Program Directory

 
City Club of Cleveland - Ted Gup, Professor, Case Western Reserve University
 
 
 
Ted Gup, the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism at Case Western Reserve University, will speak about his newest book "Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life," scheduled for publication on June 5.

Drawing on original reporting and analysis, Gup argues that a preoccupation with secrets has undermined the very values-security, patriotism, privacy, the national interest-in whose name secrecy is often invoked. He shows how the expanding thicket of classified information leads to the devaluation of the secrets we most need to keep, and that journalists have become pawns in the government's internal conflicts over access to information. Gup also explores the exploitation of privacy and confidentiality in academia, business, and the courts, and concludes that these principles have been twisted to allow the emergence of a shadow system of justice, unaccountable to the public.

A former investigative reporter for The Washington Post and Time magazine, Gup is author of "The Book of Honor: Covert Lives And Classified Deaths At The CIA" and has written for Salon.com, National Geographic, The New York Times, Boston Globe, Village Voice, Sports Illustrated, Slate, Columbia Journalism Review, Newsweek and others. He has been a Pulitzer finalist and the recipient of numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Worth Bingham Prize, Gerald Loeb Award, and the Book-of-the-Year Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors (for The Book of Honor).

Gup has been a Fulbright Scholar to China, a grantee of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a Fellow of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and a Guggenheim Fellow. An expert on secrecy, he has been a guest on numerous national radio and television programs, including Larry King, NPR's Diane Rhem Show, Talk of the Nation, The Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN, Good Morning America, and MSNBC.
June 8, 2007