Jack
Doppelt
Interim Associate Dean for Journalism; Professor
Jack Doppelt is a Medill
journalism professor at Northwestern University, publisher of Immigrant Connect (an online
storytelling network for immigrants, their families and communities in and
around Chicago) and RefugeeLives (depicting
the daily lives of refugees and establishing connections between resettled
refugees and those abroad), and a faculty associate at Northwestern's Institute
for Policy Research. At Medill, he teaches during winter quarters at NU-Q in Doha, has served as both
Acting Dean and Associate Dean, and as director of the Medill global journalism program
for 11 years from its inception in 1996 until 2007. During the 2006-07 academic
year, he served as visiting professor at Institut d'Etudes
Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in France. Doppelt is co-author of Nonvoters: America's No Shows, about
why people don't vote, and of The
Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America,
a book on investigative reporting and its influence on public policy.
His expertise is media law and ethics, and the reporting of legal and
immigrant affairs. As part of the ongoing Immigrant Connect project, he
co-produced, wrote and voiced a half-hour radio documentary – “Chicago’s
Global Immigrants: Beyond the American Dream” - that aired on WBEZ –
Chicago Public Radio on Dec. 15, 2009, as part of its Chicago
Matters: Beyond Burnham series; and wrote stories about refugee life in
Namibia’s Osire camp - Refugees: Sand in a jar, Going back home: The
split in Osire’s future, To the young and
talented: There are only two things involved, Gabriel Yuma: Dreaming
of emerging from the grave to life, Hendricks Kabemba:
Translator, poet, stuck after high school, Permit problems…resolved, and 20
Northwestern Students Report from Refugee Camps in Jordan Malawi and Namibia.
He has argued in favor of a federal shield law and his piece for American
Prospect Online, "Say It Loud," argued in anticipation of the
confirmation hearings for John Roberts that even Justice Scalia thinks that
judicial candidates should talk about their beliefs. During Election 2000, he
did a series of pieces about the nonvoting phenomenon: "Quorum Call,"
"A Whisper Among the Disenfranchised," "Nader, Nonvoters and the
Prism of Cynicism," and "The Summer's Convention Noise."
As editor and publisher of On The Docket, he ran a student-driven site that
offered the web's only comprehensive coverage of all pending U.S. Supreme Court
cases. Doppelt has published numerous articles on libel, the media's influence
on the criminal justice system and media coverage of the legal system,
including the drug trial of former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and a
report for the Inspector General of the Department of Children and Family
Services on "Confidentiality, the News Media and the Joseph Wallace
Case."
He has represented a group of journalists before the 7th Circuit Court of
Appeals in a successful attempt to gain access to sealed court documents, and
has consulted as an expert witness on media practices in a number of legal
cases, including Jeffrey Masson v. New Yorker Magazine and Janet Malcolm. He
has been a frequent guest host on WBEZ-FM, Chicago's public radio station,
co-hosted a nine-part series on race relations that was simulcast on
WBEZ-FM and WVON-AM, and coordinated a conference on "Guilt by Allegation:
Lessons from the Cardinal Bernardin Case."
A graduate of Grinnell
College and the University of Chicago Law School,
Doppelt clerked for Illinois Supreme Court Justice Thomas J. Moran before
becoming an investigative reporter and news producer. As an investigative
journalist for the Better Government Association and WBBM-Newsradio in Chicago,
he broke stories on court corruption, housing dangers and governmental
conflicts of interest.
Office
MTC 2-123
Phone
847-491-3955
Email
j-doppelt@northwestern.edu