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Edward Schumacher-Matos
Columnist & Global Affairs Expert
Edward Schumacher-Matos
Columnist & Global Affairs Expert
Biography
Edward Schumacher-Matos is the Ombudsman of NPR and the James Madison Visiting Professor at Columbia Journalism School. He also is a member of the Harvard University Population and Development Center, where he helps direct its migration studies program.
Prof. Schumacher-Matos has had a distinguished and unique career as an academic and a journalist. He has been a weekly columnist for The Washington Post, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Americas, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He also founded the Rumbochain of Spanish-language daily newspapers in Texas—in Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and the Rio Grande Valley.
His Washington Post column focused on immigration, Latino and Latin American issues, longtime pursuits of Prof. Schumacher-Matos. He wrote the column while at Harvard for nearly four years. There, he was the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies at the Kennedy School of Government; a Shorenstein Fellow on the Press, Politics and Public Policy; and director of the Migration and Integration Studies Program at the Population Center.
Respect for his sense of fairness, ethics, and professionalism is such that he was asked this summer by NPR to be its Ombudsman. By contract, he has total independence in that role and investigates public and political complaints about standards or bias in any of its coverage. The goal is to maintain both public trust and NPR’s high journalistic standards. He publishes all his findings, as well as is interviewed frequently on the radio.
Prof. Schumacher-Matos is a board member of IE University Graduate School of Business in Madrid and the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California. He also is active in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, and the Inter American Press Association.
He has written for Foreign Affairs and other magazines, edited a book on US-Spain relations, published chapters in many books, and appeared frequently on television. He was a Fulbright fellow in Japan and a Binational Commission fellow in Spain. He holds a BA from Vanderbilt University and an MA from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He emigrated from Colombia as a child and is a US Army veteran of the Vietnam War, in which he served as a lieutenant on a province advisory team.
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