(CPJ/IFEX) – The following is a 23 November 1999 CPJ press release: Journalists Receive International Press Freedom Awards For Courage in Reporting the News at New York City Ceremony “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Don Hewitt Also Honored at November 23rd Event New York, NY Nov. 23, 1999 – The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) presented […]
(CPJ/IFEX) – The following is a 23 November 1999 CPJ press release:
Journalists Receive International Press Freedom Awards For Courage in Reporting the News at New York City Ceremony
“60 Minutes” Executive Producer Don Hewitt Also Honored at November 23rd Event
New York, NY Nov. 23, 1999 – The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) presented its 1999 International Press Freedom Awards to four journalists – from Colombia, Kosovo and Pakistan – for their courage and independence in reporting the news. A fifth honoree could not attend because he is imprisoned in Cuba. The recipients of the awards, who have been beaten, jailed, or had their lives threatened because of their work, received the awards at a formal dinner ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City tonight.
The winners of the Ninth Annual International Press Freedom Awards are:
Jesús Joel Díaz Hernández, who is serving a four-year prison sentence in Cuba for starting an independent news agency;
Baton Haxhiu, editor of Kosovo’s leading independent newspaper, Koha Ditore, which he continued to publish from exile after eluding Serbian police;
Jugnu Mohsin and Najam Sethi, publisher and editor of The Friday Times in Lahore, Pakistan. Last spring Sethi was beaten, abducted and jailed after the paper published charges of government corruption;
María Cristina Caballero, a reporter for Colombia’s Semana, who received frequent death threats as a result of her work covering the country’s escalating civil war.
CPJ also honored CBS “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Don Hewitt with the Burton
Benjamin Memorial Award for a lifetime of distinguished achievement in the cause of press freedom.
In announcing the awards, CPJ Board Chairman Gene Roberts said, “The awards not only honor these five courageous journalists who faced jail, physical harm and even death, simply for doing their work, they shine light on the enemies of press freedom and democracy in many areas of the world.”
Speakers at the event included: NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, host of the awards ceremony; Maureen Dowd of The New York Times; Ted Koppel, of ABC News “Nightline”; Clarence Page of The Chicago Tribune; David Remnick of The New Yorker; and Ray Suarez of “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” Norman Pearlstine, Editor-in-Chief of Time Inc., chairman of this year’s black-tie dinner, also spoke. This year’s dinner vice-chairs were: former talk show host Phil Donahue, The Coca-Cola Company Chairman and CEO M. Douglas Ivester, and Freedom Forum Chairman and CEO Charles L. Overby.
CPJ Executive Director Ann K. Cooper said, “While we in America sometimes take press freedoms for granted, the hardships endured by these courageous journalists remind us that there are many places in the world where basic press freedoms simply don’t exist. Because the threats these journalists stand up to are ultimately threats to all of us, we are deeply indebted to them.”
Following is information about the 1999 CPJ International Press Freedom Award
winners and the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award recipient:
María Cristina Caballero, Colombia
When reporter María Cristina Caballero walks down the streets of Cambridge, Mass., she still looks over her shoulder. She fled to Cambridge from her home in Bogotá, Colombia after finding a death threat on her answering machine one day last spring. She had reason to be afraid. Four journalists were murdered in the line of duty in Colombia in 1998, and Caballero had made enemies all around, having interviewed all sides in the conflict that is tearing her country apart – including drug traffickers, guerrilla leaders, and the leader of the right-wing paramilitary United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).
For Caballero, universal access means more than getting scoops. It’s about helping to create an environment in which peace is possible. In a country where violence is rapidly destroying a great journalistic tradition – 45 Colombian journalists have been killed since 1988 – she argues that Colombia’s best hope for peace is a free and unfettered press that can provide a forum for dialogue and discussion. Caballero is on leave from her job as investigative editor for the weekly Semana to write a book about the Colombian civil war.
Jesús Joel Díaz Hernández, Cuba
Jesús Joel Díaz Hernández was arrested on January 18, 1999, convicted the next day of “dangerousness” and sentenced to a four-year prison term. He was held in solitary confinement for eight months. His crime: founding an independent news agency.
Díaz Hernández is one of a number of independent journalists in Cuba who show great courage, tenacity and cunning in the inventive use of the Internet to circumvent censorship and confront President Fidel Castro’s systematic campaign to suppress free expression. They dictate stories over the phone to colleagues abroad for posting on websites, where they are picked up by newspapers in the United States and Europe and sometimes broadcast back to Cuba.
This past spring, the Cuban government ratcheted up its assault on independent journalism by passing a law that criminalizes free speech and forbids contact with foreign media. In prison, Díaz Hernández, 25, has continued to write, although guards have confiscated his stories and threatened him with up to 20 more years of jail.
Baton Haxhiu, Kosovo
As editor in chief of the Pristina daily Koha Ditore, Baton Haxhiu helped turn the paper into a provocative source of news and analysis, focusing a critical spotlight on every key player in the Kosovo quagmire. His editorial stands have angered Serb authorities, Western diplomats and rival Kosovar Albanian leaders alike.
Such journalism came at a price: before the NATO air strikes, Haxhiu endured two years of Serbian state harassment, including repeated police interrogations. In March 1998, the paper’s Pristina offices were ransacked and several staff members were roughed up. On the eve of the NATO air strikes, Serb forces torched the paper’s offices, killing a guard. Then word came from NATO that Serb forces had killed Haxhiu. The report was incorrect: the editor had eluded the police and was hiding in a basement. But when he heard the report of his own death over short-wave radio, Haxhiu fled to Macedonia. There he resumed publication of Koha Ditore, distributing the paper to refugees.
Now back in Kosovo, Haxhiu is still a target for people who disagree with his hard-hitting coverage. The press agency linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army has denounced him as a traitor, a spy and a “pro-Serb vampire.” Haxhiu has received numerous death threats as a result.
Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, Pakistan
Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin are journalistic heroes in Pakistan. Mohsin, the publisher of The Friday Times, and her husband Sethi, the chief editor of the weekly paper, fought to assert freedom of the press in the face of the recently-deposed Sharif government’s increasingly brutal efforts to control the media. Last May, Sethi was dragged from his bedroom in the middle of the night by government agents who beat him, gagged him and then held him without charge for nearly a month.
During her husband’s imprisonment, Jugnu Mohsin courageously refused to succumb to official intimidation. She continued to put out The Friday Times while waging a campaign to learn Sethi’s whereabouts and win his release.
The Friday Times is an equal opportunity offender that has locked horns with all of Pakistan’s leaders since its inception ten years ago. The paper repeatedly angered former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto by calling on them to answer corruption charges.
Sethi’s arrest galvanized the public and the local independent press, who saw the Sharif government’s actions as a crude attempt to stifle political dissent in Pakistan. On October 12, 1999, the Nawaz Sharif government was overthrown in a military coup. Sethi and Mohsin continue to publish The Friday Times every week.
Don Hewitt, recipient of the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award, is the legendary executive producer of “60 Minutes,” the most-watched news broadcast in the history of television, and a 50-year veteran of CBS. He was executive producer of “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” and has headed the team at “60 Minutes” since the program’s birth in 1968. Hewitt invented the television news magazine format and pioneered the provocative, hard-hitting style that for three decades has brought the show praise and controversy.
When CBS created “60 Minutes II” earlier this year, one reviewer praised it for being faithful to “the unmannered, straightforward, and yet highly distinctive “60 Minutes” style perfected by series creator Don Hewitt: no spurious visuals … no gimmicky graphics … and writing and reportage of the highest standard.”
Hewitt, who is portrayed in the movie “The Insider,” about CBS management’s controversial decision not to air a “60 Minutes” interview with a tobacco industry whistle-blower, has stated that he could have resigned to protest management’s action, but chose instead “to live to fight another day.”
He continues to be outspoken about the corrosive effect that the corporatization of television news has had on press freedoms.
The Burton Benjamin Memorial Award honors the late CBS News senior producer and
former CPJ chairman who died in 1988.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to the defense of press freedom everywhere.
