Book Award

For immediate release:

Cal State L.A. Faculty Member
Receives McGannon Book Award

Los Angeles, CA – California State University, Los Angeles faculty member Steven D. Classen (Newport Beach resident) was recently awarded the prestigious 2004 McGannon Book Award for Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969 (Duke University Press, 2004).

Each year, Fordham University’s Donald McGannon Communication Research Center presents its Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Policy Research to the year’s most notable book addressing issues of communications policy.

Watching Jim Crow is a detailed social history and analysis of media activism and communications policy during the Civil Rights era. It focuses on the years 1955 to 1969, from the time the NAACP began urging Mississippi stations to stop censoring African Americans and discussions of integration, to a landmark decision issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals denying the license renewal of a prominent television station for its failure to serve the public interest.

Classen is an assistant professor of Communication Studies who joined the Cal State L.A. faculty in 2000. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995, and was the recipient of the 1996 Broadcast Education Association Kenneth Harwood Outstanding Dissertation Award, as well as the International Communication Association Kyoon Hur Dissertation Award.

“I am humbled and honored to receive this award, and am particularly grateful to receive this recognition because of its affiliation with Fordham’s McGannon Center and the previous recipients of this award,” Classen says. “The previous McGannon Book Award authors include some of my most cherished teachers, friends and intellectual mentors, so it is an honor to be counted among them.”

For more information, go to the “book award” link at http://www.fordham.edu/mcgannon.

Working for California since 1947: The 175-acre hilltop campus of California State University, Los Angeles is at the heart of a major metropolitan city, just five miles from Los Angeles’ civic and cultural center. More than 20,000 students and 170,000 alumni—with a wide variety of interests, ages and backgrounds--reflect the city’s dynamic mix of populations. Six colleges offer nationally recognized science, arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education and humanities programs, among others, led by an award-winning faculty. Cal State L.A. is home to the critically-acclaimed Luckman Jazz Orchestra and to a unique university center for gifted students as young as 12. Among programs that provide exciting enrichment opportunities to students and community include a noted alternative energy technology initiative; an NEH- and Rockefeller-supported humanities center; a NASA-funded center for space research; and a growing forensic science program, to be housed in the Los Angeles Regional Crime Lab now under construction. www.calstatela.edu