Thomas Plate

Thomas Gordon Plate (born May 17, 1944) is an American journalist, university professor and internationally syndicated columnist. Over the last 20 years his continuing column on Asia has appeared in leading newspapers across the globe, including the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, where he is a columnist writing fortnightly about China, while based in Los Angeles,The Straits Times in Singapore, The Khaleej Times out of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, The Japan Times in Tokyo, The Korea Times in South Korea, The Jakarta Post, The Providence Journal and many others.[1] He was Editor of the Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times from 1989 to 1995,[2] and an L.A. Times op-ed columnist until 2000. He is now at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles as its Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies. He is on the board of the Pacific Century Institute and the Center For Our Digital Future, in Los Angeles.

Bibliography

Early life

Thomas Plate was born in New York City. At the age of five Plate's parents moved him and his sister Maureen, to Long Island. He attended public schools on Long Island before transferring to the Franciscan Preparatory Seminary in Pennsylvania at the age sixteen. Plate eventually left the seminary and entered Walt Whitman High School on Long Island and became an editor of the school newspaper, The Whitman Window. He graduated from high school and left Long Island in 1962.

After a year at the University of Pittsburgh under a General Motors Scholarship, he transferred to Amherst College. In 1966, he received a Bachelor's degree in political science from Amherst (Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude). While at Amherst College, Plate became Managing Editor of the Amherst Student, was head of the student speakers' program and editor of PAIDEIA, then the student literary magazine. He continued his studies at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. There, Plate served on the editorial board of the Woodrow Wilson School student policy review and earned his master's degree in public and affairs from Princeton in 1969.

Career

During his years at Amherst and Princeton, Plate worked as a campus correspondent at Newsweek and the Washington Post. He also interned at both media institutions, as well as at the United States State Department in Washington in 1967 as a speechwriter between Amherst and Princeton.

In 1970 he wrote his first book Understanding Doomsday: A Guide to the Nuclear Arms Race for Hawks, Doves and People. His career in journalism includes long stints at: Newsday (Long Island, under David Laventhol), New York Magazine (under Clay Felker), the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (under James Bellows), where he won a coveted Deadline Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors and for three years running the Beat Editorial Award from The Greater Los Angeles Press Club,[3] The Daily Mail of London (under Sir David English); New York Newsday (under Don Forst); and Time magazine (under Ray Cave). In 1989, Plate moved from New York City to Los Angeles.[4] In Los Angeles, from the end of 1989 to the fall of 1995, Plate was Editor of the Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times. In this position he supervised the daily editorial and op-ed pages, as well as the Sunday OPINION section. While there, these sections garnered significant professional recognition, including awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association and national newspaper design awards. In 1999, he was selected as a Hoover Institution Media Fellow.[5]

As a journalist, Tom Plate has interviewed leading political figures and world leaders, including U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, British Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair, Japanese Prime Ministers Keizo Obuchi and Junichiro Koizumi, South Korean Presidents Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, Singaporean Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathir, Thailand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. While writing for the Los Angeles Times in July 1997, he was the first American commentator to warn that the implosion Thailand's Baht currency could the trigger a larger crisis in East Asia.[6] His column has been the longest-running newspaper-appearing column about Asia based in the U.S. In the Foreword to Plate's 2014 book 'In the Middle of China's Future: Tom Plate on Asia', Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, wrote this: "Tom Plate is one of the few Western journalists who have gotten the world's biggest story [the rise of China] right."

As an educator, Plate has presented guest lectures or courses at a wide-ranging array of institutions, including Stanford University, the U.S. Pacific Command in Honolulu, Santa Monica College, Kyoto University in Japan and the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, UAE, where he was a Visiting Professor and prepared a joint live Internet interactive course between UAEU and LMU on the media and politics of Asia. Since then he has conduced joint live Internet inteactive courses from LMU with major Asian universities such as Fudan in Shanghai (2015) and Yonsei in Seoul (2016). Over the years he has been invited to prestigious international conferences, including for four years the World Economic Forum in Davos and, most recently, the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar. In Los Angeles, at Loyola Marymount University, Plate, as its Distinguished Scholar in Asian and Pacific Studies, teaches a number of courses, including "An Introduction to the Media and Politics of Asia" and "The Future of the United Nations," the latter based in part on his 2010-2012 exclusive interviews with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, for his 4th Giant of Asia, "Conversations with Ban Ki-Moon." Recently, he accepted the position of Vice President of the Pacific Century Institute, a track-two 'building bridges' nonprofit based in Los Angeles.

Bibliography

Academia

For a span of more than 15 years, ending in August 2008 when he retired from UCLA, Professor Plate taught undergraduate courses in media, ethics and Asian politics and media. He was nominated by his department for a UCLA teaching award, and pioneered courses in the media and politics of Asia. While at UCLA, he founded the campus-based non-profit Asia Pacific Media Center. APMN served as a network for educators, journalists, media professionals, government and business officials concerned with regionally common issues, controversies and opportunities between America and the Pacific Rim. It spawned the online magazines Asia Media and Asia Pacific Arts, the latter now located at the University of Southern California.[7] Professor Plate, a senior fellow at the Center for the Digital Future,[8] now teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he is the Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies and founder and editor-in-chief of Asia Media International, the successor to Asia Media at UCLA. It can be found at asiamedia.lmu.edu.

APMN’s other site - pacificperspectives.blogspot.com – is produced by APMN’s Pacific Perspectives Media Center (PPMC), located in Beverly Hills. PPMC highlights major issues regarding Asia-Pacific cooperation and controversy through the published works of major media and academic personalities. It also syndicates Tom Plate’s column on Asia and America, as well as, from time to time, other expert guest commentators.

References

  1. ↑ , Tom Plate, Asia Media.
  2. ↑ , Newsday's Plate to Head Times Editorial Pages.
  3. ↑ Confessions of an American Media Man (Marshall Cavendish, 2007) ISBN 981-261-315-3
  4. ↑ Biography - Plate, Thomas (1944-): An article from: Contemporary Authors (2002)
  5. ↑ The William And Barbara Edwards Media Fellows Program
  6. ↑ American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong
  7. ↑ Asia Media Archives
  8. ↑
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