William A. Dorman

William A. Dorman is professor of Government Emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, where he also teaches in the journalism program.

Prof. Dorman has developed a national reputation as one of a handful of academics working in the area of mass media and their relationship to American defense and foreign policy, and he is an Associate of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media at New York University. Since 1970, he has taught a course entitled “War, Peace and the Mass Media.”

He has written extensively on foreign affairs and on press performance for publications ranging from Columbia Journalism Review to World Policy Journal. In 1985, he was invited to contribute the article on journalism in the nuclear age to the 40th anniversary issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is co-author with Mansour Farhang of a ground breaking book, the U.S. Press and Iran (U.C. Press, 1987) and was a member of the 1990-91 Social Science Research Council's panel on the Press and Foreign Policy, which produced one of the most highly regarded studies of the 1991 war with Iraq, Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Prof. Dorman has been invited to lecture extensively in the United States at universities ranging from Stanford and Washington State University to Princeton and Rutgers, and abroad in Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, Singapore and Rome. His media appearances include presentations for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Company, National Public Radio, and on "Bill Moyer's Journal" for PBS. His many presentations at professional meetings and conferences have included papers at the Middle East Studies Association, the American Library Association and the American Studies Association.

Professor Dorman will retire after Spring Semester 2007.  During his 40-year-career at CSUS, he has received numerous awards for teaching, scholarship and intellectual leadership. He is the only faculty member to have been twice named to deliver the John C. Livingston Annual Faculty Lecture (1995 and 2006-07).   In Spring 2002 he received The California State University's most prestigious honor, the Wang Family Excellence Award. The accolade is given to only four faculty statewide each year by the CSU system, which comprises 23 campuses and some 20,000 faculty.