David Demers

Journalist-turned-professor David Demers is author of more than ten academic books. The Society of Collegiate Journalists honored him in March 2010 with a national award for defending free speech rights at “great personal and professional cost.” He is an ardent advocate for the First Amendment, having initiated or helping to initiate six lawsuits in an attempt to force government agencies and universities to comply with open records and free speech laws. Demers is associate professor of communication at Washington State University, where he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in media theory, media and society, news reporting, media history, media law and editing since 1996. A mass media sociologist, he is author or editor of more than 125 journal and professional articles and 10 academic books. His research papers about corporate media structure have won five national awards. In the 1970s, Demers worked as newspaper reporter in Michigan, where he won two statewide first-place awards for investigative reporting. During the 1980s, he earned a master’s degree in journalism through the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Reporting and a master’s in sociology and criminology from The Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Minnesota in 1992. Demers is founding editor of Mass Communication & Society, a scholarly journal published by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He also founded the nonprofit Center for Global Media Studies, which sponsored two international conferences over its six-year history and published two books, and he founded six open-access journals, which are available at www.MarquetteJournals.org.