NEW POLLNER FELLOW
NBC producer signs on for fall semester
Seminar will focus on war coverage

By Lindsay Henderson
J-School Web reporter

Tom Cheatham, on-call producer for NBC, will join the University of Montana J-school faculty next fall as the second visiting T. Anthony Pollner professor.

Cheatham, whose resume reads like a journalist’s choose-your-own-adventure story from the mid-1960s to the present, will move from Durango, Colo., to Missoula for the fall semester.

At the J-school, Cheatham will work with student reporters and editors at the Kaimin and will teach a class on War Correspondence (not to be confused with War Correspondents). The class will explore war coverage from the Civil War to the war in Afghanistan.

"It is a chance to trace the themes—history, technology, censorship, government control, access to battlefields," he said. "Not just how cool it is to be a war correspondent."

Times have changed since the Vietnam War, when the press had free rein, said Cheatham, who covered that war from 1967 to 1968.

"We could go anywhere," he said. "We could just get in a helicopter and land in a fire fight."
But that freedom came with a price.

"A lot of journalists were killed doing it," he said. "A lot were killed."

Cheatham himself suffered shrapnel wounds during a mortar attack and spent a month on the hospital ship Sanctuary.

War correspondence in Afghanistan is what Cheatham describes as censorship by access. "You can visit troops when the military wants you to," he said. "It’s not totally free."

Covering wars is dangerous. The death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl earlier this year was a lesson to be careful and know exactly who you are dealing with, he said.

"There are very, very few — although some — but very few stories worth risking your life for," he said.
In his two-credit fall seminar, Cheatham plans to have a number of guest speakers, including working war correspondents and correspondents from past wars.

Cheatham’s personal knowledge of war correspondence has considerable depth. After earning a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, he worked for United Press International for more than a decade, mostly covering foreign news. From 1965 to 1977, he reported on not only the Vietnam War, but also the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and later Afghanistan, Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear weapons facility in 1974, the revolution in Portugal and the conflict in Northern Ireland, to name just a few.

In 1977 Cheatham became bureau chief of NBC News in Tel Aviv, where he directed coverage of all NBC News stories from Israel. He later became a foreign producer out of New York for NBC Nightly News.

In the United States, Cheatham has covered the school shootings at Columbine, the Oklahoma City bombing trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the Freeman standoff in Montana, the World Trade Center aftermath, the O.J. Simpson trial and just about everything else that has ever happened.

This won’t be Cheatham’s first brush with Missoula. He was a visiting professor from 1993-1994 in the School of Journalism’s broadcast department and is looking forward to reuniting with his old pals from the J-school.

"His professional credentials and experience make him ideal to instruct students in the fundamentals of news reporting in broadcast and print," said Journalism Dean Jerry Brown. "And the topic he has chosen could hardly be more timely."

The Pollner Fellowship is named for T. Anthony Pollner, a 1999 J-school graduate who was a Kaimin reporter and Web designer. After Pollner died in a motorcycle accident last year, his family established an endowment in his honor to create a position for a visiting professor at the J-school one semester every year.

The first Pollner Fellow is Jonathan Weber, former editor of The Industry Standard, who is in residence this semester at the J-school.

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