User:ScienceExplains/sandbox/LauriLebo

Lauri Lebo
Lauri Lebo
Born	March 18, 1964; Newberrytown, Pennsylvania
Occupations	Teacher’s union spokeswoman, ACLU-PA BOD, Author, journalist
Notable credit(s)	Coverage of Kitzmiller v. Dover; The Devil in Dover; Murder case in 1969 York race riot
Spouse	Jefferson Pepper

Lauri Lebo is a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania State Education association^[1], Secretary of the ACLU-Pennsylvania Board of Directors,^[2] author, former radio station co-owner^[3], disc jockey, and reporter from York County, Pennsylvania. Lebo was the principal local reporter covering Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2004 and 2005, and was featured prominently in the Nova documentary Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial both because of her coverage and because her father, Shiremanstown Mayor Dean Lebo, who co-owned Christian radio station WWII-AM (broadcasting to Harrisburg), sided with the Dover school board in the controversy.^[4]

An award winning journalist for over 20 years,^[5] including helping to re-open murder cases from the 1969 York Race Riot,^[6] Lebo left reporting to write The Devil in Dover, a book about the trial of the intelligent design movement and its effects on Dover.^[7]

Early Life

Lauri was the oldest of Dean and Ann Lebo’s five children.^[8] Lauri Lebo attended Sunday school weekly and sang in the church choir. She believed the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, and Jesus’ sacrifice. Her mother taught her to enjoy life. Her father taught her about possibilities. As she grew older, she drifted away from the church.^[9]

Her father’s conversion to the Pentacostal faith began in 1987, when Lauri Lebo was about 23, when the father who had taught her about the distance of the stars and whom she loved dearly became “... a fundamentalist, speaking-in-tongues, slain-in-the-spirit, beware-the-mark-of-the-beast, faith-healing Christian...”)^[10]^[11]

Lebo said her York County male elementary school classmates used to beat her up because of her “big mouth.”^[12]

Inspired by her friend's journalist father, Ed Jensen, who included his daughter’s friends in his “clever” news-related conversations, Lebo was deciding to become a journalist.^[13]

When she was 15, her family evacuated^[14] their home due to the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown just across the Susquehanna River from Newberrytown, less than 5 miles from her home at the time.^[15]

Journalism/Authorship Career

Ed Jensen stayed in the area to report when Three Mile Island had its partial nuclear meltdown. Jensen died three years later of cancer, and Lebo “understood what it means to be a reporter," and become one in 1985.^[16]

In 2000, her first big story covered the 1969 York, PA race riot.^[17] Based on a series of articles for the 30th anniversary of the riots by Lebo and others at the York Daily Record/Sunday news, the York County District Attorney and Deputy Prosecutor each reopened investigations.^[18]^[19]

Journalism related to the Dover trial

In 2004, the York Daily Record assigned their Education Reporter, the then-Christian Lebo, to cover Kitzmiller v. Dover, which she called “the most amazing story I've ever covered in my life.”

Lebo sat through every day of testimony.^[20] “As a reporter who doesn't come from a scientific background,” she was amazed daily that she was getting paid to “learn about evolution and the scientific method.”^[21] The plaintiffs presented “The biology class you wish you could have taken”,^[22] as Lebo quoted Margaret Talbot. “Every day we'd... learn something else incredible about... the fossil record, about the Avida program, which is a software program that actually shows evolution.”^[23] Lebo had thought she could see the “hand of the Divine” when Intelligent Design was first described to her. She had been looking forward to hearing scientific arguments for the Christian god. Instead, she heard the primary scientist for the defense, biochemist Michael Behe, admit that astrology is as much a science as Intelligent Design is.^[24]

During her December 2015 interview with Freedom From Religion’s Freethought Radio podcast, Lebo compared the pressure that Dover teachers felt to teach Creationism in biology class on the one hand, to the pressure she received from her employer to "write something nice" about Creationism on the other.^[25] Although it relented after several months, the York Daily Record threatened Lebo with dismissal if she spoke at “Evolution 2006”, put on by the Stony Brook University’s Department of Ecology and Evolution. The York Daily Record also strongly opposed Lebo’s request for time off to write her book on the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, claiming this would offend their conservative Christian readers. So Lebo quit her job as reporter and wrote The Devil in Dover.^[26]

Afterwards, Lebo became a reporter for Religion Dispatches.^[27]

Lebo was one of three panel judges for the 2016 Heywood Broun (journalism) Award.^[28]

Journalism philosophy

Since the Dover trial, Ms. Lebo has subscribed to Walter Williams’ Journalist’s Creed, the words of which “remain one of the strongest summations of the guiding principles of our craft”^[29] and the Walter Lippman philosophy of “objectivity of method”^[30], rather than the pretense that journalists have no opinions.^[31] “If one side is a lie” and the reporter treats it as equal to the other side, that reporter performs a disservice.^[32] She also asserted that media consolidation threatens a journalist's “depth and breadth of knowledge (of her/his sources and community) and does a disservice to democracy.”^[33]

Journalism awards

Freedom From Religion 39th National Convention 2016 Freethought Heroine
Studs and Ida Terkel Fund prizewinner for The Devil in Dover (Initial prizewinner)
27th Annual Schnaeder Print Media Awards (2006) 1st Place Beat Coverage: Daily Newspapers Under 49,000 Circ. for her coverage of intelligent design
To the York Daily Record and York Dispatch/Sunday News (Lebo reported for both, including articles on the York race riots) National Journalism Award for Public Service Reporting - Under 100,000 circulation for coverage of the York race riot.

Selected Articles

Religion Dispatch articles, 15 pages of links 2010-05-17 to 2011-07-10
The Scopes Strategy: Creationists Try New Tactics to Promote Anti-Evolutionary Teaching in Public Schools 2011-02-28
Unregulated Capitalism and Christian Fervor 2009-10-13
No News Is Bad News 2009-04-01
‘Academic Freedom’ is Creationism 2009-02-20
Intelligent Design Propaganda Is Coming to a Theater Near You 2008-04-28
Was Guillermo Gonzalez “Expelled”? Intelligent Design and Tenure at Iowa State University 2008-04-23

Current Career /Activism

Lauri Lebo has served as the Southern Region Advocacy Coordinator for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, a chapter of the National Education Association. She has also served as a spokeswoman.

She also serves as the Secretary for the ACLU-PA Board of Directors. She won the ACLU-PA 2012 Best published letter to the editor on a civil liberties-related issue (voter ID)

Lebo is a scheduled speaker at the [Freedom From Religion Foundation’s 39th Annual Convention].

References

External links

Category:1964 births Category:Living people Category:American women journalists

This article about an American journalist born in the 1960s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information.

[1] PA State Education Association Spokeswoman

[2] ACLU-PA BOD Secretary

[3] The Devil in Dover p206

[4] Nova Audio:Lauri Lebo - Caught in a Culture War

[5] The New Press-The Devil in Dover

[6] 1969 York race riot case reopens

[7] Townsend, Tim (May–June 2008). "Love Thy Neighbor". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 2008-06-10.

[8] Dean Lebo obituary

[9] The Devil in Dover, childhood, pp.105-106

[10] The Devil in Dover, childhood, p.105

[11] On her father’s position re: Dover @51:36

[12] Schoolyard beatings for Lebo's big mouth 44:25

[13] The Devil in Dover, Prologue

[14] Freethought Radio 2009 Interview

[15] Lebo lived close to Three Mile Island

[16] The Devil in Dover, Prologue

[17] Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism biography of Lauri Lebo

[18] York race riot murder investigations reopen

[19] 1969 York, PA race riot

[20] Judgment Day, including transcript

[21] Freethought Radio interview of Lebo

[22] New Yorker: ‘Darwin in the Dock’ and the biology class you wish you could have taken

[23] Nova: Caught in the Culture Wars, with transcript

[24] Kitzmiller v. Dover trial transcript

[25] Radio interview of Lebo

[26] Lebo quit the York Daily record to write her book @3:12

[27] Lauri Lebo’s articles for Religion Dispatches

[28] Judge, 2016 Heywood Broun Award

[29] The Devil in Dover p158,

[30] American Press Institute on journalists’ objectivity

[31] “The Devil in Dover and elsewhere: the personal side of the Creationism controversy” on objectivity @56:30

[32] Lauri Lebo - From Dover to DNA

[33] FCC Faces Public at Third Official Hearing on Media Consolidation

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