The Carleton School of Journalism and Communication is excited to host political cartoonist and Member of the Order of Canada Michael de Adder to deliver the 2024 Kesterton Lecture, “How (not) to get cancelled in 2024”.
The annual Kesterton Lecture honours the memory of Wilfred Kesterton – one of Carleton’s original journalism professors – and usually touches on some aspect of Canadian journalism and public affairs.
After his keynote, de Adder will be joined on stage for a conversation moderated by CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed, who will also moderate questions from the floor.
The Kesterton Lecture is free to attend and open to the public, but registration is required for in-person attendance. The lecture will also be livestreamed via YouTube. All in-person attendees are invited to a reception to meet Michael de Adder following the lecture.
Carleton Journalism would like to thank CBC Ideas for their support of the 2024 Kesterton Lecture.
The School of Journalism and Communication is pleased to announce that The Honourable Wab Kinew, Premier of Manitoba, will deliver the 2024 Kesterton Lecture at the Carleton Dominion Chalmers Centre in downtown Ottawa.
Michael de Adder – Keynote Speaker
MICHAEL DE ADDER CM is based in Halifax and was, until very recently, a political cartoonist for The Washington Post, best known for his wicked skewering of former president Donald Trump. De Adder’s relationship with The Post ended in January. (That’s part of the story). His work continues to appear in The Toronto Star, The Hill Times and the Halifax Chronicle Herald. And he recently joined Substack, where his work has shifted into comic strips.
de Adder was born in Moncton, New Brunswick. He studied art at Mount Allison University where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in drawing and painting. He began his career working for The Coast, a Halifax-based alternative weekly, drawing a popular comic strip called Walterworld which lampooned the then-current mayor of Halifax, Walter Fitzgerald. This led to freelance jobs at The Chronicle-Herald and The Hill Times in Ottawa.
After freelancing for a few years, de Adder landed his first full time cartooning job at the Halifax Daily News. After the Daily News folded in 2008, he became the full-time freelance cartoonist at Brunswick News Inc. He was let go for political views expressed through his work including a cartoon depicting then U.S. President Donald Trump playing golf and ignoring the dead bodies of two drowned Mexican migrants, face down in the sand.
de Adder has won numerous awards for his work, including the 2020 National Newspaper Award for Editorial Cartooning, seven Atlantic Journalism Awards plus a Gold Innovation Award for news animation in 2008. He is a past president of the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists and spent 10 years on the board of the Cartoonists Rights Network.
Nahlah Ayed – Moderator
NAHLAH AYED is the host of CBC Radio’s nightly program Ideas. She was born in Winnipeg, to Palestinian parents and she spent part of her childhood in the Middle East. A graduate of Carleton’s Master of Journalism program, she began her career on Parliament Hill with The Canadian Press. In 2002, Ayed joined the CBC and reported from Amman, Baghdad, Beirut and across the region and later spent close to a decade covering world events from London. In 2012 she published her award-winning memoir, A Thousand Farewells.
About Wilfred Kesterton
Wilfred Kesterton was born in Regina in 1914. He was a school teacher when he enlisted in the armed forces and served in England and Holland. As a Second World War veteran, he enrolled in Carleton’s fledgling Journalism school and, in 1949, became one of the earliest graduates of the new Bachelor of Journalism program. He was hired on as a journalism lecturer immediately upon graduation, as the School of Journalism’s second full-time faculty member.
In the next four decades, he would help shape the institution. Until his retirement in 1979, he taught virtually every student who went through our program. Through his writing and research, he also helped define Canadian journalism, as he was one of the first to bring serious scholarly attention to the news media in this country. He specialized in media law and journalism history and published important studies in both areas. Kesterton literally wrote the book on journalism in this country with the 1967 publication of The History of Journalism in Canada.
The Kesterton Lecture, Carleton Journalism’s signature event, was established in 2001 to honour his pioneering contribution to journalism education in this country.
