CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine, and the writer who exposed both the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, will be this year’s recipient of the Illinois Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism.
The prize will be awarded Saturday (Nov. 7) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., following an evening reception and dinner.
Hersh, a Chicago native, is the third journalist to receive the award, following “60 Minutes” newsman Mike Wallace in 2007 and former Washington Post executive editor Benjamin Bradlee last year.
The Illinois Prize honors individuals whose career contributions to public affairs reporting represent the highest and best achievements of American journalism. The recipient is selected by the University of Illinois journalism faculty to honor “work that consistently served as a beacon for other journalists, set the highest standards of excellence in the field, and placed the public good and public awareness before all else.”
Hersh represents “the best of the best that American journalism has to offer,” and is therefore an ideal winner, said Walt Harrington, interim dean of the College of Media, where the journalism program resides. “Over a 40-year span he has exposed countless sensational stories, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib to CIA spying on American citizens. He is independent, dogged and always focused on matters of profound public significance.”
Hersh, 72, graduated from the University of Chicago in 1958 and began his career as a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. After serving in the Army, he worked for a suburban paper and then for UPI and AP until 1967, when he joined the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy as a speechwriter and press secretary.
In 1969, Hersh broke the My Lai story, about the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers by U.S. troops and the cover-up that followed, his work resulting in the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
In 1972, he joined The New York Times, working in Washington, D.C., and New York until he left the paper in 1979 to become a freelance writer. He wrote his first piece for The New Yorker in 1971 and has been a regular contributor to the magazine since 1993.
Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib story, about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers, in a series of New Yorker pieces in 2004. This brought him his fifth Polk Award – making him the first five-time winner – as well as his second National Magazine Award and an Overseas Press Club Award.
Hersh also is the author of eight books, among them “Chain of Command” (based on his Abu Ghraib reporting), “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House,” and books on My Lai, the Israeli nuclear bomb program, President John F. Kennedy, illnesses affecting Gulf War veterans, and the Soviet Union’s shooting down of a Korean airliner in 1983. Among his book prizes are the National Book Critics Circle Award and two Investigative Reporters & Editors awards.
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