⇨ W. Joseph Campbell is an American writer, historian, media critic, and analyst. He is a seventh-generation Pennsylvanian, a native of Bucks County who lives in suburban Washington, D.C., with his wife, Ann-Marie Regan.

Campbell is a professor emeritus of communication at American University in Washington. During his 26 years on the tenure-line faculty at American, Campbell wrote seven solo-authored books including, most recently, Lost in Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.

His other books include two editions of the award-winning Getting It Wrong: Debunking the Greatest Myths in American Journalism (2010, 2017).

About Getting It Wrong, Andrew Ferguson wrote in Commentary magazine:

“It may be the best book about journalism in recent memory; it is certainly the most subversive.”

He further wrote: “Journalism’s myths about journalism, you’ll notice, are self-aggrandizing. They cast the journalist as hero. No wonder they’re so popular … among journalists.”

Campbell also is the author of the well-received work, 1995: The Year the Future Began (2015). “Remarkable,” one critic wrote of Campbell’s 1995 . “Compulsively readable” wrote another.

At American University, Campbell taught 20 different courses, including offerings he developed such as: “When Polls Go Bad,” “Myths of the Media,” “The American 1990s,” and “Decisive Moments in Communication,” as well as “Foreign Policy and the Press,” and “Seminar in Doctoral Teaching and Research.”

C-SPAN taped and aired a number of his classes in its “Lectures in History” series, including his last lecture in April 2023.

In addition, Campbell discussed media-driven myths in an hour-long interview with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN’s “Q-and-A” program in 2010.

He made appearances on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” in the run-up to elections in 2022 and 2024.

Campbell entered the academy after earning his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which followed a 20-year professional career as a newspaper and wire service journalist.

He filled reporting assignments from across North America, and in Europe, West Africa, and parts of Asia. He reported from overseas as a newsman with the Associated Press and domestically for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland and Hartford Courant in Connecticut.

Campbell’s assignments included covering nuclear arms negotiations in Geneva, youth unrest in Swiss urban centers, threats posed by development to picturesque Switzerland, the challenge in the early 1980s to communist rule in Poland, spasms of political upheaval across West Africa, and the consequences and effects of the world’s deadliest industrial disaster at Bhopal, India.

Campbell also developed and wrote two web logs, Media Myth Alert (2009-2022) and The 1995 Blog (2014-2020).

Campbell has discussed his research in invited lectures at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, and several major U.S. universities.

His other books include The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms (2006) and Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (2001). Both books address a poorly understood period in American journalism.

His first book, The Emergent Independent Press in Benin and Côte d’Ivoire: From Voice of State to Advocate of Democracy (1998), was an elaboration of his doctoral dissertation that examined the wellsprings of independent-minded journalism in francophone West Africa. He also is the author of The Spanish-American War: American Wars and the Media in Primary Documents (2005).

Campbell’s research has been published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, American Journalism, Journalism History, Editor & Publisher, and American Journalism Review. His work also has appeared in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Fortune,as well as the online sites of the BBC and CNN.

During his years at American, Campbell devoted portions of four summers working with the university’s grounds crews (left), tending to the arboretum that is the AU campus.

Campbell earned his bachelor’s degree at Ohio Wesleyan University and his doctorate in mass communication at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

He also studied for a year at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he played for City Fribourg, a Swiss semipro basketball team. Images of Fribourg, a medieval city that straddles Switzerland’s French-German linguistic border, are below.