Dear Carol,

In the past few weeks we lost two bright lights and good friends of the Women’s Media Center: singer and songwriter Lesley Gore and journalist Dori J. Maynard.

In memory of Lesley Gore, this week our internationally syndicated radio program, Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, releases a special program with an exclusive, never-before-aired conversation recorded by Robin in 2005 between friends Lesley Gore and Kathleen Hanna (Riot Grrrl pioneer, and punk musician with Bikini Kill, Le Tigre). In a poignant, revealing conversation, Gore and Hanna compare notes about sexism in the music industry, career longevity, reinventing themselves—and music.

This week’s edition of WMC Live with Robin Morgan also includes Robin’s interview with Carol McCabe Booker about her newly released, edited version of Alice Dunnigan’s 1974 autobiography, Alone Atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the Black Press. Alice Dunnigan was the first African American woman reporter accredited to the White House, Congress, the US Supreme Court and the State Department.

Featuring the re-release of this important memoir seems especially fitting on a week that we mourn the passing of Dori J. Maynard, President of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the oldest organization dedicated to helping the nation’s news media accurately and fairly portray all segments of society.

Dori was a champion for equality and justice and an important friend to the Women’s Media Center and our work to make women visible and powerful in media. She waspart of our WMC Progressive Women’s Voices community — media and feminist activists and thought leaders diversifying and changing the media landscape. We first partnered with Dori in 2008, when the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the White House Project, and the Women’s Media Center produced a series of forums called “From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry and the Press in the 2008 Election” that addressed the media’s election coverage that had fractured our identities by gender, race, class, and age. These forums were held at the Paley Center for Media in New York City and at the Democratic Convention Complex in Denver, Colorado. Here is the report that came out of these forums: Bias, Punditry, And The Press – Where Do We Go From Here?

We are deeply saddened at the loss of both Lesley Gore and Dori Maynard, and hope you will join us in celebrating their lives and the enormous contributions they made to our world.

Thank you,

Julie Burton
President, Women’s Media Center