Emmy Award-winning journalist Steve Bell, who reported on a variety of major domestic and international stories as an ABC News reporter from 1967-1986, will deliver two public lectures at Elon University Feb. 25-26. Bell will also meet with Elon students and faculty and serve as Visiting Professor of Leadership while he is on campus Feb. 24-28.
Bell’s public lectures, in Whitley Auditorium at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 25 and Thursday, Feb. 26, are free to the public and will draw upon his experience as a reporter at major news events. On Feb. 25, Bell’s lecture, “The Media and Politics,” will include his direct observations from covering politics. He will use video to demonstrate how politicians have become media savvy through the years, and how today’s political candidates frequently bypass the mainstream media to get their message out.
His Feb. 26 lecture, “The Media and the Military: From Vietnam to Iraq II,” will examine the evolution of war coverage by the media. His presentation will include his experiences as a war correspondent in Vietnam and Cambodia.
A familiar face to millions of Americans as the news anchor on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Bell joined ABC in 1967 and covered the social upheavals reshaping the nation. He covered the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and was on the scene when Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
His experience covering international news began in 1970 when he was assigned to the Vietnam War. He and his camera crew were briefly captured by the Viet Cong in 1970, an incident he managed to record on tape despite being held at gunpoint. In 1985, on the tenth anniversary of the end of the war, Bell filed the first live satellite news report from Vietnam.
Bell became ABC’s Hong Kong bureau chief in 1972, reporting extensively from the People’s Republic of China. He returned to domestic coverage as a White House correspondent during Watergate and the Ford administration.
Bell serves as professor of telecommunications at Ball State University, Muncie, Ind., where he is endowed chair emeritus in telecommunications and a former department chair. He continues to work on special radio and television projects, including a 1996 Vietnam documentary for public television based on a Ball State study abroad trip. Since 1998, he has directed seminars on politics and the media for the Washington Center.
-30-