Dr. Thomas E. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In October 2013, he wrote the book Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism. His earlier book, The Vanishing Voter, examines the reasons for and effects of voting, and his book on the political function of the media, Out of Order, won the Graber Award from the American Political Science Association for being the best book on political communication during the previous ten years. The American Association for Public Opinion Research named his first book, The Unseeing Eye, as one of the top 50 public opinion books of the last 50 years.
He is also the author of We the People, an introduction to the American government and the award-winning Mass Media Election. His articles have been published in the popular press, Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and other scholarly journals.
The Ford, Markle, Smith-Richardson, Pew, Knight, Carnegie, and National Science foundations have all supported his research. In 1971, Patterson graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
