Schudson grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in sociology. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1980 and the University of California, San Diego from 1980 to 2009. From 2006 to 2009, he was on the faculty of both University of California, San Diego and Columbia. He has been working full-time at Columbia since 2009. Schudson has received major awards such as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a residential fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a MacArthur "genius" fellowship. On being named a MacArthur Fellow in 1990, the foundation identified him as "an interpreter of public culture and of collective or civic memory". He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen in 2014.
Work
Schudson is the author of seven books and editor of three others concerning the history and sociology of American journalism, the history of United States citizenship and political participation, advertising, popular culture, book publishing, and cultural memory. His books, Discovering the News, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, The Sociology of News, and Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press all have been published in Chinese translation. His other works include Watergate in American Memory ; The Power of News, Reading the News, co-edited with Robert K. Manoff; Rethinking Popular Culture, co-edited with Chandra Mukerji; and The Enduring Book, co-edited with David Paul Nord and Joan Shelley Rubin. His books are reviewed in both specialized and general publications. The Journal of American History judged The Good Citizen to be "relevant, imaginative, and determined to face facts" and The Economist urged all Americans to read it. Times Higher Education called Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press "eloquent and wise". Schudson publishes in both academic and general-interest journals. In the Winter 2019 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review he authored a history of "trust" issues related to journalistic reporting in the United States, a historical review of such issues, and the origin of the term, "the media", that is entitled, The Fall, Rise, and Fall of Media Trust. He offered an assessment of whether and how trust may be cultivated by journalists and publishers. Its subtitle is, "There are worse things than being widely disliked". He is co-author, with Leonard Downie Jr., of a report on the future of news, The Reconstruction of American Journalism, that was sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School.
