• Comment: Please confirm you are Lawrence Pintak and are releasing your text under a free license by process described at WP:Donating copyrighted media.
  Also, this draft reads quite promotional. Ca ^{talk to me!} 12:57, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Lawrence Pintak, PhD is an American journalist, author, and academic who specializes in the Middle East and broader Muslim world and directs an initiative to bolster international journalism education.

Pintak was founding dean of The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University,^[1] served as dean of the Graduate School of Media and Communications at The Aga Khan University in East Africa,^[2] helped found Pakistan’s Centre for Excellence in Journalism,^[3] and directed the Adham Center for Television Journalism at the American University in Cairo.^[4] He has also led media development projects in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and the Caucasus.

A former CBS News Middle East correspondent, Pintak is the author of seven books at the intersection of media, policy, and America’s troubled relationship with the world’s Muslims. His journalistic career spans 60 countries.

Longtime CBS News anchor Dan Rather described Pintak as “both a globe-trotting journalist and a distinguished scholar [who is] not afraid to challenge assumptions, group-think, and the powerful.” Arab-American commentator Rami Khouri called him, “the foremost chronicler of the interactions between the Arab and Western media worlds.”

Pintak’s work has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, ForeignPolicy.com, CNN.com, the Columbia Journalism Review, Axios.com, and a variety of other publications, and he has been interviewed by NPR, CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, the CBC, and news organizations around the world.^[5]

Pintak joined CBS News as Middle East correspondent in the summer of 1980. A month later, he was the only U.S. correspondent in Baghdad when the Iraq-Iraq War broke out.^[6] Other major stories he covered included the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the birth of Hezbollah, the Libyan occupation of Chad, the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks, the bombings of U.S. embassies in Lebanon and Kuwait, the kidnappings of U.S. citizens in Beirut, and the 1984 TWA hijacking.

After CBS, Pintak established a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., advising multinational corporations and foreign governments on communication strategies, then in the early 1990s expanded the firm to Indonesia, where he met his wife Indira, an Indonesian advertising executive and member of the extended Javanese royal family. When the Asian economic collapse shook Indonesia in 1997, Pintak covered the resulting Reformasi revolution for ABC Radio, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Times, and NPR’s Marketplace business program.^[7]

Pintak entered academia in 2003 as the Howard R. Marsh Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan, where he also taught in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.^[8] He then returned to the Middle East in 2005 as the director of the Adham Center at AUC, which he expanded into a regional hub that trained thousands of Arab journalists in the years leading up to the Arab Spring uprising.

In 2009, Pintak was recruited to become the founding dean of communication college at WSU, named for the famous American journalist Edward R. Murrow who was a WSU alumnus. After seven years in the role, Pintak stepped down in 2017.

“Dean Pintak has elevated Murrow onto the national stage in a way never previously achieved,” Peter Bhatia, a multi-Pulitzer Prize winner, top editor at the Cincinnati Enquirer and former president of the accrediting body for journalism schools, said in a news release. “The college is now very much a part of the national conversation on journalism education, thanks to him.”^[9] Pintak later took a two-year leave to help restructure the journalism program at Aga Khan University in East Africa, then returned to WSU.

Pintak holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and has served as a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and the Atlantic Council.

• Finalist for the 2020 Religion News Association annual book award for America & Islam.
• Inaugural Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award from the Religion and Media Interest Group of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in 2021.^[10]
• AEJMC Senior Scholar Award in 2019.^[11]
• Named a Fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2017 for “extraordinary service to the profession of journalism.”^[12]
• Recipient of two Overseas Press Club awards and two international Emmy nominations for coverage of Iraq and Lebanon.

Pintak began his career as a writer at WBBM Chicago, the CBS all news station while an undergraduate student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, then covered Capitol Hill, the State Department, and the White House for AP Radio, while completing his BA at American University in Washington, D.C.

After graduation, he went to Africa as a freelance journalist. From his base in Lusaka, Zambia, Pintak covered the Rhodesia war of independence and stories across Central and Southern Africa for CBS News Radio, The Washington Star, Newsweek, the Times of London and other international news organizations.

Pintak’s academic research focuses on topics of practical use to the media industry and policymakers. Several of his studies have been published by The New York Times, including the first large-scale survey of Arab journalists^[13] and a Social Science Research Council study of Islamophobia in the 2018 U.S. presidential election.^[14]

• America & Islam: Soundbites, Suicide Bombs and the Road to Donald Trump (2019) [1]
• Islam for Journalists (co-edited with Stephen Franklin, 2014).[2] Transformed into a free course for journalists, offered through the Poynter Institute.[3]
• The New Arab Journalist (2010) [4]
• Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas (2006) [5]
• Seeds of Hate: How America’s Flawed Middle East Policy Ignited the Jihad (2003) [6]
• Beirut Outtakes (1988) [7]

• Target Hollywood (2022) [8]

• Murrow Interview [9]
• American Faultlines [10]

Pintak is married with three adult children.

• Personal Website
• Murrow College biography
• Excellence in International Journalism Initiative