Covering Violence in Conflict Zones and Here at Home Part II

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Speaker Bios: 

Richard Engel is the Chief Foreign Correspondent for NBC News, and widely regarded as one of America’s leading foreign correspondents for his coverage of wars, revolutions and political transitions around the world over the last 15 years. Recognized for his outstanding reporting on the 2011 revolution in Egypt, the conflict in Libya, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and overall unrest throughout the Arab world. Engel was named Chief Foreign Correspondent of NBC News in April 2008. His reports appear on all platforms of NBC News, including “NBC Nightly News,” “Today,” “Meet the Press,” “Rock Center with Brian Williams,” “Dateline,” MSNBC, and NBCNews.com. 

Engel’s work has received numerous awards, including seven News & Documentary Emmy Awards. This year he was honored with the “Tex” McCrary Award for Journalism Excellence from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. He also received the 2008 Alfred I. duPont-¬‐Columbia University Award and the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism, the first ever given to a broadcast journalist, for his report "War Zone Diary." The one-¬‐hour documentary, compiled from his personal video journal, gave a rare and intimate account of the everyday realties of covering the war in Iraq. He is the author of two books, A Fist in the Hornet’s Nest and War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, which chronicle his experiences covering the Iraq war. 

Ann Cooper, an award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent with more than 25 years of radio and print reporting experience, is the CBS Professor of Professional Practice in International Journalism at Columbia. She was most recently the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the world's leading press freedom advocacy groups.

For more than a decade, Cooper's voice was well known to NPR listeners. Appointed as NPR's first Moscow bureau chief in 1987, Cooper spent five years covering the tumultuous events of the final years of Soviet communism. She co-edited a book, "Russia at the Barricades," about the August 1991 failed coup attempt in Moscow. From 1992 to 1995 Cooper was NPR's bureau chief in Johannesburg, and she later covered the United Nations for NPR. 

Before joining NPR, Cooper reported for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Capitol Hill News Service, Congressional Quarterly, the Baltimore Sun, and National Journal magazine. Cooper's coverage of South Africa's first all-race elections in 1994 won NPR a duPont-Columbia silver baton for excellence in broadcast journalism. She has been an Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she studied refugee issues and produced a series on refugee policy for NPR. In 2003 she was the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at State University of New York in New Paltz.