B.A., Boston College; Fellow, Rutgers University; Fellow, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Rory O'Connor is a journalist, author, educator, and documentary filmmaker. He is co-founder and president of the Globalvision Corporation, and board chair of the Global Center, an affiliated non-profit foundation. His films and television programs have aired on PBS,[1]BBC, NHK, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and numerous other networks. He has been involved in the production of more than two dozen documentaries, and his broadcast, film and print work has been honored with a George Polk Award, a Writer's Guild Award for Outstanding Documentary, an Orwell Award[2] and two Emmys. He has written several books and blogs for the Huffington Post,[3]AlterNet,[4] Al Jazeera[5] and other news sources.
During a ten-year stint in print, culminating as Managing Editor of the Boston-area weekly alternative newspaper The Real Paper, O'Connor began working in broadcast journalism as a reporter and producer at WGBH-TV in Boston.[6] He later worked as a producer and investigator at WCVB-TV, Boston; a Program Producer at WGBH; Executive Producer at Boston's Neighborhood Network News; segment producer at the PBS NewsHour; and Producer at CBS News, before co-founding the independent international media firm Globalvision.[7]
O'Connor and Danny Schechter founded Globalvision, a New York City-based TV and film production company.[8] The company created the series South Africa Now. According to O'Connor, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) declined to distribute the program because of its anti-apartheid advocacy. However, Globalvision circumnavigated PBS and went directly to individual public television stations where it was carried in over 150 markets. Crew for South Africa Now were banned from South Africa itself, which made production more difficult.[9]
Schechter and O'Connor later co-produced Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television, which aired on American public TV stations and in over 60 countries from 1992 to 1996.[10]
Awards and honors
In 1990, South Africa Now, a public television newsmagazine produced by Globalvision under O'Connor’s presidency, won the George Polk Award for broadcast journalism.[11][12][13]
Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media (City Lights, 2012). ISBN0-87286-556-8
"Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima" (Sierra Club, Second Edition, 2011). ISBN978-0140066845
2011: Producer, Executive Producer “The Harvest (La Cosecha),” Independent Documentary produced with ShineGlobal
2010: Director, Writer, Co-Producer “The Battle of Durban II: Israel, Palestine and the United Nations,” Independent Documentary produced with Second Generation Films
2010: Executive Producer “Plunder: The Crime of Our Time,” Independent Documentary
Frontline is an investigative documentary program distributed by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. Episodes are produced at WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts. The series has covered a variety of domestic and international issues, including terrorism, elections, environmental disasters, and other sociopolitical issues. Since its debut in 1983, Frontline has aired in the U.S. for 42 seasons, and has won critical acclaim and awards in broadcast journalism. In 2024, Frontline won its first Oscar at the 96th Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature, 20 Days in Mariupol, made by a team of AP Ukrainian journalists. Frontline has produced over 800 documentaries from both in-house and independent filmmakers, 200 of which are available online.
Nova is an American popular science television program produced by WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts, since 1974. It is broadcast on PBS in the United States, and in more than 100 other countries. The program has won many major television awards.
The Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award honors excellence in broadcast and digital journalism in the public service and is considered one of the most prestigious awards in journalism. The awards were established in 1942 and administered until 1967 by Washington and Lee University's O. W. Riegel, Curator and Head of the Department of Journalism and Communications. Since 1968 they have been administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, and are considered by some to be the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, another program administered by Columbia University.
WGBH-TV, branded GBH or GBH 2 since 2020, is the primary PBS member television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Daniel Isaac "Danny" Schechter was an American television producer, independent filmmaker, blogger, and media critic. He wrote and spoke about many issues including apartheid, civil rights, economics, foreign policy, journalistic control and ethics, and medicine. While attending the London School of Economics in the 1960s, Schechter became an anti-apartheid activist and made trips to South Africa on behalf of the African National Congress (ANC). Later he would help musician Steven Van Zandt assemble other performers to form Artists United Against Apartheid, who released the album Sun City in 1985. Schechter produced and directed six nonfiction films about Nelson Mandela from the time Mandela was a political prisoner to his election and service as President of South Africa.
Miles O'Brien is an independent American broadcast news journalist specializing in science, technology, and aerospace who has been serving as national science correspondent for PBS NewsHour since 2010.
Paul J. Stekler is a political documentary filmmaker, a professor, and former chair and head of the production program in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin College of Communication. Known for his documentary films about American politics, he was also the on-camera advisor to the cast of The Real World Austin during their attempt to create a documentary about the South by Southwest Music Festival (2005–2006). Among other major filmmaking awards, he has earned two Peabody, three Columbia/duPont, three national Emmy awards, and a Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival.
The WGBH Educational Foundation, doing business as GBH since August 2020, is an American public broadcasting group based in Boston, Massachusetts. Established in 1951, it holds the licenses to all of the PBS member stations in Massachusetts, and operates its flagship station WGBH-TV, sister station WGBX-TV, and a group of NPR member stations in the state. It also owns WGBY-TV in Springfield, which is operated by New England Public Media under a program service agreement.
Stephen Henderson Talbot is a TV documentary producer, writer and reporter. Talbot directed and produced "The Movement and the 'Madman' " for the PBS series American Experience in 2023. He is a longtime contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and worked for over 16 years for the series Frontline.
Emily Rooney is an American journalist, television talk show and radio host and former news producer. She hosted the weekly program Beat the Press on WGBH-TV until its cancellation on August 13, 2021.
Paula S. Apsell is the television Executive Producer Emerita of PBS's NOVA and was director of the WGBH Science Unit.
Martin Smith is a producer, writer, director and correspondent. Smith has produced dozens of nationally broadcast documentaries for CBS News, ABC News and PBS Frontline. His films range in topic from war in the Middle East to the 2008 financial crisis. He is a member of the Overseas Press Club and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jeanne Jordan is an American independent director, producer and editor. She was nominated for an Academy Award and has received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards.
Sharon Tiller is an American film maker who has numerous film and television credits as a writer, director, and producer. She is the WGBH-TV executive-in-charge for the American documentary television series Frontline, which she first joined in 1995 as a senior producer for special projects. She is married to journalist and news producer Lowell Bergman.
Patricia Alvarado Núñez is an American television producer, director, and published photographer based in Boston, Massachusetts. She has created, produced, co-produced, executive produced, written and directed television and digitally distributed documentaries, music specials and series on social and cultural issues including the American Experience PBS primetime documentary Fidel in 2004, an episode of PBS Kids' Postcards from Buster which was nominated for a 2008 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children Series. She later served as the Creator and Series Producer of the WGBH series "Neighborhood Kitchens" which won an Emmy Award in 2014. Patricia was an Executive Producer of "Sing That Thing," an amateur choral group competition television series which ran for four seasons by broadcaster WGBH. Alvarado Núñez is currently the Executive Producer of WGBH's World Channel online, television, and podcast series "Stories from the Stage" which broadcast nationally on the PBS network and won two Webby Awards.
David E. Fanning is a South African American journalist and filmmaker. He was the executive producer of the investigative documentary series Frontline since its first season in 1983 to his retirement in 2015. He has won eight Emmy Awards and in 2013 received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in honor of his work.
Linda Polach is an American news media executive. She is currently Executive Director of the WGBH Studio located at for the Boston Public Library for WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts, operator of WGBH-TV Channel 2 and its all-news radio station WGBH (FM) in Boston, Mass. The studio is one of, if not the only, Public TV/Radio Studios situated in a Public Library anywhere in the world.
Elizabeth Deane is a writer, producer and director of documentary films for PBS, specializing in American history. She is based primarily at WGBH-TV in Boston, with work ranging from presidential politics to biographies and musical history.
Jacquie Jones was an American public television film director, producer, writer and media executive. She was an editor of the Black Film Review from 1989 to 1993. She was executive director of Black Public Media from 2005 to 2014.
Irv Drasnin is an American journalist, a producer-director-writer of documentary films for CBS News and PBS. Among the awards he has received for broadcast journalism are the duPont-Columbia, the Directors Guild (DGA), the Writers Guild (WGA), and the American Film and Video Blue Ribbon.
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