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Plowshares National Student Peace & Justice Conference

Oct. 17-19, 2003 – North Manchester, Indiana

“We Are the Eyes of the World”
Media: Seeking the Truth

The first annual Plowshares Peace & Justice Student Conference was held in North Manchester, Indiana, at Manchester College. The conference examined the role of the media in world affairs with a focus on peace and justice.

The weekend conference featured speakers Raghida Dergham, Mo Rocca, and Christopher Hedges. Raghida Dergham works for Al-Hayat, the leading independent Arabic newspaper. She also reports as a news analyst on the NBC news and MSNBC. She spoke about international journalism and Americas foreign policy in relation to the Middle East.
Mo Rocca is a fake news correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. The show uses satire and irony to give the day's news. Some people say they can get the truth out of the news better from watching the fake news on The Daily Show than they can from real news shows. Rocca used stand up comedy and video clips to tell how he started working on The Daily Show and what it's like to do the fake news.
The last speaker of the weekend was writer Christopher Hedges, a war correspondent and current writer for the New York Times. He spoke about how he became interested in journalism and his writing process.

Addie Liechty, one of the three Plowshares interns who helped organize the conference said, "The speakers went over very well, and we had a wide variety of opinion. Chris Hedges was bleak but strangely hopeful." She is looking forward to reading his book War's the Force That Gives Us Meaning, which she bought at the conference.

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Speakers

Daily Bridge Club – Friday, Oct. 17, 10 p.m.

The Daily Bridge Club is a seven-piece ensemble from Chicago that regularly turns heads with its unique hip-hop recipe, one that blends elements of old and new school, jazz, spoken word and poetry. Originally from Champaign, Ill., the band regularly headlined at the High Dive and Canopy Club and opened for DJ Logic, Carlos Washington, Jazz Mandolin Project and Liquid Soul among others.

Raghida Dergham – Saturday, Oct. 18, 3:30 p.m.

Raghida Dergham is a senior diplomatic correspondent for Al-Hayat, the leading independent Arabic newspaper. As a former president of the United Nations Correspondents Association, she addressed the UN General Assembly on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day. She has interviewed numerous foreign ministers and heads of state and has broken major news stories, including the secret talks in Oslo.

David Horsey - Saturday, Oct. 18, afternoon workshop

David Horsey is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist. His work is distributed by Tribune Media Services to 200 newspapers, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and USA Today. Horsey won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Editorial Cartoons, his second, in the nation’s most prestigious journalism contest.

His career has taken him to national political party conventions, presidential primaries, international conferences, the Olympics, Japan and many countries in Europe. He also spent a year at the Hearst Newspapers Washington Bureau where he took a close look at national politics for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial page.

Horsey received a BA in Communications from the University of Washington where he was editor of the student newspaper, The Daily. He earned an MA in International Relations from the University of Kent at Canterbury (U.K.). His journalism awards include 13 first place regional awards for cartooning, governmental reporting and spot news reporting as well as the 1999 Susan Hutchison Bosch Award for outstanding achievement in journalism. He took first place in the 1994 Best of the West journalism competition and, in 1995, was the first cartoonist to win the Environmental Media Award.

David Horsey has published four collections of his professional work: Horsey’s Rude Awakenings (1981), Horsey’s Hits of the ‘80s (1989), The Fall of Man (19949), One Man Show (1999), From Hanging Chad to Bhagdad (2003).

Mo Rocca – Saturday, Oct. 18, 8 p.m.

Mo Rocca is a senior correspondent on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stuart.” He is former president and writers of Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals. He is also a contributor to NBC’s “Today Show,” a regular panelist on National Public Radio’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and a frequent commentator on CNN and the Fox News Channel.

Chris Hedges – Sunday, Oct. 19, 10 a.m.

Chris Hedges is a correspondent for the New York Times and has covered conflicts from Central America to the Balkans to the Middle East and Persian Gulf. He formerly worked for the Dallas Morning News, Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting after the September 11 attacks.