PEOPLE: MORT ROSENBLUM
Mort RosenblumOffice - Marshall 311
E-mail - mort.rosenblum@gmail.com
Mort Rosenblum is a professor of practice in the UA journalism school, teaching International Reporting.
Rosenblum has reported on nearly every major international conflict since the Congo mercenary wars and the Biafra secession in the 1960s. From 1970 to 1973, he covered Vietnam, the violent breakup of Pakistan, and war in Ceylon. He broke the Hama massacre story in Syria in 1981, and was the first reporter into southern Lebanon, following Ariel Sharon's invasion in 1983. In Central America, Rosenblum's reporting linked the Reagan and Bush Administrations to drug smuggling into the United States by CIA-supported Contras. He covered U.S. invasions of Grenada and Haiti. Rosenblum has written widely from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Rosenblum's dispatches from Central Asia and Armenia presaged the fall of the Soviet Union, and he was in Red Square the night that Boris Yeltsin seized command. He reported on the fracture of Yugoslavia from the first shots in Ljubljana to the final chapters in Kosovo. Rosenblum returned repeatedly to Africa over the years where he covered such major events as the Rwanda killings, Joseph Kabila's seizure of Kinshasa, and war in Ivory Coast. In 1990, he was among the first journalists into liberated Kuwait; he covered the second Gulf War from Basra and the marshes. After September 11, Rosenblum was in the initial group of reporters to reach Kabul.
As chief editor of the International Herald Tribune from 1979 to 1981, Rosenblum took an American-style European newspaper to printing plants around the world and pioneered new forms of international journalism. Rosenblum has written from 200 countries or territories on subjects ranging from environmental calamity to tango dancing by the Seine.
His 13th book, ESCAPING PLATO'S CAVE: How America's Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival, was published in October 2007. In 2008, with co-editor Gary Knight and publisher Simba Gill, he launched dispatches, a quarterly journal on vital issues that goes beyond the "what?" and "who?" to the more crucial "why?" and "what can be done?"
Rosenblum won an Overseas Press Club Award in 1989 and has been nominated for eight Pulitzer Prizes. He has served as a visiting professor/guest lecturer in journalism or international affairs at universities from Arizona to the Netherlands.