April 14, 1998
Emmy Award-Winning CNN Anchor Jeanne Meserve to
Present Middlebury College’s Annual Robert van de Velde Lecture
Jeanne Meserve, an Emmy Award-winning
anchor and correspondent for CNN, will deliver the Robert W. van
de Velde, Jr. Memorial Lecture on “Sex,
Lies and Audiotape: Is This the News?”
at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28 in the auditorium of Middlebury
College’s Twilight Hall on College Street. Meserve is a Middlebury
alumna from the class of 1974. The lecture, which was originally
scheduled for Jan. 7 and canceled due to bad weather, is open
to the public and free of charge.
Based in CNN’s Washington, D.C. bureau, Meserve has
a variety of anchoring responsibilities on the weekend, including
“Early Prime,” “The World Today,” “PrimeNews,”
and “World News.” Meserve, who joined CNN in
1993, won an Emmy in 1997 for her contribution to the network’s
coverage of the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta.
Meserve’s work at CNN includes anchoring coverage
of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin-reporting
that won a New York Festival Gold Medal. She also served as a
floor reporter during both the Republican and Democratic 1996
national conventions.
Meserve was an ABC-TV news correspondent for eight
years covering a variety of beats, including the White House and
State Department. At ABC, Meserve reported extensively from overseas.
She covered Beijing in the wake of the Tiananmen Square uprising,
and reported on the hostage situation in Lebanon, tensions in
the Persian Gulf, and the intricacies of U.S. Soviet relations.
Robert W. van de Velde, Jr. was a member of the Middlebury
class of 1975. The memorial lecture was established in 1981 by
his parents, R.W. and Barbara van de Velde; his widow, Diana Mooney
van de Velde; and other family members and friends. The lecture
series provides an annual talk on the confluence
of public affairs-both foreign and domestic-and journalism, particularly
broadcast journalism. Previous speakers in the series have included
Frank Sesno of the class of 1977, Cecil Forster of the class of
1964, Robert Abernethy, Governor Madeleine Kunin, Raymond Benson,
Jane Bryant Quinn of the class of 1960, Karl Meyer and E.D. Hirsch.