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MONTANA
FREE PRESS AWARD McGiffert
recognized for vigorous defense
of First Amendment
By Lindsay Henderson
J-School Web reporter
J-School Professor
Emeritus Bob McGiffert, who taught First Amendment Law to
a generation of UM students and has battled passionately
for open government, is the recipient of the 2002 Montana
Free Press Award
. "I was stunned, surprised, touched and totally pleased,"
said McGiffert, who retired from full-time
teaching in 1991. He accepted the award at the J-school's
annual Dean Stone Night on April 5. The annual award is
given jointly by UM's schools of journalism and law.
McGiffert's legacy of pushing for open government lives
on in Montana journalists who were once his students, noted
Professor Clem Work, who now teaches the Media Law class.
McGiffert also served for many years on the board of directors
of the Montana Freedom of Information Hotline.
"For years, while teaching media law here at UM, he was
pretty much Montana's lone expert in mass media law, with
his special passion being the people's right to know about
their government," Work said in presenting the award.
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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 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."
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