Georgetown honored this year’s recipients of the 2005 Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting John Burns and Seymour Hersh at a ceremony Tuesday in the ICC Auditorium. Special citations for the award went to David Ignatius and Bernard Kalb.
Named for longtime Newsweek correspondent and former Polish diplomat Edward Weintal, the annual prize recognizes one or more journalists who distinguish themselves in their coverage of foreign policy and diplomacy.
The hot-button issue of 2005 was the war in Iraq.
“They opened our eyes to the reality of the Iraq War with the encouragement of their editors back home, who told them to buck the tide and tell the truth,” Weintal Selection Committee Chair Marvin Kalb said of the four prize winners.
The ceremony was followed by a panel discussion about the responsibilities of reporting on such a volatile issue as the war.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a time when what we write has so little effect,” Hersh said. “They [the Bush administration] have an agenda, and I don’t think we’re going to stop them.” Hersh, a New Yorker correspondent, broke the story about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses in 2004.
Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post, blamed the American public for what he saw as the waning importance of journalism in contemporary American society.
“It’s as if the ground on which Americans read reporting is evaporating,” he said. “People don’t give a damn anymore. They prefer Fox News.”
“A country gets the journalism it deserves,” Hersh agreed.
