Looking Back on the First Year as Chair

For Internews board chair Markos Kounalakis, it all started with an accordion. As a child visiting Greece during the junta rule of the late 60s, he was in a backyard one day playing a song he knew on the accordion.

Suddenly his relatives came running out to tell him to stop playing or someone might call the police.

Board Chair Markos Kounalakis

“It turns out it was a Cretan revolutionary song from the days of the Ottoman occupation,” he said in a recent interview. “It had been outlawed by the junta because it called for an uprising. It was inconceivable to me that any authority could limit your freedom of expression. So that was my first exposure to censorship.”

That early experience began Kounalakis’ lifelong involvement with media and communications, through a career as a foreign correspondent, a corporate communications strategist, and a book author.

Kounalakis, 47, is now president and publisher of the Washington Monthly, a political magazine. He is also Vice-President of Sacramento-based AKT Development.

As chairman of the board of Internews Network, Kounalakis has made his mark. He was instrumental in catalyzing the June 2003 Athens conference on media in Iraq that Internews organized (see story on the conference). Kounalakis used his personal contacts and resources to get the Greek government to sponsor this first multinational reconstruction effort for Iraq.

Looking back on his first year as chair, Kounalakis said, “It’s been a real privilege and I love it.”