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Pulitzer winner Harry Ashmore (1916-1998), was born in Greenville, South Carolina. Ashmore was executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials he wrote in support of integration of a Little Rock high school in 1957. He later served as editor in chief of the Encyclop¾dia Britannica and as president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. He died in Santa Barbara, California. For more on Ashmore, read an interview with independent journalist Scott London. Jayson Blair (1976- ), a young journalist for The New York Times, resigned in May 2003 after his editors discovered that he had fabricated or plagiarized information in dozens of stories. Blair had joined the paper in 1998 as an intern, and later became a full-time reporter. The ethics scandal led the newspaper to publish a four-page section setting the record straight. The scandal didn't end there, however, and in June 2003 Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd also stepped down amid staff complaints about their management style. The affair raised a number of issues in the public and within journalistic circles, including questions about the credibility of the Times and about race (Blair is African-American). A number of detailed stories about the scandal are available on the Web, including a report from CNN. English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806--1873) was prominent as a publicist in the reforming age of the nineteenth century, and remains of lasting interest as a logician and an ethical theorist. Mill stands as a bridge between the eighteenth-century concern for liberty, reason, and science and the nineteenth-century trend toward empiricism and collectivism. His work Utilitarianism systematized the doctrines that knowledge was based on experience and reason. As a member of Parliament, Mill was considered a radical, supporting ideas like public ownership of natural resources, equality for women, compulsory education, and birth control. His advocacy of women's suffrage in the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867 led to the formation of the women's suffrage movement. Read more about Mill in a biography posted on the Utilitarianism.com site. One of the most popular and respected philosophers of the end of the twentieth century is John Rawls (1921-2002) born in Baltimore, Maryland. His book, A Theory of Justice, (1971) gave strength to the liberal political positions of the era and is one of the most read of recent philosophical works. A student of the social contract theories and the categorical imperative, Rawls was a Princeton graduate who joined army and served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. After the war he was a teacher of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then secured a tenured position at Harvard, where he remained until his death. The Harvard University Gazette has an obituary on Rawls. Bob Steele has become one of the leading voices of journalism ethics. Director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute, Steele earned his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1990. A former television journalist, Steele now is a frequent author and lecturer on ethics. He is co-author of Doing Ethics in Journalism: A Handbook with Case Studies (1996) and writes the Talk About Ethics column for Poynter's Web site.
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