Prof K research & writing

Prof. William (Bill) Kovarik, PhD, is an historian and professor at Radford University.  His work is located at the intersections of media history, media technology, media law and science & environmental communication.

 Prof. Kovarik has served for more than three decades as a professor at Radford University, a public university that was once part of Virginia Tech. He has also served as an instructor at the University of Maryland and the University of South Carolina; as a visiting professor at  Virginia Tech, the University of Western Ontario in London, and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia;  and as a professor at Unity College in Maine.  He was also on the faculty of the Virginia Governor’s School for the Humanities in 2023.  

Prof. Kovarik has worked with wire services,  daily newspapers, national news magazines and the environmental press, among others, including (specifically),  the Associated Press, the Baltimore Sun, the Charleston SC Post-Courier, columnist Jack Anderson,  the New York Times, Time Magazine and Time-Life Books.  He has  also served as editor of Energy Resources and Technology, Latin American Energy Report, Appropriate Technology, and Appalachian Voice.

Prof. Kovarik is a journalism alumni of VCU in Richmond, Virginia. He also studied history of media, environment and international development at the University of South Carolina, earning an M.A. in 1983, and the University of Maryland, earning a PhD in 1993.  His dissertation involved research into the  media coverage of a preventable environmental disaster (Ethyl leaded gasoline) and the use of media history to uncover previously inaccessible and unknown events in environmental history.

Prof. Kovarik has also studied international comparative media law as a post-doctoral fellow at the Oxford PCMLP Summer Institute. 

Prof. Kovarik’s books include:  “The Forbidden Fuel” (1982,  republished 2010) with Hal Bernton and Scott Sklar), The Ethyl Controversy (1993); “Mass Media and Environmental Conflict” (1996, with Mark Neuzil, Sage); “Web Design for the Mass Media” (2001, Pearson) and “Revolutions in Communication” (2011, 2016, Bloomsbury, with a 3rd edition in press for 2024).

Prof. Kovarik was elected as an academic representative on the board of directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists and also served on the board of  Appalachian Voices and the academic advisory board for the Virginia Center for Investigative  Journalism. He was named among the leading pioneers of environmental journalism by Environmental Health News in 2021 and is an environmental historian on a United Nations Foundation expert panel.

prof. Kovarik’s books & projects 

The Forbidden Fuel: A History of Power Alcohol Mass Media and Environmental Conflict (1997) Web Design for Mass Media (out of print) Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital AgeBrilliant! A history of renewable energy FirstAmend.book.cover2ndEd

Publications & PRESENTATIONS  (2009-2021)

Major research projects

     Media history research

  • “International Environmental Journalism,” (noted above)
  • “Civil rights and the press,”  web feature for Revolutions in Communication, 3rd edition under development for Bloomsbury.
  • “Life in the old print shop,” feature section from Revolutions in Communication, 2017.  Subject of guest lectures via skype at NYU, Ball State and other history classes using Revolutions in Communication as a textbook.
  • “The Industrial printing revolution,”  feature section from Revolutions in Communication, 2015.
  • “E.W. Scripps and science: The unconventional ideas behind the founding of the science service and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography,” feature section from Revolutions in Communication, 2015.
  • “Street Press of the Velvet Revolution,”  feature section from Revolutions in Communication, 2016.
  • The confluence of newspapers and the environment in the early 20th century.  Looking at the news coverage of selected public health and conservation issues in the 1899 – 1932 period, we see a striking bipolar distribution, indicating a revival of Progressive era concerns late in the 1920s and the ubiquity of environmental controversy. This is a paper from the 1998 conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.
  • Exploring the Lost History of Environmental Conflict Before Silent Spring. Presentation to the Communication Studies Seminar Series Virginia Tech September 25, 1998.
  • Environmental History Timeline helps remind us of the traditions of reform and the roots of conservation. This was originally a guide for our use when Mark Neuzil and I wrote Mass Media and Environmental Conflict in 1996. Since then it has taken on a life of its own on the web.
  • The editor who tried to stop the Civil War: Hezekiah Niles and the New South describes the efforts of one Baltimore editor to reconcile opposing views in the 1820 – 1833 period. He clearly foresaw civil war and proposed a course of economic development for the South which was, perhaps not surprisingly, adopted after the war by Southern progressives, including Atlanta editor Henry Grady. The paper was published in American Journalism in 1992 and has been slightly updated since then.
  • Niles Weekly Register Encyclopedia of Journalism History, 2006 — Niles’ concept of news embraced the broadest scope of human experience. His Register kept close track of economics, technology, science, medicine, geography, archaeology, the weather, and many stories of human interest. There was, for example, a dog who rescued another dog from a river. There was the case of a blind woman restored to sight, and another of a slave who killed himself rather than be sold at the slave market. Niles printed many items about ballooning and predicted that someday man would build machines to fly (although he doubted that steam engines could propel them).

  • Photo courtesy Rex Wyler.

    Greenpeace Entry in the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, 2009 — Greenpeace raised street theater and protest tactics to a new level using global media. The effect, according to Greenpeace co-founder Robert Hunter, was a “mind bomb” – that is, an action that would create a dramatic new impression to replace an old cliché.  The most obvious example of a  “mind bomb” was to overturn the image of heroic whalers to that of heroic ecologists risking their lives to save the gentle giants of the sea.  This approach caught the world’s attention and dramatically changed the political terrain for commercial fishing and whaling operations after Greenpeace’s first whaling protests in June of 1975.

  • Environmental Sourcebook, Center for Foreign Journalists, Scientists Institute for Public  Information, Society of Environmental Journalists, 1992-94
  • The Ethyl Controversy, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of, 1993. (pdf)   After 17 refinery workers went barking mad from lead poisoning, public health officials demanded answers from Standard Oil and General Motors. They claimed there were no alternatives, although they had patented several dozen. Two scientists —  Alice Hamilton of Harvard and Yendell Henderson of Yale — stood up to the industry, demanding that the government take precautions, but they were unable to keep the profitable poison off the market.  (It was finally banned in the US in the late 1970s). Although industry blamed the media for highly sensational accounts of the disaster, a closer look shows that science writers of the 1920s were able to perform their basic responsibility under democratic theory, which was to uncover facts and present a variety of opinions. What they were not able to do was fathom the technological complexities at the base of the controversy. 
  • A Survey of Central American News Media Hardware, Intercommunication and Development needs: Paper presented to the Eighth Annual Conference on Intercultural and International Communication, Miami, Fla. Feb. 22, 1991. These are the results of a study by the International Center for Foreign Journalists concerning media technology needs in Central America.
  • Dr North and the Kansas City Milk War: Public Health Advocacy Collides with Main Street Respectability, Paper to The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC) 1989. This is about a New York physician and public health expert who used yellow journalism tactics to force pasteurization on the milk industry of Kansas city in the 1920s.

    ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY Research 

Professional service

  • Society of Environmental Journalists — Board of Directors 2004 – 2010;  Conference Chair, Roanoke, 2008, hosted by Virginia Tech; Also tour leader, panel chair, educational coordinator;  Pittsburgh coal history tour leader, Oct. 2018; New Orleans day-long workshop leader, Sept. 2013, Chemicals in the environment; Lubbock Texas, October 2012, Reporting wind power tour, book publishing panels; Chattanooga, TN: October 2013, citizen science panel; New Orleans, La: chemical disaster workshop panel; many others. Also see Education for Environmental Journalism, SEJ web site. 
  • Speaker for:   First Amendment rally, Floyd Ec0-village, Feb. 2017;  “Art, identity and media in Appalachia,” presentation to the Grayson County Land Care group, June 20, 2016;
    History of Renewable Energy, Unity College, 2015;  American Chemical Society conference, Pittsburgh PA, October, 2012 panel on the media and Rachel Carson; Elderstudy, “Radio Time Machine,” 2011. Many others.
  • Guest instructor, Hollins University Writers Conference:  2012, 2013, 2014, on technology and writing; 2016 on Writing in the Gothic South;       and 2019 on communications technology and community media.
  • Book production for “Head of Lettuce,” “Blood on the Horns,” and other books.   Cover Design  and other production work for Glen Martin’s Global Democracy and Human Self-Transcendence: The Power of the Future for Planetary Transformation, Cambridge Scholars, 2018.

Interviews & Citations,  2001-2021

“The oil industry was born with the silver spoon of subsidy firmly wedged between its little teeth. It was not born in the spirit of free competition that they like to tell you about all the time. So energy is really political, and it was always political from the very beginning…” — Prof. K, From Freedom Fuels, starring Daryl Hannah, Willie Nelson, John Stewart, Homer Simpson, Woody Harrelson and Prof. Kovarik.