Rhona Tarrant, executive editor of CBS News Confirmed, will present this year’s Marie Colvin Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, Feb. 26, at Stony Brook University.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “The New Battlefield: Open-Source Investigations into Conflict and Disinformation”—a timely topic in a world heavily influenced by social media. The program will begin at 6 p.m. at the Charles B. Wang Center theater, located at 100 Nicolls Road. Registration through the university’s website is requested.
“She’s a leader in open-source intelligence having worked very early on in her career at Storyful, an enterprising startup in this area, and then she’s recently moved to CBS News to run their verification division,” said Sarah Baxter, director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting at Stony Brook.
As executive editor at CBS News Confirmed, Tarrant is part of a fact-checking team for CBS News and Stations that weeds out misinformation from the factual contributions of social media.
“Social and open-source intelligence is such a key way to gather information. Journalists really need to know all about it. So many stories have been broken using open-source material, and it’s crucial as a sort of eye into societies that are closed or run by authoritarian regimes and also into societies that are full of disinformation,” Baxter said.
According to the website, Tarrant will explore the rise of open-source verification in conflict reporting and discuss what future journalists need to master this skill.
An example where open-source verification proved instrumental was when Russian-backed forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, Baxter said, noting there are numerous other examples as well.
Tarrant's biography includes serving as the U.S. head of editorial at Storyful, where she worked with The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in award-winning investigations. She launched her career in broadcast journalism and also spent a decade working in current affairs with RTE in Dublin and WNYC in New York. She is an Assembly Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and shares her expertise with journalists worldwide.
Wednesday evening will also serve as a time to reflect on the ultimate sacrifice made by Marie Colvin, an Oyster Bay native and The Sunday Times of London journalist killed in Syria 13 years ago. Colvin’s sister, Cat, will give a lecture about Syria, where journalists lacked freedom until recently, Baxter said.
“For the first time western reporters are back in Syria and able to move freely,” said Baxter, who worked with the late Colvin at The Times.
The Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting was founded at Stony Brook University in 2013 in conjunction with Colvin’s family, and the lecture series launched soon afterward, according to Baxter.
Some of the series’ celebrated lecturers over the years have included CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, former online news director for The New Yorker David Rohde, and former Dateline NBC anchor Ann Curry, a longtime humanitarian news correspondent.