The Byrd Center presents: 

Constitution Day at the Byrd Center: Defending Freedom in a Digital Age
​with Kathy Kiely

Thursday, September 14 at 7:00 PM
Byrd Center Auditorium 

Constitution Day at the Byrd Center: Defending Freedom in a Digital Age

The Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education is pleased to announce that the 2023 Tom E. Moses Memorial Lecture on the U.S. Constitution will be held on Thursday, September 14, 2023, at 7 PM in the Byrd Center auditorium on the campus of Shepherd University. This year’s address will be by the distinguished journalist and educator Kathy Kiely, Lee Hills Chair in Free Press Studies at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, who will discuss the changing threats to constitutional democracy and how to meet them.

Kathy will discuss how Western democracies have created robust institutional, political, and psychological defenses against the type of tyranny that dominated the last century: tyranny built upon heavy handed terror and censorship. But what if the tyranny we have most to fear in the 21st century is not the 1984 model, but something harder to recognize: a tyranny that’s built not upon terror, but addiction, and not upon deprivation of information, but a surfeit of it?

Kathy Kiely worked for more than four decades as a reporter and editor for regional and national newspapers as well as online and multimedia publications. She has a passion for transparency, free speech, and teaching. She is the Inaugural Press Freedom Fellow for the National Press Club’s nonprofit Journalism Institute. Her reporting and editing career includes stints as Web producer for WAMU-FM, and as an editor for Bill Moyers and for Bloomberg Politics. She covered Congress and national politics for USA TODAY, and headed the Washington bureaus for several newspapers, and was White House correspondent for the New York Daily News. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, a master’s from American University, and was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

Due to limited seating, advance free reservations are required.
​To reserve seats, please RSVP HERE.

The Moses Memorial Lecture is named for the late Tom E. Moses, a longtime civil libertarian, activist, and founder of the Eastern Panhandle branch of the ACLU-WV. The inaugural Moses Lecture was given by Senator Robert C. Byrd in 2005.