Michael Schudson ’69, professor of journalism at Columbia University, was among 180 influential artists, scientists, scholars, authors, and institutional leaders inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. As one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious learned societies, the academy has supported independent research in science, technology policy, global security, the humanities, culture, social policy, and education since 1780.

Schudson holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard and is the author of seven books and co-editor of three others dealing with the history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, and U.S. political culture. He is currently completing a book on the emergence of practices of “transparency” in the 1960s and 1970s (from the Freedom of Information Act to “unit pricing” in the supermarket). Schudson has been a Guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavior Sciences in Palo Alto, Calif., and a MacArthur Foundation fellow.

He is the recipient of the 2004 Murray Edelman distinguished career award from the political communication section of the American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association. Schudson’s articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, the Wilson Quarterly, and the American Prospect, and he has published op-eds in newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.