Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Liasson to speak on presidential election

NPR journalist will share her insight


By SABINA DANA PLASSE
Express Staff Writer

National political correspondent for NPR, Mara Liasson, will speak at the Liberty Theatre in Hailey.Photo by Steve Barrett © 2006

The Sun Valley Center for the Arts will kick off its new lecture series with Mara Liasson, national political correspondent for National Public Radio. The timing and importance of Liasson's visit to the Wood River Valley is unprecedented for an election year.

"I am very excited to be able to take time out of this extraordinary election year to come and speak at Sun Valley," she said. "I've never covered an election that has confounded conventional wisdom as often as this one has, and I probably won't again. This is really a once-in-a-lifetime story."

Liasson will talk at the Liberty Theatre in Hailey on Thursday, Sept. 18, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 for Sun Valley Center for the Arts members and $20 for non-members. To purchase tickets, visit sunvalleycenter.org or call 726-9491, ext. 10, or stop by The Center's Ketchum location.

"I invited Mara over other political correspondents because she works for both NPR and Fox News, which makes her accessible to people all across the political spectrum," said Britt Udesen, The Center's director of education and humanities. "She has a long career of covering politics and elections, which means her visit here, six weeks before the presidential election, is particularly timely. Also, she is brilliant. She comments on things as they happen and truly understands the political process as it plays out in this country."

Liasson's reports can be heard regularly on NPR's award-winning newsmagazines All Things Considered and Morning Edition. She provides extensive coverage of politics and policy from Washington, D.C., focusing on the White House and Congress. Liasson also reports on political trends beyond the Beltway.

Each election year, Liasson provides key coverage of the candidates and issues in both presidential and congressional races. During her tenure, she has covered four presidential elections: 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004. Prior to her current assignment, Liasson was NPR's White House correspondent for all eight years of the Clinton administration. She won the White House Correspondents' Association's Merriman Smith Award for daily news coverage in 1994, 1995 and 1997. From 1989 to 1992, Liasson was NPR's congressional correspondent.

Liasson joined NPR in 1985 as a general assignment reporter and newscaster. From September 1988 to June 1989 she took a leave of absence to attend Columbia University in New York as a recipient of a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism.

Prior to joining NPR, Liasson was a freelance radio and television reporter in San Francisco. She was also managing editor and anchor of California Edition, a California Public Radio nightly news program and a print journalist for the Vineyard Gazette in Martha's Vineyard, Mass.

Liasson is a graduate of Brown University where she earned a bachelor's degree in American history.




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