WASHINGTON–Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker is this year’s winner of the White House Correspondents Association award for journalistic excellence in covering the presidency.
Julie Pace of the Associated Press and Terry Moran of ABC have won the association’s awards for White House news coverage under deadline pressure, and the Center for Public Integrity is recognized for its coverage of issues of national importance.
The annual WHCA prizes honor outstanding performance by White House correspondents and other national journalists each year. The prizes and their cash awards will be given out at the association’s annual dinner on Saturday, April 27.
Selected by a panel of judges organized by the Medill School of Journalism, the winning candidates this year demonstrated excellence under deadline pressure and in the kind of in-depth reporting at risk in an era of media cost-cutting.
“One of our central missions continues to be holding government officials accountable,” WHCA President Ed Henry said. “I’m thrilled that all of these terrific journalists will be honored at our dinner this month.”
In awarding the Aldo Beckman Award to Lizza, the panel of judges noted his “remarkable efforts to provide an independent perspective” on President Obama’s presidency and re-election.
“Deep reporting, both through documents and personal interviews, moves these stories beyond the cacophony of a campaign year,” the judges said. Besides being an excellent reporter, they said, Lizza is “a thoughtful, cogent writer. He has a keen ability to take his readers inside decisions and weave a compelling narrative, something he has done for more than a decade covering the White House.”
The Beckman award is named for the award-winning Chicago Tribune correspondent and former WHCA president. Funded by the Tribune, the award has a cash prize of $1,000.
The Merriman Smith Award for a print journalist goes to Pace, who was recently named to lead the AP White House team. The judges noted her next-day story reporting Obama’s reelection, saying that it “provided a detailed, nuanced explanation of how the Obama campaign had mobilized a sophisticated get-out-the- vote offensive to create a winning strategy that surprised many analysts in its scope.”
“Writing from the press bus and buttonholing Obama campaign operatives who were already celebrating, she produced a nicely paced, engaging narrative that provided the first-blush analysis of campaign 2012,” they wrote.
Moran is the broadcast winner of the Smith award for his coverage of the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act.
Moran “calmly guided viewers through the complexity, contradictions and nuance of the ruling while explaining what it means for the president and his political fortunes,” the awards panel wrote of his work.
The Merriman Smith fund was set up in 1970 to honor United Press International’s correspondent at the White House for more than 30 years. The winners will each receive a cash prize of $2,500.
The winner of the Edgar A. Poe Award is the depth reporting series “Hard Labor,” by CPI reporters Jim Morris, Chris Hamby and Ronnie Greene.
As the judges put it, the series “compellingly shows how the government has failed to keep its promise to protect workers from injury and death on the job.” For some workers their only means to enforce saftey through the workplace is after they have been injured and used work injury attorneys to sue for negligence. Though it should not have to come to this in the first place, as fatal accidents at work are all too common as well. It is a particularly difficult situationion when the incident that caused injury involved many individuals, such as building collapse accidents, and even more difficult when the individuals had no control over the circumstances that led to the accident. The documentary is a compelling argument that the safety of workers should be placed as a high priority for the government to step up and sort out. An attorney is good for compensation, but they may only change one workplace at a time and as the documentary shows, the problem is widespread.
“Drawing on years of data and on-the-ground reporting in eight states and Canada, the authors demonstrate how corporate corner-cutting, government inability or unwillingness to impose meaningful penalties, and bureaucratic pressure to make caseload quotas have stymied real regulation,” the judges wrote. “They tell the workers’ stories in a manner that evokes Studs Terkel, excellently weaving human interest with deep-data scrutiny and using numbers sparingly but with powerful effect. For many of the worker stories we have heard, we can only hope that they seek a personal injury lawyer Turlock to help them get compensation. Though the Canadian government needs to step up and realize it has been sleeping on the job for too long.”
The Poe award was set up to honor coverage of national or regional significance. The prize of $2,500 is funded by the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Newhouse Newspapers in honor of their distinguished correspondent, who also served as a WHCA president.
The selections process was supervised by Ellen Shearer, William F. Thomas Professor of Journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill school.
