An awards night where the world dominated
Four-time Pulitzer-winning photographer Carol Guzy stood before the Overseas Press Club in New York on Thursday night, having just accepted this year’s Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for photojournalism. Then she mused about one of that famous Spanish civil war photographer’s most famous guidelines: improve the work by showing the courage to push closer.
Guzy, already known for her unflinching gaze in places such as Haiti, got closer in documenting the scars that war left on the children of Mosul, Iraq.
Incredibly close.
But that wasn’t her point Thursday night.
Courage, Guzy said, was not about getting there; it’s about staying there, even when that story is shredding your heart. She dedicated the award last night to the bruised, scarred children left behind in Mosul. They are showing true courage, Guzy said, with their resilience and grace.
Her view of courage and humility was echoed by the feature photography winner, Getty Images’ Kevin Frayer. He covered Myanmar’s pogrom of its Rohingya minority, driving nearly a million people from their homes. There were times when, Frayer said in a message, "surrounded in sadness, I could find beauty in nothing."
Detail: A Kevin Frayer photograph of a fleeing Rohingya family (Screenshot)
He urged the crowd to support the release of the two Reuters reporters in Myanmar who have been imprisoned for months for doing their jobs. Other winners included the AP for the big award, the Hal Boyle award, on the Rohingya flight, and to the AP’s Maggie Michael, who found secret Saudi-led camps where Yemeni prisoners were being tortured. Other awardees showed the economic destruction of Venezuela and rampant corruption in Mexico, important stories often lost in awards season and the day-to-day coverage of America's mercurial leader.
Judges awarded the magazine award to Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal of the New York Times Magazine for their nearly two-year effort, "visiting about 150 bomb sites in northern Iraq, often at great personal risk," to show that civilian casualties caused by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes were considerably higher than previously reported.
A Reuters team, as with the Pulitzers, won for its coverage of the Philippines under vigilante president Rodrigo Duterte. Judges said "their exhaustive, meticulous reporting exposes the scope of the state’s role in the slaughter of its own citizens." NBC Left Field, the network’s digital news video unit, took an award for “The Kill List,” a documentary on Duterte. Here are all the winners.
Trump's 'Friends' cut him off
President Donald Trump’s phone-in to his security blanket, “Fox and Friends,” Thursday morning generated exponential amounts of coverage, not just for the newsy nuggets coming out of it (courtesy of Trump), but because it was a chance to see the president in full defensive mode on live TV — something that heretofore had only been described in news stories by “sources close to the president.”
And what a display it was. He went on for close to 30 minutes, many times with his voice getting louder and louder, before show co-host Brian Kilmeade — sounding like a harried mom having to deal with a gossipy neighbor — told him, ““We could talk to you all day, but it looks like you have a million things to do.” (Translation: This is getting old, dude, let me help you out …)
Here are some of the stories we liked that captured this unprecedented venting:
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The case for “Fox and Friends." Erik Wemple of the Washington Post says it’s good to at last see a tirade like this in person instead of getting it second-hand.
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Chris Cillizza of CNN summarized “The 53 most stunning lines from Donald Trump's 'Fox & Friends' interview”
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The entire transcript, annotated, by the Washington Post.
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Along the same lines, HuffPost offers up “A Guide To Unscrambling Trump’s Bonkers ‘Fox & Friends’ Interview.”
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And this, for the headline alone: “Old man yells at country,” via Slate.
Quick hits
NO MORE KNOW-IT-ALL: In a major report for the American Press Institute, P. Kim Bui casts a broad net in seeking how to build trust in reporting and in a newsroom. Empathy, humility and transparency go a long way. In reporting, do your homework, but don’t act the expert, she writes. In a newsroom, you can go a long way in training, starting with admitting mistakes, but not everyone will be able to do it all, NPR’s Keith Woods tells Bui. “That’s all empathy is at the end of the day, is standing in someone else’s shoes,” Woods says. “You don’t have to wear them. You don’t have to like them.” The report is engaging, but if you’re time-pressed, here are 9 steps for storymakers and 10 steps for the story editors and supervisors.
BROKAW ALLEGATIONS: Variety and the Washington Post cite a former employee as saying that former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw groped her in a meeting in the 1990s. Brokaw acknowledged meeting her but denied the allegations. We'll be going through the stories, of which the Brokaw incident is just a part, throughout the day.
HE STARTED THE WAR: Back in 1986, “Gallup was finding that 65 percent of Americans still felt a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the press.” The following year, Brent Bozell started his advocacy group, the Media Research Center, in order to root out and expose liberal bias in the media. And thus the war on the press began, writes Tim Alberta for Politico Magazine. Flash forward 30 years, and the Gallup numbers show confidence in the press is at an all-time low of 32 percent, and at just 14 percent for Republicans. Mission accomplished?
SPEED BRIEFING: For longtime New York Times photographer Sara Krulwich, there's something new at this year's Tonys: Her very own award, writes Michael Paulson. … Two Southern California public television stations, KCET and KOCE, are merging, says Meg James. … the president of the group that runs The New Orleans Times-Picayune is stepping down and will not be replaced, the Advocate’s Richard Thompson reports.
TURKEY CRACKS DOWN: A Turkish court has sentenced 14 journalists and newspaper employees working for a Turkish opposition newspaper to prison sentences up to 7 ½ years. The charges were terrorism-related and came after a failed coup attempt. The move is raising alarm bells over press freedoms under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
‘WE WERE WRONG:’ On the same day that a new memorial opened in town that honored victims of lynchings, the Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser published an editorial owning up to its own role in perpetuating violence against African-Americans. “The Advertiser was careless in how it covered mob violence and the terror foisted upon African-Americans from Reconstruction through the 1950s. We dehumanized human beings.” One of the headlines the paper published: Dead! Riley Webb hanged in Selma by orderly mob. (Emphasis ours.)
A VAMPIRE SQUID: That’s how a British lawmaker described Facebook on Thursday. So, yes there is such a thing, but the foot-long cephalopod isn’t too scary, despite its fearsome name. It hangs in the low-oxygen, low-predator ocean deep — and doesn’t eat much.
THE VAMPIRE GRAPHIC: Quartz’s Dan Kopf on why you should never use a pie chart — and why, no matter how hard you try, you can’t kill data visualization’s Walking Dead. Nor should there be a silver bullet (or a cross or garlic or whatever), argue fans of idiosyncratic and brilliant pie-charter Ann Friedman. They are right — and here's where to get more of her fresh pie. (Hat tip: Mel Grau)
A SHARING PROBLEM?: The Newseum has created a poster for educators, libraries and others (editors?) to help Americans get wiser about what stories online they would share. It’s part of a media literacy effort at the Washington museum, says Anna Kassinger, director of curriculum for the Newseum’s educational wing. You can check out the poster and/or download it from here.
What we’re reading
DO YOU BELIEVE?: A Pew poll shows most Americans believe in God or a higher being. It’s just not always the God in the Bible. Get this: About the same percentage of nonwhite Democrats and Republicans in general agreed on the God in the Bible. Three other takeaways, although 1 and 2 may seem contradictory: 1) Belief in the God of the Bible declines with age. 2) Those under age 50 viewed God as less powerful and less involved in earthly affairs than do older Americans. 3) Among college graduates, only 45 percent believe in the God of the Bible. (Hat tip: David Dockterman)
FAREWELL, FREE JOURNALISM: Post Opinions commentator Megan McArdle on the reported move of her former employer, Bloomberg News, behind a paywall: “The old open Internet was a marvelous gift to readers, a vast cornucopia of great writing upon which we’ve been gorging for the past two decades. But there’s a limit to how long one can keep handing out gifts without some reciprocity. At the end of the day, however much information wants to be free, writers still want to get paid.”
THE REST OF THE STORY: “I hope you’ve monetized this,” Donald Trump said to the two North Carolina sisters known as Diamond & Silk before sending them out to do their routine to a campaign audience. Oh, they have, Donald. They have. Here’s everything you need to know, by the Washington Post’s Monica Hesse and Dan Zak.
OVERLOOKED NO MORE: Maria Bochkareva jammed three lifetimes into her 30 years. Married at 15 and split up not much later, the semiliterate peasant petitioned Russia’s czar to enter the military during World War I. She loved it, wrote the NYT’s Elisabeth Goodridge in the latest of the paper’s obituaries of “overlooked” women of note. By 1917, Bochkareva was commanding an all-women’s “strike force” that was on the wrong side of the Russian Revolution. Touring the West, she raised money from Theodore Roosevelt and “wrote” an autobiography. Returning home, she was imprisoned by the victorious Bolsheviks — and executed.
New on poynter.org
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Who’s checking on the social media fact-checkers?
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Support flows in for #SaveStudentNewsrooms.
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WeChat is just the latest platform to be identified as spreading fake news, reports our weekly fact-checking newsletter.
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This story about several investigative journalism initiatives will hearten you.
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