Barbie Zelizer founded the Center for Media at Risk in the wake of the 2016 presidential election with an urgent mandate. Threats to journalistic integrity and media freedom were mounting in an increasingly degraded media environment. As the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and a former wire service reporter in the Middle East, Zelizer knew this critical moment required collaborative strategizing between media scholars and media practitioners. At the Center for Media at Risk, Zelizer has created a vital space for practitioners and scholars to collectively resist the pressures facing media workers globally.
Beyond the Center, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, culture, memory and images, particularly in times of crisis. She has authored or edited sixteen books, including the award-winning About To Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford, 2010) and Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago, 1998), and close to 200 articles, book chapters, and essays. She has two upcoming books: How the Cold Broke the News (Polity, 2025) and Propaganda in an Age of Disinformation (coedited with Nelson Ribeiro, Routledge, 2025).
Zelizer is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Europaea Academia. She is a recipient of multiple fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation; Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy; the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; the Fulbright Senior Scholar Foundation; Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; and an American Council of Learned Societies. A founding co-editor of the academic journal Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, a former president of the International Communication Association and a former Judge of the Peabody Awards for Excellence in Electronic Media, Zelizer is also a media critic, whose work has appeared in The Nation, PBS News Hour, CNN, The Huffington Post, Newsday, Liberation and other media organizations. Her work has been translated into French, Korean, Turkish, Romanian, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and Portuguese.
For Zelizer, the Center for Media at Risk embodies a career-long commitment to fostering media freedom, safeguarding independent journalism and empowering media practitioners to free/protect/defend/save the media.