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Fall Meeting Speaker

Fall Meeting Luncheon
Tuesday, November 9

ISEA members will get a unique, first-hand look at national politics when Howard Fineman joins us for his 12th consecutive appearance at the Fall Meeting. 

Fineman, one of the nation’s leading political reporters and commentators, is senior Washington correspondent and columnist for Newsweek. His "Living Politics" column appears regularly in the magazine and on Newsweek.com. He also writes a separate weekly installment for MSNBC.COM, where the column originated in 2000.   

On television, Fineman is an NBC News analyst, contributing to the network’s Today Show and MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews and Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Fineman is a regular panelist on the Sunday morning, NBC-syndicated Chris Matthews Show.

He is the author of scores of Newsweek cover stories, and has interviewed and written about every president and major presidential contender since 1987.  His 2003 cover story “Bush and God” helped Newsweek win a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. His freelance work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and online on Forbes.com. 

As a reporter and writer, Fineman ranges widely. Besides campaign-year covers, other  projects have included: race and politics, the impact of digital technology on society, the influence of Hollywood on politics, the rise of the religious right and of conservative talk radio. He has interviewed business leaders such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Steve Case and Robert Rubin and entertainment figures such as Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda and Jay Leno.

Fineman's book The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire our Country, published in 2008 by Random House, has been called "a spectacular feat, a profound book about Amerca that moves with ease from history to recent events" (Doris Kearns Goodwin). 

A native of Pittsburgh, Fineman began his journalism career at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., covering the energy industry and Kentucky politics before moving to the newspaper’s Washington Bureau. He earned an AB, Phi Beta Kappa, from Colgate University; an MS in Journalism from Columbia University; and a JD from the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. Fineman’s legal education included a year as a Visiting Student at the Georgetown University Law Center. He has traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East on Pulitzer and Watson Fellowships. Fineman has won numerous awards for his work, from organizations such as the Headliners Club of New York, the American Bar Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Journalism Review and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.