MEDIA CONTACT: Wendy Leopold at 847-491-4890 or w-leopold@northwestern.edu

April 26, 2005

Iraq Coverage Earns Prize

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Reporter Michael Massing, who criticized national media coverage of the events leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the reluctance of journalists to challenge a popular president in times of patriotism and war, has won the $10,000 Mongerson Prize for Investigative Reporting on the News. The prize is awarded by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

The Medill School also named three winners of the $1,000 Awards of Distinction -- Jonathan Landay and Tish Wells of Knight Ridder Newspapers; Pete Slover of The Dallas Morning News; and Stephen Jimenez, Glenn Silber and Elizabeth Vargas of ABC’s “20/20.”

Massing, a former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and 1992 MacArthur Fellow, will receive the Mongerson Prize May 16 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The prize honors outstanding reporting that covers and promptly corrects incomplete, inaccurate or misleading news stories.

In a series called “Now They Tell Us” in The New York Review of Books, Massing questioned the media’s acceptance of the Bush administration’s claims that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. “Thoroughly reported and clearly written, the stories put journalistic failings in context and serve as a cautionary tale for newsrooms,” the judges said in naming Massing the winner.

Knight Ridder Newspapers’ Landay and Wells were honored for a story that showed how reporters were deceived by Iraqi defectors, which led to incorrect reporting in 108 different stories in U.S. news media.

Slover was honored for three stories he wrote for The Dallas Morning News on unauthenticated memos used in a “60 Minutes Wednesday” piece on President Bush’s National Guard service. He found that one officer named in the memo had retired 18 months before the date on it, and also was the first to report that the secretary who would have typed the memos called them fakes.

Jimenez, Silber and Vargas were honored for an hour-long “20/20” episode that re-examined the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo. Witnesses now say that Shepard was beaten as part of a robbery for drug money and was not the victim of an anti-gay hate crime.

“This year’s winners epitomize the goals of the Mongerson prize and why it is so important that journalists take responsibility for correcting misleading and inaccurate stories by their own organizations and others,” said Medill Assistant Dean Ellen Shearer.

The Mongerson Prize was created in 2001 through a grant from Paul Mongerson, an engineer, businessman and author interested in the media. It is based at the Medill News Service in Washington, D.C.