Menino Campaign Appoints Debate Coordinator

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Emily Nowlin

617-367-1900

Friday, April 24, 2009

Broadcast veteran was Executive Producer of 1988 and 1992 Presidential Debates

Boston – The Menino campaign today appointed Edward M. Fouhy to be its Debate Coordinator.  Mr. Fouhy will represent the campaign in all debate negotiations.  Mr. Fouhy, a highly respected veteran broadcast journalist, was executive producer of the 1988 and 1992 presidential debates, and was instrumental in changing their traditional format. The revamped debate series in 1992 was seen by more Americans than any other political broadcasts to that time. 

Mr. Fouhy was also a consultant to Google YouTube in its quest to hold a presidential debate in New Orleans in 2008. 

Mr. Fouhy is a career journalist; a reporter, news producer and news executive for more than 35 years, beginning in Boston as a reporter covering the state capital. After three years as news director of WBZ-TV, Boston he joined CBS News and went to Saigon as bureau chief at the height of the war. Later he was Los Angeles Bureau Chief, then senior Washington producer of the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" during the Watergate years. Later he became CBS News Washington Bureau Chief and subsequently CBS News Vice President and News Director, directing the network's worldwide news bureaus and correspondents as well as supervising all of CBS's hard news broadcasts. 

Mr. Fouhy later served as ABC News Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief, and later was executive producer for the prime time news magazine programs American Almanac and '1986' at NBC News.

 Ed Fouhy recently retired as executive director of the Pew Center on the States, editor of Stateline.org. the daily news service published by the center, and director of the Government Performance Project.

“It’s wonderful to have Ed working with me again on an issue of importance to our favorite city,” said Mayor Thomas M. Menino.  “He’s a consummate professional whose depth of journalistic experience and talent are unsurpassed in my experience.”

He has won five national Emmy Awards for the hard news and magazine programs he has produced. He was, as well, recipient of the Drew Pearson Award for investigative reporting early in his career. 

A graduate of UMass Amherst, Mr. Fouhy recently completed a documentary on the rapid emergence of local news web sites in communities where newspapers have cut back coverage of their local governments. 

Mr. Fouhy was an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.  A Milton native, Mr. Fouhy lives in Chatham with his wife Barbara.