It is with great sadness that CCLP learned of the death of CCLP Senior Fellow John Lansing. He passed away unexpectedly on August 14, 2024. He was 67 years old.
Lansing joined CCLP in March 2024 after an illustrious career in journalism and media. He influenced airwaves across the United States and abroad as the president and CEO of NPR, and before that, as the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
Most recently, he was a panelist and active participant in CCLP’s roundtable discussions at the Republican National Convention (July 16-18, 2024). To the aspiring young journalists in the room, he offered the advice, “We are, in America, right now in a full-fledged war. It’s going to be harder and harder to get people to believe and understand what is true. The first step is to say there is such a thing as an empirical truth.”
Lansing was also a recent guest on CCLP Senior Fellow Adam Clayton Powell III’s TV program, “White House Chronicle.” Powell, who was central in inviting Lansing to join CCLP, paid tribute to him on the air with the following words:
“John Lansing began his career as a photographer, and that is different from starting with the written word. You develop an eye for framing and context, and you look for what is slightly out of place.
John also was a builder: He created a cable television company that sold for ten figures – yes, more than a billion dollars. HGTV? Food network? John had them all.
Then he went to work for his country, for public service, first directing all U.S. government international broadcasting – Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, all of it.
And he finished his professional career at NPR, which he also viewed as public service.
After he retired, he joined USC as a senior fellow in the Center on Communications Leadership and Policy, where he wanted to focus on truth, its enemies and the global war on fact.
And that is the subject of our program today.“
Read more about the life of John Lansing: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/16/g-s1-17382/john-lansing-npr-ceo-dies-dei-union.