Martin Fletcher

MONMOUTH, Ill. — Emmy Award-winning journalist Martin Fletcher of NBC News will deliver Monmouth College’s 2006 commencement address on May 14.

Based in Israel for the past 25 years, Fletcher has served as NBC’s Tel Aviv bureau chief and correspondent since 1990. He has recently reported extensively on the political emergence of the radical Islamic Hamas movement following the Palestinian elections in January.

Throughout his distinguished career, Fletcher has often been first on the scene to cover important historic events. During the 1979 Teheran hostage crisis, he entered the American Embassy, was arrested and had some of his tapes confiscated. He reported from China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre and was also present in Berlin when the walls came down.

When NATO and American troops were hunting for General Aidid, the Somali warlord responsible for killing 18 American soldiers, Fletcher was the only person to find and interview him for NBC Nightly News. He also was the first correspondent to enter Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

A native of London, Fletcher graduated from the University of Bradford in Yorkshire. He worked as a French and German interpreter for the Common market, before beginning his news career in 1970 as a writer for VisNews. After a stint with the BBC, he returned to VisNews in 1973 and began a two-year assignment in Israel at the beginning of the October War.

Fletcher, who will be presented with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree at the ceremony, received his first Emmy in 1988 for his reporting on the Palestinian intifada, the second in 1994 for his coverage of Rwanda and the third in 1999 for his Kosovo coverage. In 2002 he won a fourth Emmy, the prestigious DuPont Award, for coverage of the Palestinian uprising.

The commencement exercises will be held on the college’s Wallace Hall Plaza. The public is invited.

Released by the Office of College Communications
Barry McNamara, Associate Director of College Communications
Phone: 309-457-2117
Fax: 309-457-2330