Fred Barbash

Lecturer in Journalism

Departments/Programs

Journalism

Degrees

University of Hawaii-Manoa, M.S.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, B.A.

Expertise

Journalism

Profile

Fred Barbash is a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post with four decades of experience in traditional and digital journalism. He has covered or supervised coverage of local, national, foreign and financial news, with a speciality in legal issues. He has served as The Post’s Supreme Court correspondent, legal reporter, National Editor and London Bureau chief, among many other jobs, and has written widely on Constitutional history, including a book on the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

He began his career as an investigative reporter, exposing corruption at the highest levels of Maryland government. Later, he covered, among other things, the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana; the confirmation hearings of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Clarence Thomas; numerous landmark Supreme Court rulings; the breakup of the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana; the rise of Tony Blair in Britain; the conflict and peace process in Northern Ireland; nuclear leakage from Russian submarines in Murmansk; the the legal battles waged by the Trump administration on immigration, the census and the environment.

As an editor, Fred helped supervise coverage of several presidential campaigns, the Challenger shuttle disaster, and the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He left The Post in 2006 to teach for two years at the Medill journalism school where he taught graduate students how to bring life to coverage of public policy issues. He was an editor at Politico during its early days, managing editor of CQ Weekly Magazine and White House/Congress editor at Reuters.

In 2013, he was recruited back to The Post by Martin Baron to conceive, create and manage a team that worked through the night to dramatically expand The Post’s digital global audience through engaging narratives and rapid breaking news coverage.

Fred was known at The Post for spotting and recruiting exceptional young talent, among them many ex-interns.

Fred began his career as an intern, convincing the Baltimore Sun to take him on in its New Delhi bureau. The Sun then hired him as a reporter.

Fred is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and was a fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, specializing in South Asian politics and languages.

Courses Taught

JOUR

89a

Contemporary Media: Internship and Analysis