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Wall Street Journal’s Karen Elliott House to deliver Baccalaureate address
By David J. Craig
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| Karen Elliott House Photo by Christopher Smith |
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As a journalist covering international politics for the Wall Street Journal in the ’70s and ’80s, Karen Elliott House pursued a profoundly simple goal: to tell the truth.
All ethical journalists strive to be accurate, of course, but House, who today is publisher of all print editions of the Journal, considers herself lucky to have built her career at a company that encourages reporters to dig for facts with unusual tenacity, and to avoid whenever possible suggesting in their stories that opposing perspectives about news events are equally valid.
“[The Journal] has been a great place to work because it is one of the few places in journalism that does seek truth from facts, as the Chinese would say,” said House in an interview last year with Bostonia. Journal reporters are taught that “there are facts; it’s not all subjective. There is such a thing as truth and you must have facts to support what you write.”
And “if you’ve got the facts, you can write anything,” she continued. “There are no sacred cows. There are no people who are friends of our owners who can’t be written about, or people who are on our board who can’t be written about, or political or business elite who can’t be written about. And that’s a huge satisfaction, that you can look yourself in the mirror every morning and know that you don’t have to cut corners for anybody.”
House, who in 1984 won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting, will draw on more than 30 years of experience as a journalist and news executive when she delivers BU’s annual Baccalaureate address, Sunday, May 18, at 9 a.m. at the Baccalaureate Service at Marsh Chapel. Later that morning, she will be presented with a doctor of humane letters, honoris causa, at the All-University Commencement exercises.
Entitled Pursuing Your Own Path, her address will focus on the importance of “charting an independent course and having the courage to follow it rather than wandering through life doing what the pack does,” she recently told the B.U. Bridge. “BU, which more than most universities avoids political correctness, has helped prepare students to do this.”
House, in addition to being publisher of the Wall Street Journal, is a senior vice president of the newspaper’s parent company, Dow Jones & Company, and sits on the Dow Jones executive committee. She has been a member of the BU Board of Trustees since 1989, and is currently Board secretary.
A native of Matador, Tex., House received a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1970 and began her journalism career at the Dallas Morning News. She joined the Journal’s Washington, D.C., bureau in 1974, covering energy, the environment, and agriculture. Her passion, however, was international politics, and she was named the paper’s diplomatic correspondent in 1978, becoming assistant foreign editor in 1983, and then foreign editor, a position in which she continued to write occasionally, in 1984.
House received a Pulitzer Prize that year for a series of penetrating interviews with Jordan’s King Hussein that “correctly anticipated problems that would confront the Reagan administration’s Middle East peace plan,” according to the Pulitzer Web site.
In 1989, House was named vice president of Dow Jones’ international group, eventually being named president of the group in 1995. She was responsible for the business and editorial staffs of all Dow Jones overseas publications and services, international sales operations, overseas investments, and publishing partnerships.
House returned last year to the Journal as publisher. She continues to oversee Dow Jones of CNBC Europe and CNBC Asia Pacific, a business television partnership of Dow Jones and NBC.
In addition to the Pulitzer, House has received numerous other journalism awards: the Overseas Press Club’s Bob Considine Award for best daily newspaper interpretation of foreign affairs (1984 and 1988); the University of Southern California’s Distinguished Achievement in Journalism Award (1983); Georgetown University’s Edward Weintal Award for distinguished coverage of American foreign policy (1980); and the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Excellence in Diplomatic Reporting for a series on Saudi Arabia (1982).
House is a former director and a current member of the Council on Foreign
Relations and a director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. She
is a member of the board of trustees of the nonprofit think tank RAND,
and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
14
May 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations