Markos Kounalakis
 | This article has no links to other Wikipedia articles. (April 2008) |
 | Template:Wikify is deprecated. Please use a more specific cleanup template as listed in the documentation. |
Markos Kounalakis is an American journalist and author. Kounalakis is the current president and publisher of The Washington Monthly, a magazine founded by Charles Peters in 1969 Kounalakis co-anchors the nationally syndicated weekly political program, Washington Monthly on the Radio[1]. He publishes under his original family name, thus avoiding long bylines caused by his official name change to Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis, after his marriage to Eleni Tsakopoulos in Istanbul in 2000.
Kounalakis worked as a foreign correspondent for NBC Radio and Mutual News in the USSR, based in Moscow from 1991-1992. He previously reported for Newsweek on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Albania. Newsweek also sent him to cover the early phase of the Yugoslav civil war. He went to Afghanistan and covered the “Holy War Without End” for The Los Angeles Times Magazine.
In 2002, The New York Times called him a “White Knight” for saving the venerable Washington Monthly magazine [2]. Publisher Kounalakis and Editor Paul Glastris have since rejuvenated the magazine, grown its readership, and increased its impact – making it a “progressive must-read” in Washington, DC, according to James Carville. Its expose of former education secretary William Bennett’s gambling problem brought early attention to the Kounalakis/Glastris team [3]. The magazine is currently in merger talks with Common Cause, where Kounalakis is a member of the National Governing Board [4].
Born in San Francisco to refugee parents from Greece. His father, Antonios, was an underground guerilla fighter against the Nazis on the island of Crete during WWII. He fought with Constantine Mitsotakis, who later became Prime Minister of Greece. Like his father, he was a blue-collar construction worker who maintains his Class A heavy equipment truck drivers license.
Education
Kounalakis received a public education in the San Francisco Bay Area and received his Bachelor's degree in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. He received his MSc in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, was a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow in Europe (1988-1989), and an International Journalism Graduate Fellow at the University of Southern California (1995-1996).
Service
Kounalakis serves on the Board of Visitors at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism; Board of Advisors at Georgetown College and the Wilson Council at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS). He is the Vice Chairman of the Board of Advisors at the Southeast Europe Project at WWICS; he is a trustee of the World Affairs Council of Northern California: and formerly served as Chairman of Internews Network 2002-2004; Vice Chairman of the California State World Trade Commission 2001-2003; Board of Trustees of the Western Policy Center 2001-2005. In June 2003, he chaired a multinational reconstruction conference in Athens, Greece where Iraq's media laws were drafted.
Film Production
“The War Prayer” [12]
In May 2007, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Leah Garchik [5] reported, “Sixteen years ago in the library of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, NBC war correspondent Markos Kounalakis, came across Mark Twain's poem The War Prayer. Twain had written it just after the turn of the 20th century to protest war and American imperialism; it was first published in Harpers Monthly in 1916. The prayer is about a populace seeking God's help in achieving victory in war.
“Today, in time for Memorial Day weekend, Washington Monthly president Kounalakis is releasing a 14-minute animated film based on the poem, on YouTube. He produced the film for $8,000. Everyone who pitched in on this project, including narrator Peter Coyote and Lawrence Ferlinghetti playing the minister, and graphic designer Akis Dimitrakopoulos, donated their efforts.” [6]
Books
He is the author of the book Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton (1993) [7] and co-author of Beyond Spin: The Power of Strategic Corporate Journalism (1999) [8] . He is the co-author of Hope is a Tattered Flag: Voices of Reason and Change for the Post-Bush Era (June 2008) [9].
Chairs
Kounalakis and his wife, Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis, have established two chairs in politics and democracy at Georgetown University [10] and Stanford University [11]
References
 | This article has not been added to any content categories. Please help out by adding categories to it so that it can be listed with similar articles. (April 2008) |