Kevin Sanders - Director of Special Projects/UN Representative

Sanders' widely republished 1990 article "A Beginner's Guide to the BNL-BCCI Bank Scandal" was chosen by Project Censored as one of the top twenty stories of the year. It was later selected by Utne Reader Magazine as one of the top ten stories of the past ten years. Sanders' cover story for Whole Earth Review, "Age of Transparency" on the political implications of earth observation satellites was later anthologized with essays by William James, John F. Kennedy and Arthur C. Clarke in the book, Securing Our Planet. Sanders has also written for The Nation, Futurist, Current, Horizons, Penthouse, Politiks, and newspapers and journals in USA, Europe, Japan and Australia.

As critic and commentator on ABC TV news in New York he often sparked controversy. Martin Scorcese once threatened to sue Sanders for his review of Taxi Driver. (However Scorcese later cast Sanders as the Duke in the film Age of Innocence.) In 1977 Sanders produced and hosted a widely transcribed and republished one-hour TV discussion on The Year 2000 with Margaret Mead, Herman Khan and William Irwin Thompson. In 1986 Sanders wrote and produced the Peabody nominated Footsteps of Giants, the first documentary for the newly established Fox Network - a one hour 25th anniversary TV special on the first American in space, for which he wrote the US President's introductory speech. The program was praised by the New York Times and is available on Pacific Video

In 1996 Sanders was the only broadcast journalist to cover the entire proceedings of the World Court hearings in the Hague on the legality of nuclear weapons. He later wrote, produced and hosted the Globalvision documentary on the hearings, "The People vs The Bomb: Judgment in the Hague" shown on PBS in New York and on national TV in Canada and Australia. In 1998 at Cambridge University in Britain he was the only journalist to cover the proceedings of The Planetary Interest conference.

Sanders has become increasingly active in NGO broadcast outreach at the United Nations. In 1997 as Chairman of the Earth Society Foundation, founded by Margaret Mead, Sanders hosted the first ever live webcast from the United Nations of the Earth Day Peace Bell Ceremony. At the ceremony Sanders proposed creating a C-Span of the UN - a continuing project. Sanders is now founding director of the World Opinion Forum, an enterprise initiated by UN NGOs, War & Peace Foundation, the World Federalists - founded by Albert Einstein - and the UN Earth Day Peace Bell Ceremony co-founded by Margaret Mead. At the UN in 2003 Sanders produced and hosted the first day-long World Opinion Forum international webcast on World Opinion: A New Superpower? with a keynote address by Denis Kucinich. Later Sanders hosted a follow-up day-long conference on The Future of the UN at Seton Hall University with a keynote address from Walter Cronkite.
As UN media representative for the London-based Oneworld Radio network of more than a thousand radio stations, Sanders provided a daily program, World Opinion to review international editorial commentary.

World Opinion Forum provides continuing coverage of nuclear disarmament including the celebration on UN Earth Day 2020 of the anticipated abolition of nuclear weapons as called for by Mayors for Peace, World Parliamentarians and the European Parliament.
Then (or whenever the world finally abolishes nuclear weapons) at the moment of Spring Equinox - when we ring the Peace Bell at the UN as we have for 40 years - a radio telescope in Australia will beam the first message to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri only 4 light-years away.

Last Updated Saturday, June 19 2010 @ 02:17 PM EDT