Alvin Snyder
Senior Fellow
Author and Former Executive of USIA
 
Snyder began his career in broadcasting as a desk assistant at CBS News in New York. He was later put on the staff and for the next several years he worked with two of the top editors at CBS News, Ed Bliss and John Merriman.

Eventually Snyder became a news editor, then an executive news editor of CBS News and executive producer. During his 11 years at CBS, he was also the executive news producer for WCBS-TV, New York, the flagship station of the CBS TV Network.

Snyder won a Grammy in 1966, together with CBS News President Fred W. Friendly and Sheldon Hoffman, for their work on the now classic two-volume Columbia Records album, "Edward R. Murrow: A Reporter Remembers - the War Years."

Working directly with Herb Klein, the director of the newly-minted White House Office of Communications, Snyder supervised the placement of White House and Executive Branch spokespersons on national and local TV and radio news and public affairs broadcasts during the Nixon administration. He also served on White House task forces to determine White House recommendations on the growth of cable television, and public television.

Snyder went on to become Special Assistant to the President, visiting more than 20 countries as a member of the Presidential advance team that set up the various aspects of the President's trips abroad and within the U.S. He was a member of the official U.S. diplomatic delegation at meetings with host country representatives to coordinate media coverage of the President.

In Washington, Snyder was the White House press office liaison with the network TV news bureaus on coverage of the President's Oval Office addresses to the nation.

After working at the White House, Snyder became a TV producer at the U.S. Information Agency. He also served as executive producer of an international Bicentennial TV broadcast carried in multiple languages by television networks abroad.

Next he went to the Mid-West for 6 years, as executive news producer of the NBC network's owned-and-operated TV station in Chicago, WMAQ-TV, and as news director of WLWT-TV, Cincinnati. Snyder returned to the U.S. Information Agency in 1982 as the Director of the TV and Film Service.

At the USIA he headed a worldwide organization involved in news and information TV and film production, program acquisition and satellite delivery systems. The worldwide interactive television network, Worldnet, which was inaugurated in 1983, was called by the Washington Post "The Jewel in the Crown" of President Reagan's international public diplomacy efforts.

Snyder is the author of "Warriors of Disinformation,” which he wrote as a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program in Communication Policy Studies.

Snyder is a member of the Authors Guild, the Writers Guild of America, The National Press Club, the Federal City Club, and the Radio-TV News Directors Association.