The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will celebrate its ninth-annual First Amendment Day on Tuesday, Sept. 26.
This campus-wide, daylong event is designed to both celebrate the First Amendment and explore its role in the lives of Carolina students. First Amendment Day is observed during National Banned Books Week.
The keynote speaker for the day’s events will be Bill Adair, the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism & Public Policy and director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University. One of 25 Knight Chairs at universities around the country, Adair’s research and teaching focuses on fact-checking and new forms of journalism.
The creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact, Adair has been recognized as a leader in new media and accountability journalism. He worked for 24 years as a reporter and editor for the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) and served as the paper’s Washington bureau chief from 2004 to 2013. He launched PolitiFact in 2007 and built it into the largest fact-checking effort in history, with affiliates in 11 states. In 2013, he managed the site’s first international expansion with the launch of PolitiFact Australia.
Adair’s talk, “The Enemy of the American People and the Future of a Free Press,” will be presented at 7 p.m. in Room 111 in Carroll Hall.
First Amendment Day is organized by the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy. For a full listing of events, please visit the center’s website.
Published Sept. 21, 2017