Philip Bennett

Philip Bennett is an American journalist and professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University. Bennett began his career at The Lima Times in Peru before joining the staffs of The Boston Globe (1984–1997) and The Washington Post (1997–2009). He was managing editor at The Post from 2005 to 2009, He was previously deputy national editor of national security, defense and foreign policy coverage, and assistant managing editor for foreign news at The Post. At The Boston Globe, he was a foreign correspondent, metropolitan reporter, assistant editor of Metro news, and finally foreign editor. Currently, he is the Eugene C. Patterson Professor and director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy.

Early life and family

A native of the San Francisco area, Bennett is a Harvard University graduate who describes his outlook this way: "I love newspapers and the people who make them." After stepping down, Bennett was on the short list for J-School dean at UC Berkeley before being appointed Eugene C. Patterson Professor of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University in 2009. Speaking about his plans in this new role, Bennett said: “One leading challenge for journalists is to make sense of an expanding universe of available data and to put it in the service of more accurate and thorough reporting, and rich storytelling, [...] Universities can help experiment and create in ways that have become more difficult for the news industry.” Bennett said, “At the Post I want more Muslim readers and I want more Muslim journalists,” and called on news organizations to hire more Muslim journalists so that Americans could be taught to understand “the basic tenets of Islam.” The speech was sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democracy, School of Social Sciences, UC Irvine. In October 2008, Bennett gave a speech at Amherst College titled "The Presidential Race, What's the Story?"