McClatchy's Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel has received a 2008 Polk Award for outstanding foreign reporting. The Polk Awards were named after CBS News correspondent George Polk, who was slain while covering the civil war in Greece in 1948. Today, the Polk Awards seem like the kind of award that journalists give each other so they feel they are important. But what kind of journalists do they honor? Let's take a look at past award recipients. .
The list of prior award recipients reads like a Who's Who among elite anti-Bush media figures. Past winners include:
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- Seymour Hersh multiple winner (anti-war activist, infamous for using anonymous sources)
- Christiane Amanpour multiple winner (married to former Clinton cabinet member James Rubin)
- Larry Bensky (left-wing activist, correspondent for Pacifica Radio)
- Susan Sontag multiple winner (left-wing anti-war activist)
- Amy Goodman (anti-war activist, host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now)
- Robert Brustein (left-wing writer for Huffington Post)
- Norman Mailer (anti-war activist, arrested for protesting during Vietnam War era, major donor to Democrat candidates)
- Allan Nairn (employed by Ralph Nader for 6 years)
- Bill Moyers multiple winner (left-leaning journalist, favored for a presidential run by left-wingers Molly Ivans and Ralph Nader)
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Leila Fadel will fit right in with this group of lefties. Just last month she endorsed without qualification the latest George Soros report on the "lies and misrepresentations" Bush told during the run-up to the Iraq War. She has also said her focus is on victimized Iraqis, not American success.
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By the way, in December I predicted journalists and failing media outlets would give Leila Fadel awards and accolades during 2008. As the print media declines in circulation and influence, I expect they will accelerate the pace of handing awards out to each other.
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