Cases in Journalistic Decision-Making
Edited by Tom Rosenstiel & Amy S. Mitchell
Introduction by James W.
Carey
1. McCarthyism, 1950-1954 by John Herbers
2. Internet Journalism and the Starr Investigation by J.D. Lasica
3. Columbine School Shooting: Live Television Coverage by Alicia C.
Shepard
4. Minnesota Basketball Cheating Case by Geneva Overholser
5. Richard Jewell and the Olympic Bombing by Ronald J. Ostrow 6. The Massacre in El Mozote by Stanley Meisler(see
teaching notes)
7. Watergate by James M. Perry
8. New Orleans Times-Picayune Series on Racism by Jack Nelson
9. John McCain's 2000 Presidential Campaign: Political Reporting by Jon
Margolis
Give Blood? Not This Reporter(Stanley
Meisler's first published story) "It took
22 years, but I finally got up enough nerve to let a pretty nurse, Mary
Jane Bishop of Cincinnati, draw one whole pint of dark RED blood from a
bulging BLUE vein in my pale WHITE arm. Officials
of the Red Cross and the American Legion trapped me yesterday during the
first day of the bloodmobile's current visit to Middletown. I was
snooping around the Legion Home on a routine check of Red Cross business
when Mrs. Charles Fay, scheduling chairman, suggested a tour of the
bloodmobile operation..." The Middletown Ohio
Journal April 9, 1953
The
Lost Dreams of Howard Fast
"For many years Howard Fast the Communist obscured our view of Howard
Fast the writer. Flaunting contempt at Congress, issuing tracts against
"bourgeois, decadent" authors, rallying sympathy for the Soviet
Union, he stood between us and his books and kept us from a special insight
into the intellect of an American Communist. Fast, who has left the party,
may have represented, in some ways, the essence of America's own brand of
communism. The clues to understanding him as a Communist lie in
understanding him as a writer..." The Nation
May 30, 1959
Massive Negro
Demonstration 'Only a Beginning' The historic civil rights march on Washington - massive and orderly and
moving - has dramatized the wants of Negroes in America, but leaders still
faced the task today of trying to turn drama into action. Speaker after
speaker told the 200,000 Negro and white sympathizers massed in front of the
Lincoln Memorial Wednesday that their demonstration was no more than a
beginning. 'Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will
now be content,' said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 'will have a rude
awakening if the nation returns to business as usual...' Associated Press
August 29, 1963
Liberia
"Funerals can confuse a visitor to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Is he
on the western coast of Africa. or in New Orleans? First, the big brass band
marches down Broad Street on a hot Sunday afternoon, playing rollicking
hymns, not exactly "Didn't He Ramble?" but something like it. Then comes the
second line, the youngsters singing and waving their open palms high in the
air, and a soccer team, in uniform, tossing a ball to the rhythms..." The Atlantic Monthly
March 1973
Rwanda
and Burundi "The enormity and horror of it all are exposed by what a visitor
does not see in Bujumbura. Bujumbura, a languid, colorless, nondescript town
on Lake Tanganyika, is the capital of Burundi, a central African nub of a
country in which 85 percent of the population is Hutu. Yet a visitor can
find few Hutus in Bujumbura. It is a little like entering Warsaw after World
War II and looking for Jews. A visitor would not need a tour of Treblinka to
know that something terrible had happened..." The Atlantic Monthly September 1973
Spain's New Democracy
On June 15, 1977, just a year and a half after the death of Generalissimo
Francisco Franco, Spaniards elected a new, bicameral Cortes with the
authority to write a constitution for Spain. It was the first freely
contested parliamentary election in Spain since February 15, 1936, and it
produced scenes that Franco would have abhorred: Communists brazenly waving
red banners, chanting slogans, and singing the
Internationale; the young, dynamic leader of the Socialist Workers
Party entering rallies with his left hand in a clenched fist salute, his
right signaling V for victoria; politicians exhorting
Basques in Euskera, Catalans in Catalan, Galicians in
Gallego, all forbidden languages a few years before;
and newspapers belittling their government and its leader... Foreign Affairs
October 1977
Engage, Isolate, or Strike After the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended in the last decade
of the 20th century, American strategists turned their sights on another threat:
the potential havoc that might come from a group of smaller countries like North
Korea and Iran that the Americans called "rogue states." That name was a
wonderful metaphor. It reminded everyone of "rogue elephant," the term that
hunters and wildlife experts use for an elephant that breaks from the herd,
follows its own rules, and goes on wild rampages. The antics of a rogue elephant
sounded just like the threat of a rogue state, especially a rogue state trying
to arm itself with nuclear weapons. But the metaphor had one flaw. No one tries
to negotiate with rogue elephants. Hunters simply kill them... UCLA Magazine
March 25, 2008
(Columbia University Press, 2003), edited by Tom Rosenstiel and Amy S.
Mitchell.