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Dr.

William Franklin Baker

Educational Broadcasting Corporation
Company executive (broadcasting)
Area
Leadership, Policy, and Communications
Specialty
Journalism, Media, and Communications
Elected
2005
Dr. Baker directs the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy & Education at the Graduate School of Education at Fordham University. He is also the Distinguished Professor of media & entertainment at IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain, and President Emeritus of WNET-Thirteen, New York's public television station. Baker taught the first business class at the Juilliard School in NY. He hosted and produced a podcast for Religion News Service called Beliefs. During his 21-year tenure as president of WNET in New York, America's flagship public broadcaster, Baker fortified its existence with the development of one of the first — and then largest — endowments in the history of public broadcasting, and presided over its heyday as the pre-eminent producer of arts, nature, biography, and public affairs programming in the nation. As a commercial broadcaster, Baker helped start many cable networks, helped launch Oprah Winfrey as a talk show host, and was involved in the early stages of launching the Discovery Channel and the Disney Channel. He was president of Westinghouse Television and Chairman of Group W Satellite Communication for a decade. Baker has received seven Emmy Awards and two Columbia DuPont Journalism Awards. He was also honored in 2016 by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for his work in the performing arts. He is the executive producer of the theatrical films and PBS documentaries The Face: Jesus in Art and Picturing Mary. Baker is Executive Producer of the film SACRED, released worldwide in theaters and festivals in 2017. He is co-author of the book Leading with Kindness (American Management Association, 2008) and hosted the series of the same name on public television. Baker is also the co-author of Every Leader is an Artist (McGraw-Hill, 2012) and Down the Tube: An Insider's Account of the Failure of American Television (Basic Books, 1998). He co-authored The World's Your Stage (Amacom, 2016) for performing artists, along with three other books. His newest book, with Michael O'Malley, Ph.D., is Organizations for Humans (Stanford University Press, 2019). Baker holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Communications Sciences and Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University, is the recipient of ten honorary doctorates, and is a Fellow of the Çï¿ûÊÓÆµ. He was chairman of the National Park Service Advisory Board. His interests include astronomy, horology, and polar science, and he is believed to be the eighth person in history to have stood on both the North and South Poles. Summers, he's a lighthouse keeper at Henry Island, Canada.
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