Tom Plate

Tom Plate writes about America’s relationship with the Pacific Rim and travels frequently to Asia. Over the last dozen-plus years, Prof. Plate’s columns have appeared and continue to appear in many world papers, including The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, The Straits Times in Singapore, The Khaleej Times (Dubai, United Arab Emirates), The Japan Times in Tokyo, The Korea Times in South Korea, The Jakarta Post (Indonesia), The Seattle Times, The Providence Journal and some mid-sized and small U.S papers. The collective circulation of these core newspapers is easily in the millions.

Between 1994-2008, Prof. Plate taught, full-time, undergraduate courses in media, ethics and Asian politics at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He was nominated by his department for a teaching award and offered consecutive, three-year, tenure-like teaching contracts by Social Sciences and Policy Studies. He has lectured at Princeton, at UCLA’s Anderson School, the East- West Center at the University of Hawaii, California Polytechnic State University at Pomona, The Getty Museum and Trust in Los Angeles, the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii and at universities in Asia, including the LKY School of Public Policy in Singapore, Kyoto University in Japan, and Melbourne University in Australia. He is currently working on a trilogy of book profiles, titled “Giants of Asia” (Lee Kuan Yew, Mohamad Mahathir and Ban Ki-moon).

In the late nineties, he founded the non-profit Asia Pacific Media Network, then headquartered at UCLA. Now called AsiaMedia, it is an international network for educators, journalists and media professionals, government and business officials concerned with regionally common issues, controversies and opportunities. He also founded the Pacific Perspectives Media Center – a new non-profit organization.

He is a graduate of Amherst College (political science – Phi Beta Kappa) and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he earned his master’s degree in public and international affairs. He is the author of six books – in 2007, the most recent published: “Confessions of an American Media Man” (Marshall Cavendish). He has been a staff editor or writer at Time, Newsday, New York Magazine, CBS and The Daily Mail of London, where he served as guest American editor. From 1989-1995 he was Editor of the Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times. He has been honored with major journalism awards, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors Deadline Writing Award, the Greater Los Angeles Press Club Award for “Best Editorial” (three years in a row) and the California Newspaper Publishers Award (three times). He has been a Media Fellow at Stanford University and a fellow in Tokyo at the Japanese Foreign Press Center’s annual Asia-Pacific Media Conference. He is listed in Who’s Who in America and for years had been a participant at the \ annual retreat of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He resides in Beverly Hills with his wife Andrea, a licensed clinical social worker, and their four cats. She has two master’s degrees; the cats have no higher-education degrees --- but they do have pedigrees.