I'm Burke Gladstone and this is on the Media's Midweek podcast.

Todd Giddellin, writer, media analyst, sociologist and lifelong activist died on February 5.

In his youth, he helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam

War held in Washington in 1965.

He organized rallies against South African apartheid and four civil rights in America.

Later, as an educator and author and media critic of the right and the left, he worked

as an observer and shaper of thoughts about our media narratives until the end of his

life.

Giddellin was also a mentor to many and a huge influence on many more, especially those

who came to the nascent field of media criticism after him.

Among them, New York University Journalism Professor and Media Critic Jay Rosen, writer

of the oft-quoted Press Think Blog and a regular here on our show.

I met him in the early 90s in and around T'Koon magazine, which was a Jewish magazine

of the left then headquartered in New York.

And then he began to help me establish myself as a media critic and started inviting me to

things and sort of giving me things to do well before I had earned them, maybe on some

sort of hunch that I could develop into something someday.

And that's how I knew him.

There are an abundance of media critics in the world.

I asked Jay what he thought made Giddellin unique.

Several things.

While he started out as an activist, not as a media observer or critic, and he was president

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