NEW YORK (Feb. 24, 2021) – Long Island University (LIU) has announced the winners of the 73rd annual George Polk Awards in Journalism, honoring journalists in 18 categories for their reporting in 2020.
Almost half of the awardees won for reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic, which dominated the judging process, accounting for one quarter of all submissions. This year saw a record total of 592 entries, work that appeared in print, online or on television or radio and was nominated by news organizations and individuals or recommended by a national panel of advisors.
“As always, we strive to identify individual reporters who do significant work, not just the news organizations themselves,” said John Darnton, curator of the awards. “We have never seen a story on the scale of the pandemic. In large part it fell to the press to inform the public about it and the press performed admirably. Our eight Polk winning entries represent the best of the best.”
Reimagining a just society pt. 3 | A coming shift in perspective
In retrospect, the COVID-19 pandemic may mark a paradigm shift in global society if governments and their citizens worldwide today embrace its lessons, including many still emerging. One of these lessons concerns the dangers of ignoring knowledge we already had about interconnections between global public health, economic and national security, and ecological degradation. As Dr. M. Sanjayan, CEO of Conservation international, observed, “2020 has shown our complete interdependence with nature.” Resistance to change is natural, even if sometimes illogical, and has been manifest throughout the crisis in opposition, particularly in the United States, to following (belated) public health guidelines to wear masks, avoid crowds, and limit time in enclosed poorly ventilated spaces. But what would differentiate an “anti-masker’s” stance from those who, on a national or global scale, call for a return to “normal”
28th Dec 2020
This has not been a great period for free expression. The range of socially acceptable opinion has shrunk, as independent-minded journalists and experts have been eased out of their jobs at places ranging from New York magazine to Boeing and Civis Analytics for saying unorthodox things. The esteemed scholar James R. Flynn wrote a book called “In Defense of Free Speech” which was in turn cancelled by his publisher for being too controversial.
Fortunately, a range of people from across the political spectrum have arisen to defend free inquiry, including Noam Chomsky, Cathy Young, the University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer, Caitlin Flanagan, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Jonathan Haidt, John McWhorter, Yascha Mounk, Jonathan Rauch and magazines like Quillette and Tablet.
Brooks: The Sidney Awards
This has not been a great period for free expression. The range of socially acceptable opinion has shrunk, as independent-minded journalists and experts have been eased out of their jobs at places ranging from New York magazine to Boeing and Civis Analytics for saying unorthodox things. The esteemed scholar James R. Flynn wrote a book called “In Defense of Free Speech” which was in turn canceled by his publisher for being too controversial.
Fortunately, a range of people from across the political spectrum have arisen to defend free inquiry, including Noam Chomsky, Cathy Young, the University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer, Caitlin Flanagan, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Jonathan Haidt, John McWhorter, Yascha Mounk, Jonathan Rauch and magazines like Quillette and Tablet.
Facebook and antitrust: A slam-dunk case, or a decades-long fight in the making?
It’s not surprising that the announcement last week of an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook has gotten a lot of media attention. Mammoth cases like this one (which involves the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states) are extremely rare. There have only been half a dozen or so of this magnitude in the last 50 years, and only the Microsoft case from the late 1990s and possibly the AT&T breakup even come close to this one in size and impact. But the history of such cases shows that what almost inevitably happens is not a swift victory for justice (however one might define that term) but years, and in some cases decades of protracted legal wrangling, a process that is almost mind-numbingly boring for most people, satisfying no one apart from the legions of corporate lawyers and academics for whom it provides something close to full employment. After all that, the ending is likely to be a carefully negoti