SUNY New Paltz professor Dr. Robert Miraldi to discuss, sign new biography

NEW PALTZ—Dr. Robert Miraldi, a SUNY New Paltz journalism professor, will read from his new biography of America’s premier investigative reporter at a book signing and reception on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 6 p.m., at the Honors Center in College Hall on the New Paltz campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Miraldi’s book on Seymour Hersh, now 76-years-old, traces the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s 50 years of journalistic crusades, exposs, and confrontations with six presidents on his way to reshaping American national security policy and investigative reporting itself.

From his expos of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1969 to the revelation of prison torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in 2004, Hersh has uncovered domestic spying, military crimes, and government assassinations which Miraldi chronicles for the first time in “Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist.” Miraldi traces Hersh’s rise from the streets of Chicago in the 1950s to the newsrooms of the most powerful newspapers and magazines in the United States.

Hersh’s work – a snapshot of some of the biggest stories in America through its most turbulent decades – has consistently put the reporter in the headlines because of his use of anonymous sources and the controversial nature of his countless exposs. The book shows how his work had drawn the fury of targets from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush to Barack Obama.

This unauthorized biography is also a lively look at his life as well as a critical assessment of his stunning achievements. “Hersh is irascible and abrasive but also an iconoclastic and heroic character,” observes Miraldi. “He is a truly great American character, a top tier figure.”

“Scoop Artist” begins with the dramatic tale of how Hersh tracked down the story of the massacre of hundreds of civilians in the village of My Lai in Vietnam in 1968. While My Lai became the symbol of a bad war, Miraldi documents how Hersh became the journalist the political right loved to hate and the father of a conservative movement against a “liberal” media. “He has become the man the political left loves and the right loves to hate,” Miraldi pointed out.

In the years since, as he moved from one journalistic triumph to another, he has constantly been in the eye of the storm. Hersh worked for four years as a reporter for the Associated Press in Chicago and Washington, D.C. Then he was a famous investigative reporter for the New York Times for seven years. After leaving the Times he wrote best-selling books and has been a controversial magazine writer for the New Yorker for a decade.

Miraldi is an award-winning author, journalist, and columnist who has taught at the New Paltz since 1982. He is considered one of the nation’s foremost experts on investigative reporting. In 2004 his biography, “The Pen Is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell,” was named the best book in the country in journalism and mass communication.

Miraldi is the author of two books and editor of three others. In 1992 he was a Fulbright Scholar, lecturing in the Netherlands. His writing on the First Amendment has won national awards. A Ph.D. in American Studies, he teaches classes on media law, press history, and news reporting. He began his career as an investigative reporter in New York City.

The event is sponsored by the College’s Honors Program and the Department of Communication and Media. For more information contact Dr. Patricia Sullivan at sullivap@newpaltz.edu.