Discovery Institute Names National Talk Show Host Michael Medved as Senior Fellow
SEATTLE — Michael Medved, nationally syndicated talk radio host and bestselling author, has joined the Discovery Institute in the role of senior fellow. The position cements a longstanding friendship and recognizes a commonality of values and projects across a spectrum of issues.
“Michael Medved is an intellectual entrepreneur, a political and cultural polymath with great insights, judgment and wit. We are delighted to have this new relationship with him,” said Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman.
The sixth largest talk radio audience in the country, 3.7 million listeners, hears Medved’s daily three-hour radio program, The Michael Medved Show. Michael’s show is carried on more than 200 stations across America. The author of several books, including Hollywood vs. America and a recent autobiography, Right Turns, the one-time “punk liberal activist” turned “lovable conservative curmudgeon” is currently at work on a book on The Ten Big Lies About America.
Chapman saluted Medved “as the national radio host—make that ‘media host’—who is best able to understand science issues, including the current conflict over Darwinism and intelligent design. He’s very smart, quick and resourceful. Yet he also is respectful of those he disagrees with.”
“Over the years, I’ve greatly appreciated Discovery’s scholarship and advocacy in many areas,” Medved commented. “We may not agree on every issue, but I often have been struck by how much our worldviews overlap. It has been my pleasure to have Discovery fellows on my show as guests, including Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, and David Klinghoffer. Formalizing the relationship will, I’m sure, only deepen the feeling of collegiality I already have with my friends at Discovery. I look forward to working with Discovery on future projects.”
Medved’s first book, What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?, provided one of the first skeptical reconsiderations of the 1960s counterculture. His tenth book, Right Turns, drew national attention in 2005, offering 35 “unconventional lessons” from Michael’s dramatic political and religious evolution. The New York Times called Right Turns “A provocative memoir… Even many of his readers who hold to very different political and social views will concede, grudgingly, the quality of Medved’s intellect.”
Crown Forum will publish The Ten Big Lies About America, certain to be hugely controversial, in June 2008.
Long active in the Jewish community, Medved has served as president of an Orthodox congregation and co-founder of a Jewish Day School. Since 1996, Michael and his wife, Dr. Diane Medved, a psychologist, have lived in the Seattle area with their three children.
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Discovery Institute promotes ideas in the common sense tradition of representative government, the free market and individual liberty. Our mission is promoted through books, reports, legislative testimony, articles, public conferences and debates, plus media coverage and the Institute’s own publications and award-winning Internet website: http://www.discovery.org. Current projects explore the fields of technology, science and culture, reform of the law, national defense, the environment and the economy, the future of democratic institutions, transportation, religion and public life, government entitlement spending, foreign affairs and cooperation within the bi-national region of Cascadia.