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[[File:Lawrence Lichty.png|thumb|Lawrence W. Lichty Photo courtesy of Northwestern University.

]] Lawrence Wilson Lichty is a noted media historian and educator. The author of numerous books and articles, Lichty’s work ranges across broadcast history, journalism, the War in Vietnam, and audience research. Although most of his career has been in higher education, he has held important positions in public radio and television, and at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

Career
Lichty was born June 14, 1937, in Pasadena, California. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California in 1959. In 1958, Lichty and his friends played a prank on long-time rival UCLA, by substituting 10,000 copies of the Daily Bruin with a bogus lampoon edition. The stunt received national attention and is remembered at his Alma mater to this day. Lichty earned a masters (1961) and doctorate (1964) from The Ohio State University. During his time at OSU, he met and married another graduate student, Sandra Kay Shaw.

Lichty’s first teaching job was at Long Beach State Colleg e in California. A year later, in 1964, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He moved from Assistant Professor to Professor during his 13 years in Madison. It was during that time that Lichty began his research on news coverage of the War in Vietnam. From 1978 to 1980, he served Director of Research at National Public Radio (NPR). Subsequently, he joined the faculty of the University of Maryland - College Park as a Professor and Chair of the Radio/TV/Film division. During his tenure at Maryland, he also served as Director of Media Research on The Vietnam Project at WGBH (Boston). In 1985, he became Chair of the Radio/TV/Film Department at Northwestern University. While at Northwestern, he took leave, from 1990 to 1993, to serve as Director of the Media Studies project at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He became Professor Emeritus at Northwestern in 2009.

Lichty’s contributions to the field fall into three areas; media history, audience research and broadcast education.

Media history
Lichty published many articles on broadcast history, often these appeared in the newly formed Journal of Broadcasting. In the early 1970s, he co-authored American Broadcasting: A Source Book on the History of Radio and Television, with Malachi Topping, a collection that helped establish the emerging field of broadcast education.

While on the faculty at the University of Maryland, Lichty served as the Director of Media Research on the documentary Vietnam: A Television History. In that capacity, he curated all the film and video footage of the war that was used to produce the 13-episode series. The documentary was widely acclaimed and in 1983, won a Peabody Award. The award made note of the series' "unmatched archival research."

As early as 1966, Lichty was sought out by journalists as an expert on the Vietnam war and consulted on other projects touching on broadcast history. He became a consultant on the 1991 public television series Making Sense of the Sixties. He was also a consultant on the 2005 motion picture about Edward R. Morrow, Good Night, and Good Luck, staring George Clooney. On several occasions during 1997 and again in 2005, Lichty consulted on the series American Experience.

During his long career teaching broadcasting and consulting on documentaries, Lichty accumulated a substantial archive of papers, personal interviews and video tapes. In 2022 he donated his collection to the University of Maryland Libraries. The collection, “Special Collections in Media & Culture (MMC)” is a major unit of Special Collections University Archive (SCUA), and is located in the R. Lee Hornbake Special Collections Library. MMC consists of archival collections which document the cultural and technical history of radio and television broadcasting in both the commercial and non-commercial spheres.

Audience research
Lichty has also affected the practice of audience research with contributions both applied and theoretical.

In 1978, he became the Director of Research at National Public Radio (NPR), in Washington, DC. During his time at NPR, Lichty helped create the long-running news program Morning Edition.

In 1991, Lichty and co-author James Webster published Ratings Analysis: Theory and Practice. The book became the standard text on audience measurement and is now in its fourth edition.

Broadcast education
In addition to his leadership roles at three universities, Lichty shaped the larger field of broadcast education. Lichty was an early promoter of the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) and its peer-reviewed journal, now called the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. In 1989, he was elected President of BEA.

His efforts in media education extended beyond universities. In 1991, Lichty became Director of Media Studies in the Wilson Center for Scholars, a program that focused on journalism and news media. In his capacity as Director, Lichty organized conferences and appeared on various panels televised on C-SPAN. He also enlisted scholars in writing projects and in 1992, published The Future of News with Philip Cook and Douglas Gomery.

In 1998, BEA recognized Lichty with its Distinguished Education Service Award, given to “an individual who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the American system of electronic media education.”