Journalism Career
In 1969 Schell and Schurmann co-founded Pacific News Service (PNS) to create and distribute news and commentary from a broader spectrum of voices, especially viewpoints from abroad. The PNS was critical of the United States role in Indochina during the Vietnam War and supportive of establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC.
Before his 1974 departure for China, Schell had already published three scholarly books, The China Reader, Starting Over: A College Reader and Modern China: The Story of a Revolution.
In 1975 Schell and his younger brother Jonathan Schell (who would later write the bestseller The Fate of the Earth, and join The Nation and the Nation Institute) became correspondents at The New Yorker. Schell has also served as a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. He has written widely for many other magazine and newspapers, including The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Harper's, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, the China Quarterly, and the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
In 1980 Schell won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to research and write about the reliance on drugs in the U.S. meat industry.
He has also been a co-producer for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) production center WGBH-TV in Boston (1984), NBC Nightly News (1987), CBS' 60 Minutes (1991), and helped produce Peter Jennings' specials at ABC Television. In 1994 he worked for the PBS documentary program Frontline.
In 1992 Schell won an Emmy Award and an Alfred I. duPont Award - Columbia University Silver Baton for producing 60 Minutes' Made in China, a documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In 1997, Schell won a George Peabody Award for his production of Frontline's documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Schell's selection as Dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism elicited one unusual attack from right-wing radio talk show hose and health guru, Michael Savage, who alleged the head of the search committee, sociology professor Troy Duster, had refused to interview him. Savage considered himself a qualified conservative journalist for the job, and claimed that Schell's appointment constituted political patronage, which is illegal under California's labor laws. The suit also argued that a political litmus test for the deanship illegally denied public employment and First Amendment rights to a conservative applicant. The lawsuit was dropped as having little merit and when all conservative applicants withdrew from consideration.
During his tenure at UC Berkeley, Schell was responsible for the hirings of Christopher Hitchens, Michael Lewis, Cynthia Gorney, Michael Pollan, Louis Rossetto, Charles Ferguson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark Danner, Steve Wasserman, Stephen Talbot and Tom Engelhardt, among others.
In April 2006, Schell announced his intention to resign as dean.
Schell is now the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, which focuses on multimedia journalism, original research and public events to bring attention to areas of mutual interest to the United States and China. Since its inception, the Center has focused primarily on issues of energy and global climate change. Schell is currently overseeing "The China Boom Project", "On Thinner Ice", a joint multimedia project with David Breashears' Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP) and MediaStorm, and a new policy effort to maximize American interest in response to investment from China.
A frequent participant in the World Economic Forum, Schell is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, The Climate Policy Initiative, GE's Eco Imagination Advisory Board and the Council on the Future of Media, which claims to be "championing a new global, independent news and information service whose role is to inform, educate and improve the state of the world-one that would take advantage of all platforms of content delivery from mobile to satellite and online to create a new global network."
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