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Entries associated with the tag "George Polk Awards":

February 19th - 2:28 p.m.

The George Polk Awards for investigative journalism were announced Tuesday, and one is historic. Long Island University, which administers the awards, has given the Polk Award for legal reporting to a blogger -- superblogger really. According to the citation, Joshua Marshall's Web site, talkingpointsmemo.com, "led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country." Here's a link that pays proper tribute to the Polk Awards and to Marshall's trailblazing blogging. 

The Polk Award for consumer reporting goes to the Chicago Tribune for its 2007 series, "Kids at Risk."  The citation says that the Tribune's "accounts of children suffering injury and death from exposure to dangerously designed magnetic building sets, lead-tainted toys and defective cribs led to massive product recalls and heightened public awareness of the dangers posed by these widely sold items." Unfortunately for the reporters involved, the citation didn't bother to name them. But they include Patricia Callahan, Maurice Possley, Ted Gregory, and Sam Roe.

February 20th - 4:11 p.m.
The tiny Lakefront Outlook has just been awarded one of journalism's highest honors, the George Polk Award for local reporting. It honors the weekly Outlook's three-part investigation last December of Bronzeville's new Harold Washington Cultural Center, a money-losing operation that the Outlook reported Alderman Dorothy Tillman has staffed "with her family, friends and political allies." The Polk citation names the Outlook's entire editorial staff of six people, who also produce the Hyde Park Herald each week. Reporter Daniel Yovich led the project. In the January 19 Reader I profiled blind intern Kalari Girtley, who played a key role in the investigation and continues to hope her contribution will lead to a paid position.



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Branzburg v. Hayes, the split U.S. Supreme Court decision (1972) generally construed by journalists and judges alike as affirming some sort of reporter's privilege in federal courts.

U.S. Appellate Judge Richard Posner's influential opinion in McKevitt v. Pallasch (2003) telling those journalists and judges they were wrong -- there is no such privilege.

John Milton's Areopagitica (1643), one of the earliest and most eloquent arguments for a free press. Said Milton: "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye."

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