Dear FM-L & HCJ-L people,
Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now" will be on campus at 5 p.m., Tuesday,
April 17 to receive a James Aronson Award for Social Justice
Journalism, honoring her distinguished career.
Also in attendance will be four other prizewinners, who have done
powerful work on environmental threats to the world's oceans, the real
identities of Guantánamo detainees, uranium mining polluting Navajo
homelands and the plight of AIDS orphans in Haiti.
Whether your interest is journalistic technique, the social issues
these journalists engage, or their career advice, the evening should
offer a great deal to think about. Digital artists should find the
work of John Sherffius, this year's "Cartoonist with a Conscience,"
engaging. The project on AIDS orphans made extensive use of compelling
photographs, and the photographers will be at the event.
The winners will talk for a while, then be available for Q&A and
one-to-one conversation. With the profound changes occurring in both
global ecology and the media industry, the discussion should be even
more pointed than usual.
You'll find a full press release below. Everyone is welcome; feel free
to bring friends. Refreshments will be served. So come! It's going to
be good!
Peter Parisi
=========================
The James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism
Department of Film & Media Studies
Hunter College
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
2006 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism goes to
broadcaster-columnist Amy Goodman for her distinguished career
investigating injustice
Aronson news awards honor stories on
· Humanity's destructive impact on the world's oceans
· Guantánamo detainees
· Uranium pollution of Navajo homelands and
· AIDS orphans in Haiti
John Sherffius of the Boulder Daily Camera takes "Cartooning with a
Conscience" prize
NEW YORK -- Amy Goodman's distinguished career utilizing multiple
media platforms to bring a clear social justice vision to reporting
and investigating the news is a winner of a special 2006 James Aronson
Award for Social Justice Journalism.
For social justice news reporting in 2006, Aronson prizes honor the
work of Mother Jones magazine for spotlighting humanity's destructive
impact on the world's oceans; the National Journal for taking the lead
in revealing the surprisingly innocent backgrounds of many Guantánamo
detainees; the Los Angeles Times for exposing the US government's
uranium mining on Navajo land and subsequent abandonment of the Navajo
people when radiation began to kill them; and the South Florida
Sun-Sentinel for portraying the grave plight and remarkable resiliency
of AIDS orphans in Haiti.
The Aronson "Cartooning with a Conscience" award goes to the powerful,
artfully crafted images of John Sherffius of the Boulder Daily Camera.
The prize winners will be honored at a ceremony open to the public
beginning at 5 p.m., Tuesday, April 17 in the Faculty Dining Room ,
Eighth Floor, Hunter College West Building, 68th Street and Lexington
Avenue.
Tom Robbins of the Village Voice will deliver a keynote introduction.
Robbins holds Hunter College's Jack Newfield Visiting Professorship In
Journalism for Spring 2007.
A Multimedia Investigator and Interviewer
Amy Goodman, Career Achievement Award
For decades, Amy Goodman has provided invaluable journalism, actively
measuring world events against clear-eyed standards of social justice.
Her interviews give voice to the silenced; her in-depth investigations
probe injustices played down in mainstream media. Now, the reporting
that has spanned multiple media formats -- public, college and
community radio, podcasting, Internet access and television -- has
moved into print as a column syndicated by King Features. Democracy
Now's reach widens just as its importance has never been greater as an
essential counterbalance to increasingly consolidated media. As she
put it in her first column, the public needs media to provide
viewpoints beyond those of the pundits who quibble over how quickly
the bombs should fall and fail to ask whether they should be falling
at all.
Ocean's End?
Julia Whitty, "The Fate of the Ocean"
Scientific consensus on the reality of global warming may finally have
been acknowledged, but only scattered attention has been paid to the
equally grave dangers facing the seven-tenths of the planet covered by
the world's oceans.
In the lead article of a 28-page cover package on the topic in Mother
Jones magazine, Julia Whitty chronicles the devastation unfolding in
the oceans, where nearly every form of life -- from plankton to Whales
-- is threatened by human activity.
Whitty interweaves compelling personal accounts of her travels aboard
research vessels in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico with
exhaustive research into a daunting, compelling narrative of
overfishing, global dead zones, changing ocean currents, noise
pollution, the ozone hole, floating plastics, and under-water global
climate change.
Who Are the Detainees?
Corine Hegland, "Guantanamo's Grip"
Intrigued by the rising number of hunger strikes at Guantanamo Bay,
National Journal Staff Correspondent Corine Hegland set about to
discover who exactly the Guantánamo detainees were -- guileful
terrorists? desperate innocent men?
The resulting investigation scrutinized 6000 pages of court documents
to create a thorough database on 132 of the detainees and partial
information on 314 others. Her findings: according to the government's
own records, most of the men weren't known terrorists, weren't
captured on the battlefield, and weren't even accused of fighting the
United States
Mined and Undermined
Judy Pasternak, "Blighted Homeland"
Navajos living in homes built with radioactive uranium mine waste,
drinking contaminated water and inhaling radioactive dust -- Los
Angeles Times reporter Judy Pasternak's four-part series brings into
shocking clarity the plight of these Native American victims of the
Cold War, whose lands were mined to build the US nuclear arsenal then
largely left ravaged and lethally radioactive.
Native Americans are generally a vastly underreported group. Against
that background, Pasternak's exhaustive interviewing, and patient
investigation of real estate and mine-inspection records are all the
more laudable. She shows how lack of political clout left the Navajos
to fend for themselves in cleaning up a toxic mess. Now, with uranium
prices rising, mining companies are again eyeing the rich deposits on
Navajo land and the Navajo themselves are torn between the hope for
new jobs and the risk of a polluted homeland.
Yes, In My Backyard
Reporter Tim Collie, photographers Mike Stocker and Jim Amon, "Orphans of AIDS"
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel does not sell many papers in the
Caribbean, but its journalism fully recognizes the web of connections
between their circulation area and that troubled region not so far
away after all.
The four-part series culminates a five-year effort examining the AIDS
crisis in South Florida and the Caribbean. The picture is grim, with
Haiti lacking a single dollar of public funds for AIDS programs and
the efforts of charity groups being often heroic but limited, while
the number of victims continues to grow.
Reporter Tim Collie's eloquent yet straightforward treatment brings
the lives of these homeless children before us in their own words with
their honesty and resiliency further documented by a visit display of
extensive photographs by Mike Stocker and Jim Amon. The stories'
humane focus does not exclude the complex context of this tragedy.
Information graphics clearly lay out the complexities of AIDS funding,
the difficulties of treating the disease in children and pregnant
mothers, and its wide prevalence in South Florida and the Caribbean.
Painterly with a Punch
John Sherffius, the Boulder Daily Camera, "Cartooning with a Conscience"
John Sherffius' cartooning is remarkable for the painterly quality of
his images combined with a mordant, dry irony that make the effect of
his work more often a kind of shocked gasp than a chuckle. To portray
the shift of US military intentions from Iraq to Iran, he depicts an
odometer showing the letters I, R and A with a fourth space where the
letter Q rolls up as the letter N slides into view. The display is
spattered with blood.
The awards were announced March 8 at Hunter College of the City
University of New York, where they have been administered since 1990
by the Department of Film & Media Studies and a committee of
journalists, media professionals, scholars and activists.
CONTACT: Peter Parisi | [log in to unmask] | (212) 772-5041
Website: http://filmmedia.hunter.cuny.edu/aronson
Peter Parisi, Ph.D.
Dept. of Film & Media Studies
Hunter College
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
212-772-4949
Suffering itself isn't so bad; it's resenting the suffering that
really hurts. --Allen Ginsberg
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