Celebrating Women's History Month w/ Award Winning Journalist Dr. Beth Knobel

so you have some context and relevance. It is the twenty first of March and we are still celebrating women's history months, so I'm glad you've joined us. I wonder how many of my listeners are familiar with the names

Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller, and Marie Colvin. I'm sure that some of you may have at least heard the names before, but I'm willing to wager that the great majority have not, or their incredible achievements, and that's a shame, because those three women were among the greatest journalists this country has ever produced, having risked and gave their lives literally and figuratively to change the world through their words and images. On their shoulders, women continued to stand in the fearless

pursuit of truth. Yet, despite their accomplishments, another little known fact is that most journalists today are women. It's another important reason that we continue to celebrate women, particularly those in journalism today with my very special guest. She has boldly carried on the tradition of great women journalists that have come before her, as demonstrated in her roles as

a leader, producer, reporter, author, teacher and mother. Beth Noble had a twenty year career as a journalist before a joining Fordham University in two thousand and seven as Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies. From nineteen ninety nine to two thousand and six, she was the Moscow Bureau chief for CBS News. In nine years at CBS News, she worked as both an on air correspondent as well

as a producer. She is a recipient of an Emmy Award for coverage of the two thousand and two Moscow Theater siege, and Edward R. Murrow and Sigma Delta Caya Awards for coverage of the two thousand and four Beslan School siege. Doctor Noble spent fourteen years living in Moscow, where she worked for the Los Angeles Times, the Television News Agency, Worldwide Television News, and the production company Feature

Story before joining CBS News. Earlier in her career, she worked for the Columbia Daily Spectator and Governance the Harvard Journal of Public Policy. Doctor Noble received a master's and doctoral degrees in public policy from Harvard University and her bachelor's in political science from bar Arnard College, Columbia University. In twenty ten, doctor Noble co authored a guidebook for young journalists with CBS News legend Mike Wallace, Heat and

Light Advice for the next generation of journalists. She also wrote a book in twenty eighteen on how watchdoor reporting has fared in the Internet era. She also studies the effective media on politics in Russia. At Fordham, doctor Noble teaches hands on courses in multimedia journalism, journalism history, and press politics. She serves as the advisor to the student

newspaper on Fordham's Bronx campus, The RAM. Outside of Fordham, Doctor Noble currently serves as a judge for the News and Documentary Emmy Awards, as a board member of the Overseas Press Club of America and as a trustee of the Columbia Daily Spectator. She is also a third degree black belt in Taekwondo. I call her the Renaissance Woman. A deep breath and my friend and colleague, welcome, doctor Bethson. I appreciate you for taking the time. Obviously we're very busy.

they are as professionals. So I'd like to ask you, did you always dream of becoming a journalist when you were when you were a kid growing up, was was that foremost in your thinking?

to go to Stuyvesant High School. This was back in the days when normal people kind of got into Stuyvesant, who hadn't studied for eight years for the entrance exam as they do now, and so it was really it's Stuyvesant that I started to get interested in media, although apparently I did once when I was about eleven, I wrote to the New York Post trying to get a job as a sports reporter, and for some reason I

didn't get it. But at Divesant there was a whole scene of both kind of official media like the school newspaper and unofficial media. There were all these people just sort of self publishing magazines, and so I started working on magazines and I just thought this is a really cool thing to do, Like there was just something about the process of informing people that I just found so important and interesting. I did an internship senior year of high school at The Villager, which is a local paper.

It still exists in a West village, and so they sent me out to report stories and I was like, this is the coolest job in the world, to get to get paid to talk to people like I'm good. And so I went to college, and you know, it was incredibly fortunate to go to Barnard College, which at the time was the Women's college of Columbia University. Now this is before Columbia was college was co ed, and I kind of majored in the Columbia Daily Spectator. It was a five day week paper. We had to lay

it out. They don't lay it out anymore, only once a week, and the SPEC's motto was success without college. I probably skipped a few too many classes, but I really learned how to be a journalist, and that's what really gave me the fire. Now and as you said in your in I serve as one of the alumni trustees of the Columbia Spectator, and I'm just in total awe of the high quality journalism that those students do.

I look at the quality of the reporting and the multimedia work than they do, and they're you know, doing social media, and they're doing videos and they're doing reporting. Their work covering the protests at Columbia over the last year has been absolutely remarkable. I'm so incredibly proud of those students. And then I ended up becoming a professional

journalist in Russia. After I finished graduate school, I started writing about Mikhail Gorbachev, started going to Russia, fell in love with a Russian journalist who I eventually married and then later divorced. But it was nineteen ninety when I started going to Russia and everything was changing. Communism was

falling apart before my eyes. And so when I decided to move there in nineteen ninety two, the only thing I knew how to do was be a journalist, and I was really lucky to get some really great jobs in Moscow and learn the language, ending up with CBS, which is where we met, and you know, is still a place where I have a relationship. I help with their Russia coverage still, and you know, I'm just so incredibly grateful to have been able to work as a journalist,

to be able to travel around the world. And you know, if I if I am an activist in any way, it's that I'm an activist for the truth. Like I really believe in the First Amendment. I really believe in giving people the information that they need as citizens to make decisions about their lives. And that's that's one of the things I think we both bring to the classroom at FORDOM trying to empower students to dig deep and to find the truths and and to share the truths, even even when it's not pretty.

rotation to Cobble, Afghanistan for a month. This was after the fighting had ended, and I spent about a month in Afghanistan with Elizabeth Palmer, who's a dear friend and you know, still a wonderful correspondent now based in the CBS B bureau in Moscow. She was the Mosque's she's based in London, CBSNE and she was the Moscow correspondent

for a couple of years. And I remember driving around Cobble and particularly driving across the Schmali plane north of Cobble and passing these herders living in tents with their goats, and I just thought, Wow, this is a moment, What an incredible opportunity to go to a place like Afghanistan that I would never ever in a million years go to such a historic and interesting place, and to get to tell stories to Americans, to make them care about a place that is so outside of their everyday life

but has important implications for our country, for national security. So yeah, sometimes I look at my life and I kind of want to pinch myself about.

All of them were war correspondents and covered conflict. One of them actually killed in action, Marie Colvin, who was warned not to go back, and her response was, but I have to. So I and the others were not necessarily killed in action, but we're in a sense lost to the wars they covered, if you will, many similar that many soldiers experience with PTSD coming back from war. I mean, they could appear and they had great careers, but they never lose what they've seen. So talk and again,

you've been in war zones. Talk about some of the challenges, particularly unique challenges that women and journalists in that situation face that perhaps maybe their male counterpart don't encounter on the same level. Can you talk to that? Yeah?

I admire those kinds of journalists. If there are bullets flying, I would like rather be back in my safe space than out there. It is one of the reasons I have such respect for those frontline journalists. But I can think of times where, you know, people looked at me in Russia and was like, you're a woman, what are you doing here?

house that they gave us. And this family had numerous daughters kind of running from you know, twenties down to you know, five years old, and these women were fascinated by me. And I speak Russian and so they could talk to me, and they were like, what do you what are you doing? You're a woman? Where's your husband? How does he allow you to do this? Do American women work? Is this normal? And they weren't being you know,

mean or anything. They were just incredibly curious to see a woman in a very different role than they were used to in Chechena. Which is not to say the Chechen women and don't work. They absolutely do work. But it was kind of like a little mini lesson in feminism for these young Chechen women to sort of say, look, you know you hopefully you can do whatever you want, and you know, it's important for people of all kinds of different backgrounds to be telling stories.

So that kinds of does it surprise you at all to find so many? And why do you think women, despite the difficulties, are still attracted to it as a profession.

staff was overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. By the way, I don't think the Spectator had its first editor female editor in chief until after I had gone been the editor, and that was I believe, about one hundred years into its history. Yeah, I think it was a woman in the class of nineteen eighty seven. It was the first few editor in chief, which is probably about one hundred

and nine years into Spectator's history. You know, everybody brings their own perspectives to their work as a journalist, and certainly my view of the world has been deeply colored by being a woman and also by being a mother.

In two thousand and four, we were covering the school siege in the town of Beslon, where as I'm sure most listeners will remember, a group of Chechen terrorists took an entire school hostage, mostly children and some of their parents who were bringing them to school for the first day, which has usually a little ceremony, and those people were held in a school gym for three days in sweltering heat. The gym was leased with bombs that would go off if the Russian forces tried to attack. It was awful

talking about PTSD. I definitely felt the effects of having covered that story for many, many weeks and months afterwards. But I was covering that story and all I could kept thinking about was, Wow, what if my kid were in there, who was four years old at the time, And I just thought, you know, he's such a chatterbox.

He would never have been able to shut up and sit there for hours and hours in a hot gym with no water and no food, and so my empathy for the people in that gym was very deeply colored by my own experience as a mother. So I think it's really great. At the Spectator when I was there, the women, I don't know, we're ten or twenty percent of the staff. So again, right now, I look at the staff of the Columbia Spectator. It's a majority woman. Most of their editors in chief for the last ten

years have been women. Most sometimes they're all female managing boards, you know. And it's good. The more kinds of voices and the more kinds of people we can have in journalism telling different stories in different ways, the stronger journal is going to be overall.

quieter moments afterwards. I remember reflecting after nine to eleven, having spent two weeks at Ground zero, and then also the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, busy, busy, terrible weather and not thinking about it, but afterwards coming to terms with what we've just seen and documented. And I guess we all have methods of dealing with what is yours. And you mentioned how for months you were suffering with PTSD. How do you prepare and if you know assignment's going

to be difficulty, do you mentally prepare yourself? And then afterwards what are some of your methods of coping?

and that you also have to be able to kind of compartmentalize a little bit and sort of take your own emotions and go, Okay, I have my emotions, I have my feelings. I bring you know, I'm not objective about certain things in my life, but like I'm going to be a journalist, I'm going to kind of put on my journalist hat now and then push those feelings to the side, and I'll come back to them and deal with them. So in in Beslan, you know, it

was tragic. We would interview people who had lost their whole family, and they would cry through the interview, and then we would cry through the interview. At points our cameraman said, like, I can't even see what I'm shooting anymore. I'm crying so much that it's just a big blur. But afterwards, I, you know, I had dreams about Beslan and about being held hostage, you know, for many, many weeks after that event, and so, you know, you talk

about it, you try to process it. One of the things that I'm very proud of as an alum of CBS is that I always found them to be very understanding when people were like, Hey, I've just covered a war, I've just covered a terrorist act. I might need a couple of days off or I, you know, I'm going to seek some counseling and try to work through this, and they've been My experience was that they were extremely

supportive in this. You know, I've saw, you know, a lot of colleagues cover some really horrible things and that's just part of the job. And I think you have to go into the job knowing that you're going to see the worst of humanity, but the upside is that you also get to see the best of humanity. Going back to Beslan, we were, you know, interviewing these people who lost their whole families, and then at the end of the interviews, these people were like, Hey, do you

need a bathroom? Hey are you hungry? Hey can we feed you? Do you need a place to stay? Do you on our internet Wi fi? You know, what can we do for you? And I remember thinking, these people have just gone through the worst days of their life, and yet they're being so kind to us, Like, what does that tell you about the human condition? It tells you that even at the worst of times, people can be at their very best. And those lessons have definitely stayed with me through my career.

it has to be reported as such. I mean, there's an internet meme that says something about what journalism is. If it's if somebody's asking if it's raining outside, you really don't debate it. You put your head out of the window, you find out if it's raining or not. I'd like to see your thoughts on that. As I said, the idea of it is to approach with objectivity and fairness.

But at some point, as you dig a story, as I said, there are villains and there are heroes, and what role does a journalist play in highlighting one over the other.

No obviously, you know, most people would look at any war like that and just say, oh, this is this is so sad, this is a terrible thing. I hope this war ends so fewer innocent people will die. Everybody always has some feelings that they bring to a story, and so the aspiration is to put those aside and focus on the facts, focus on fairness, focus on being balanced.

And it can be really hard to do that. Sometimes reporting about the Ukraine War, where I do have strong personal feelings is challenging, but I always try to be fair and accurate in what I say about it, even though you know, now the work that I do for CBS is really punditry. They'll come to me and be like, hey, this thing happened, how do we interpret it? What does it mean? What do you think? And even in that role where I actually can, you know, let my opinions go,

I tend not to. I try to just sort of add fact and add information to help people interpret it for themselves. So I think it's important to know and remember that journalism is a profession. It has standards, it has practices that are widely adapted, and the standards for

journalism transcend the medium. So, for example, the Society of Professional Journalists has a set of standards that it says journalisms should act according to, and that's, you know, seeking the truth above all else, being fair and balanced, being accountable, being transparent, and that doesn't matter if you're you know, doing your journalism via TikTok videos or your reporting for the New York Times of CBS. Those are aspirations that

we all have. And I think it's it's really important for people to remember that journalists are, you know, almost always, certainly mainstream media journalists are always aspiring to put their personal feelings aside and just focus on what's actually true.

And Mike was like, the heck with that. And so we worked together twice. When I was at CBS. He came to interview bars Jeltzon in two thousand and then he came to interview Vladimir Putin in two thousand and five, and so we got to know each other, and he had a reputation of being quite the tiger in his

early years. By the time I worked with him, he was in his eighties and he was kind of a pussy cat and we got along very well, and so I had him come to visit Fordom and give a talk to students, and he was he was so Mike Wallace.

He just people started asking him questions and then he I remember he was wearing a lavit le or mic so he could move around, and he like literally left the place where we were sitting, walked into the audience and started questioning the students about things and having a conversation with them, and it was so good that I called him the next day to thank him, and I said, you know, you really ought to write a book about how to do journalism, because your view of what it

is is a little bit different than kind of the classic canon of journalism. And I said, you know, if you want, we could do it together. And much to my surprise and delight, he said, that's a great idea. Let's do it together. And so I started going to his apartment in New York and I made a list of like the two hundred and fifty most basic questions of doing journalism, like what's a story news? How do you know who to interview? How do you know you

haven't forgotten to ask something important? What are your ethics? How do you think about following the law? You walk into an edit room and you've got thirty hours of material, how do you combit down and make it a story? And so we just started talking and I ran a tape and we just talked and talked and talked and talk to talk and then I went out and interviewed about thirty other people to have their impressions of the in the book as well. And yeah, we had a

great time. And I think other than the fact that it doesn't really cover the internet because it came out in twenty ten, I think it really the book stands up in terms of the way it explains the way to do news gathering and the importance of journalism. And yeah, it's a really good book. It's still it's still out there.

I know some people are still using it. And it's really the book that I wish I had had when I was say, entering college and wanted to go work at the Spectator and really wanted to know what journalism was all about.

just a title, it's training, it's ethics. All that comes together so that people at least should trust that you've done your due diligence, your research, etc. The Internet some people still practice that, but because it's relatively anonymous, it's changed anything everything. But you wrote, you literally wrote the book. So how do you feel the Internet has changed news gathering in journalism for the better, for the worst or what are your feelings?

smaller and smaller. And so I thought the book was going to be documenting the fact that watchdog reporting was going away, and much to my surprise when I actually started looking at the data, it actually showed that a lot of the newspapers had expanded their watchdog reporting. A good example is the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which decided to put some kind of accountability story on its front page every single day rather than to make sure that it

was acting as a vibrant watchdog over the government. And so I then interviewed editors at all of the papers I studied, and including the Washington Post and the New York Times and papers in places like Idaho and Florida and upstate New York, and all the editors said the same thing to me, which is, we need to do watchdog journalism because if we don't do it, no one's going to do it. And it's the thing that our

readers actually really feel is worth paying for. So I think if I extend my research only went through twenty eleven, but I think if I did it now, I might find very different results than I did then. And so one of the things that I'm working on now is actually looking at these independent journalists. I came to be interested in this through a student who's currently writing her bachelor's thesis at FORDAM about these new independent journalists who

do journalism on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. So one really good example of this is a guy named Johnny Harris who's a journalist. He has a good background, he worked at all kinds of different organizations and now he's on his own and so he'll make like a twenty minute video about like who is Vladimir Putin? And for some of his videos, he's going out into the field and interviewing people and doing kind of very classic journalism.

And sometimes he's not actually interviewing anyone, he's just curating pictures, curating information and putting it into a package that's very slick looking and very informative. But isn't you know, the kind of typical journalism that you and I would have done at CBS. And he is something like six million followers on YouTube, so there's definitely marketing. Yeah, there's been definitely an audience for this. But the question is, well, like,

is this journalism? Where does content begin and where does journalism end? And what are the ethics that he's subject to? Is he's still subject to the same standards and practices

as somebody working for a mainstream news organization. So this is one of the things that I'm working on now and thinking about because I think you could really disagree about the extent to which some of what these people are doing as journalism, and then you could look at others and look at what they're doing, these independent journalists, and be like, that's still classic journalism, where the reporters going out and interviewing people and such.

a very well known author. He was an advisor to Richard Nixon. He headed the Nixon Center for many years and then he was kind of the American host, and then there was a Russian host as well, a parliamentarian, and so the idea of the show was America thinks this and Russia thinks this. And so I'm hoping now to go back and study this show after the start of the Ukraine War and show as an example how Russian state propaganda to sell this war to the Russian

people is reflected in this one show. And so they were definitely speaking a lot about Ukraine in the shows that I studied. But now Russian television has become even more propagandas that it was three or five years ago. My my, I do sometimes watch Russian TV and it's they have a lot of political talk shows, a lot of them, a lot, a lot, a lot, and people on them are just, you know, going on tirades against

America and against the West all the time. So I think this one show is an interesting microcosm, and I have a feeling it's not really showing the American point of view anymore. I think it's mostly just all the Russian point of view. But we'll see as I do more research.

Trump administration on the First Amendment. We've seen them attack CBS, the AP, Reuters and so on and so forth, and we can see it where in my mind it's slowly being turned that the administration wants to see in his own personal propaganda machine, very similar to what's happening in Russia. I think we need to discuss that a little bit when we come back. I also want to talk a little bit about your martial arts and let people know you into taekwondos when I said the Renaissance woman, what's

in kidding? Beth has been great so far, my very special guest, doctor Beth Noble, an expert in all things media. Our background is so broad. We'll leave it at that. We have so much more to discuss here on being Frank, I'm your host, Frank Lebono. There'll be more intelligent conversation coming up right after these brief commercial messages. Please don't go anywhere yet.

But you can also catch Being Frank anywhere you get your favorite podcasts, And because every Being Frank is archived, you can listen to any of our programs just about any time you like. Find a link to Being Frank on the Hudson River Radio Facebook page or at our website Hudson Riverradio dot com. Just click on the icon and you're there. Okay, let's continue our conversation with Beth Nobles,

talking a lot about journalism. What it means a free press, etc. Best incredible career, and it brings us to a very important topic. And that's what I see as an assault on the First Amendment and the ramifications we've seen the current administration sue CBS News, ban the AP from the White House, etc. So there are moves in place at least it seems to me to be able to control the free press. And it's something that in my mind, we can have. But let's talk to a person who's

more eminently qualified than I am. Best noble, what are your feelings?

is not rule of law there. For example, if you're accused of a crime, there's no reason to believe that you would get a fair trial because the judiciary branch is under the control of the president, and in fact, you know, their rates of finding people guilty are like in the high nineties. It almost doesn't matter whether there's proof or not. And so another thing that I've picked up from living in Russia is that it's absolutely essential to a democracy to have a free and vibrant press.

Our founding fathers may not have gotten everything right. I'm not sure I love the Electoral College, for example, but I do think they were very right in making sure that there was a First Amendment in place to protect the media, to protect people's rights to have free speech, to have the right of free assembly. And so it's concerning, I think for most journalists today to see free speech under attack. It's very troubling for professors to see free

speech under attack. I think I'm probably a little bit more absolutist about the free about the right to free speech then a lot of people are. I really have no problem with most people saying whatever it is they want, because that's the American way. And I'll just share that.

One of the things that I've been doing as the advisor to the newspaper at Foredam is that I've been working pretty closely on opinion pieces with a student who's very, very conservative, and you know very he's working with the College Republicans at FOREDAM. And when I started working with him to improve his writing, I said to him, you know, journalists don't come to me as Democrats or Republicans. Journalists

come to me as journalists. And I may not agree with a point that you're making in your piece, but I'm going to help you do the best job I can of expressing your point of view clearly, so that maybe you will win some people over your point of view, or at least you will do a good job of expressing the point of view that you have on politics. And you know, some of my friends that I've shared this with are like, so, wait a minute, You're like helping a student write a piece about a point of

view that you totally disagree with. And I was like, absolutely, That's exactly what I'm doing, because that's the American way. The American way is to be able to discuss things, to advocate for things, and you know, inside for them, I'll just share that people are concerned about their rights to teach in the classroom and I don't think anybody really knows what's coming down the pike next. So I think that's made journalists very worried. I think it's made

professors very worried. You know, if I'm an advocate for anything, as I said earlier, I'm an advocate for the truth. You know, that's really what society needs is for the press to be free. And let's be clear, all modern presidents try to cultivate the press, good press coverage, and control the media. You know, whether that's Franklin Roosevelt having a fireside chat, or whether it's someone like Ronald Reagan who had a very sophisticated team putting together his media strategies.

If you wanted Ronald Reagan to do an event, you had to explain not only why it was worth doing, but what the image on the evening news would be, what the photo on the front page of a newspaper would be, and what the headline would say. So I think presidents have been involved in controlling the media for a long long time, maybe as long as there's been media, but certainly what we're seeing today with things like the Associated Press being punished for not wanting to call the

golf the golf of America. I think that is new, and I think it's it's hard for journalists to know the right way to try to combat that so that they can do their job well. And certainly for professors. I feel like a lot of my colleagues are just waiting and seeing what happens, and so it's a it's a very worrisome time. And in the long run, I think, you know what's what's best for society. You know, my tradition is that what's best for society is a is

a vibrant press, press and vibrant free speech. But I understand that it can be very hard to be the subject of free speech that is going against you.

Again with the idea of free speech. And I know your feeling is very similar to doctor Paul Evanson's, who's been a regular guest, where you know, almost unless it absolutely incites violence, direct violence, it goes. You don't have to like it. That's the point. But enough about what my feelings are towards it. What are yours? It's a very delicate balance there, Beth. Where do you see it? Yeah?

set very very high. You know, I have not seen in what I've read, which obviously isn't any everything, that this student at Columbia who was detained, you know, cross that threshold. He seems to be you know, certainly Palestinian pro Palestinian. But you know, he didn't, he didn't get over my personal bar for hate speech. I know some people listening to this may may disagree, but I'll just say more generally that Colombia is in a very difficult

situation right now. And as we're talking, there are apparently negotiations going on between the Columbia administration and the Trump administration about sort of things that they the Trump administration wants Columbia to do in order to get its federal grants restored. And one of the things that the Trump administration is trying to do is to push for a change in leadership and the way that it's sort of

Middle Eastern Studies department is run. And I can't remember another time that I've ever heard of a government getting into the academic work of a university. And so I, you know, am in a lot of groups of professors and there's a lot of discussion right now about this. There are professors at Columbia who have signed letters and petitions saying, you know, this is not allowed. You cannot allow a government to dictate what we're going to do

in the classroom. And I think if that happens, there might be people who leave Columbia, who retire, who try to start moving to other universities. Colombia is, you know, a place that formed me as an undergraduate, a place that I still have ties to through the Columbia Spectator. But I am a professor and so I deeply understand

where their faculty is coming from. That we've had academic freedom to teach students as we want, and if I didn't have that myself, I don't think I could really teach journalism the way that I think it should be taught. I might be worried about saying the wrong thing, and so I think in the long run, it's the students who would suffer if freedom of speech in the classroom is impinged upon by by any administration, Republican or Democrat. It's just not to me. It's not the right thing

to do. We want people to be able to speak freely in classrooms. That's why you know, cancel culture is also not appealing to me. I don't want any of my students to feel that they can't say what's on their minds.

journalism and outstanding one every year. Tell us a little bit about the prize, where it came from, and why it's important.

the family of a writer named Anne Sperber Am. She wrote under A. M. Sperber, who wrote the biography of Edward R. Mureau, the great CBS journalist and kind of the father of modern broadcast journalism, and worked on the biography of Mura for something like ten years. The amount of research that she did in the number of people she interviewed is just it's just mind boggling. It's an amazing, amazing book. And she passed away very very early in her family in doubt this prize, and so it's kind

of like a celebration of great journalism. There have been some you know, wonderful writers, you know, some a list names who have won the prize, and you know, it's it's really a pleasure to have an excuse, you know, to read read these books. One book I've been reading is a friend's book that will be out in April. Jill Dharty, the former bureau chief for CNN, has a memoir and you know, probably will consider her book for next year's prize because it's we're now reading the books

that came out in twenty twenty four. This is twenty twenty five book. But they're amazing books by amazing authors. And sometimes it's people that I know, and sometimes it's journalists that I never really knew a lot about and have learned about. So it's just another way that we at Fordham are doing what we can to help keep journalism in the public eye and keep it vibrant.

try and try it. So I did, and by the end of that free month, I was totally hooked and I've been doing it ever since. That was thirteen years ago, and so my son and I were the first mom son pair to make first and then second degree black belt together, which was really so special for me. And then my son went off to college and I kept going.

So in May, I believe I'll be testing for my fourth degree black belt, which is kind of cool because it's the first rank of mastery, so everyone at the school will have to call me Master Noble, and I'll also be the first woman at the school to reach master. So I think like people don't understand martial arts that they think it's about hurting people and punching. It's not. It's about self confidence, it's about perseverance, it's about discipline,

it's about respect. It's an incredible sport for young people. It's a great sport for young girls. There are you know, we are schools has I think close to fifty to fifty in terms of girls and boys in there, and it really helps young women gain confidence and gain perseverance because you don't get a belt like just oh I want it, I hear it is No, you got to

work and you got to build up to it. So I you know, I think it's in a really appropriate time if we're talking about women's history and women's empowerment that some of your listeners like check it out, like if you have a child, or if you are a woman and you're looking for something to do for your health, like check out a local martial arts class. It's it's really great exercise. And the other thing is that when you're in a martial arts class, you can't think about

anything else. You have to be there and be present and pay attention. And for me, my, you know, my job is so busy that I really love having an hour or two hours on nights and weekends where I'm not thinking about anything. I'm not thinking about the news. I'm just thinking about, Okay, someone's coming at me with a punch. What I do to protect myself.

so much of your understanding and knowledge about journalism. So thanks for all you do for Fordham students and as well as for your audience on the podcast.

such a better process. It's faster and easier to have someone help you learn journalism rather than trying to learn it on your own. And you know, I feel like our student when I got to Fordham that we didn't have a journalism major and we didn't have the public media master's program. So I feel really happy that we do. And I'll tell you as you know, a lot of our students are doing a great job. They're getting really

good jobs, and they're telling really important stories. And that's what gets me out of bed every day, to be.

and remember you can share being frank with others. I always leave you with two things that are relative to our conversation, want to quote, and then some great music that has a little backstory that I was submitted by our composer friend Robert Debou and going to read that for you and sec in just a second. First from our friend Walter Cronkite, who said, our job is only to hold up the mirror to tell and show the

public what has happened. I think it's a little more complex than that, but that's the basics and we'll stick to it. Okay. Some closing music comes from and again keeping with our theme of Women's History Month, a wonderful composer that most people haven't necessarily heard of. They've heard her music, but not her name. Augusta mary Anne Holmes

eighteen forty seven through nineteen oh three. And this is the Triumphal March, as arranged from her march to Zoe Avs for piano by Robert de Beaux, Irish French composer. August Mary Anne Holmes was born in Paris and lived her entire life there. Her parents, well educated and upper middle class, encouraged her lifelong love of learning. She was known as a delightful and creative young girl, and spoke French, Italian,

German and English, while also demonstrably precocious on piano. She was not allowed to study at the famed Paris Conservatory because of her gender. Camille Saint Sans arranged for her to study with the renowned Belgian composer and organist Caesar franc saying of her, like children, women have no idea of obstacles, and their willpower breaks all barriers. Mademoiselle Holmes is a woman and extremist. Holmes published some of her

early works under the male pseudonym Hermann Zenda Holmes. Many compositions include cantatas, symphonic poemes, operas, and over one hundred songs in a few works for solo piano, including this march Zoaves. The Zoaves are a class of French light infantry serving in France's North African colonies. Briefly, some uniforms of the Union Army in the American Civil War modeled upon them because of their lightweight. This piano march dates from eighteen sixty one, when the composer was but fourteen

years old. Even though she was not permitted to study there. The manuscript is housed in the Library of Harris Conservatory and can be found on the International Music Score of Library Project. So here is a triumphal march on piano by Robert Tabona, composed by Augustus Mariette Holmes. Per engineer, our engineer, the mailman, mister Neil Richter. I'm your host, Frank Lobono, and we hope to have you join us on the next being. Frank, We're the only way to be is Frank. Thanks everybody.