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2009 Michael Kelly Award Winners
Ken Armstrong
The Seattle Times
Nick Perry
The Seattle Times
Courage can take many forms. There's physical courage-the willingness of journalists to put themselves in harm's way to keep the public informed. There's also moral courage-the commitment to truth that will alienate readers, risk advertising accounts, and jeopardize a newspaper's standing during already precarious times. Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry of The Seattle Times displayed such courage in their four-part series "Victory and Ruins," which exposed a community's blind embrace of a Rose Bowl-winning University of Washington football team that coddled two dozen players who were arrested while at the university for charges including rape, robbery, and assault. Armstrong and Perry showed how it wasn't only the athletic department and university administrators who looked the other way but also local police, prosecutors, judges, and influential alumni. As Seattle Times investigations editor James Neff wrote: "Few things ignite as much passion as football. And we knew we were lighting a fuse."
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Barry Bearak
The New York Times
Celia Dugger
The New York Times
Lawlessness reigned in Zimbabwe as the government of Robert Mugabe terrorized residents last year in a desperate, and ultimately successful, attempt to stay in power after disputed elections in March. New York Times reporters (and husband and wife) Barry Bearak and Celia Dugger chronicled Zimbabwe's disintegration at great personal risk. Bearak was imprisoned by authorities in Zimbabwe for several days for the crime of "committing journalism." As one of Bearak's captors told him, "You've been gathering, processing and disseminating the news." After Bearak's release, he was spirited out of the country and unable to return because he was too well known. But Dugger decided to risk her own arrest and imprisonment by traveling to Zimbabwe to continuing reporting the story. Their dozens of gripping and first-hand accounts ensured that the government's campaign of violence and intimidation did not go unnoticed.
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Richard Behar
Fast Company
In "China Storms Africa," investigative reporter Richard Behar reveals China's aggressive quest for natural resources in sub-Sahara Africa. "This commercial invasion," Behar writes, "is without question the most important development in the sub-Sahara since the end of the Cold War." It is, he reports, "one of the most bare-knuckled resource grabs the world has ever seen." To report the story for Fast Company, Behar traveled throughout Africa to gather the evidence of China's ambitions, which threaten to wipe out a decade's worth of efforts to improve African human rights and government transparency. But in the end, Behar writes, it's not just about China and Africa. "We buy China's junk, they buy our bonds, our real estate, even our corporations; they expand into Africa with our money, enabling them to grow and sell us more junk. It's a spiderweb, a matrix-and how it spins out is as scary as it is unclear."
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Peter Godwin
Vanity Fair
Peter Godwin saw Zimbabwe as few other journalists could. He grew up and was educated in Zimbabwe, served as a conscript, and maintains a network of friends and associates in the country. After President Robert Mugabe banned Western journalists from Zimbabwe, Godwin was able to spend more than six weeks there at a particularly horrific time, when Mugabe was terrorizing citizens in the run-up to elections. Godwin's brave and moving piece in Vanity Fair describes a social collapse and brutal intimidation so extreme that people in Zimbabwe refer to the prevailing state of mind there simply as "the Fear." But, as Godwin shows, the spirit of resistance has not been entirely extinguished. In one scene in his story, a church congregation crowds around Godwin when the police attempt to seize him, quietly hiding his notebooks under their clothing so that there will be no evidence that he is a journalist.
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