The International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) honors women journalists around the world for the work they perform under the most daunting conditions. Among this year’s winners are Tatyana Goryachova from Ukraine, who had acid thrown in her face because of articles she had written about government corruption, and Manelos Monzon of Guatemala, whose house was broken into and car destroyed by machine-gun fire in an effort to keep her from writing about human-rights violations.
The obstacles faced by journalists working in the United States pale next to the experiences related by the IWMF Courage awardees. We’re chafing under Bush’s public-relations offensive against the national media. He complains that negative news crowds out good news in the reporting about Iraq. He has a point because news is almost always by definition negative. A former NBC executive once said that news is what the government would pay you not to print; the rest is advertising.
The Iraq war and its violent aftermath hovered over the luncheon. Elizabeth Neuffer, the Boston Globe reporter who died in Iraq in a car accident in May, was remembered by actress Anna Deavere Smith, who had presented Neuffer with a Courage award in 1998 for her work in Bosnia and Rwanda. “The truth may be hazardous to those who tell it, but the truth is not dangerous,” Smith said, quoting Neuffer, who saw her mission as a journalist to counteract disinformation and propaganda.
If Bush had been in the audience, he might have been offended by some of the comments, even if they were accurate from the perspective of those who made them. Lifetime-achievement award-winner Magdalena Ruiz has been the voice and conscience of Argentina for nearly 50 years, reporting on the “disappeared,” the thousands of people systematically abducted, tortured and never seen again in her country in the 1970s and ’80s. She uncovered secret tape recordings that reached into Argentina’s security ministry to reveal what really happened in that dirty war. Yet she wasn’t talking about the Argentine government when she remarked how hard it is for people to live together in peace when their leaders bypass international institutions. “Let’s call them the Lords of War,” she said.
Bush says that members of Congress and others who have visited Iraq return believing that a great deal more progress is being made than the media acknowledge. Anne Garrels of National Public Radio, another of the awardees, was honored for her reporting from Baghdad during the war. Garrels is a 27-year veteran of hotspots around the world, from Central American wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador to Chechnya and Kosovo. She said the ordinary Iraqis she interviewed “accurately predicted the security vacuum and the violence which so astounded our government, and which we are now seeing.”
Bush can blame the press. Every administration does. But there is a reality that Bush cannot ignore, and that is the continued attacks on Coalition forces and the almost daily deaths of U.S. servicemen and women. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and a rigorous critic of Bush’s Iraq policy, presented Garrels with her award. Unlike most American reporters who were in Iraq, Garrels was on her own and not an “embed” beholden to the military for protection. “She was embedded nowhere but in the truth as she found it,” Remnick said.
Celebrity introducers lent glitter to the occasion. Barbara Walters presented Magdalena Ruiz with the Lifetime Achievement award, which Walters won in 1992. Walters remarked that when she began as a journalist, women in the profession could never have filled the ballroom the way they do today. “We wouldn’t have had 25 women sitting here,” she said. Jane Fonda introduced Monzon, the crusading journalist from Guatemala, where 200,000 civilians were killed in the country’s 36-year civil war and those who uncover and document human-rights abuses could be next. “I am here to say to those who want to silence us–we are not afraid,” Monzon said.
The winner from Ukraine, Goyachova, told her story through an interpreter. The cofounder of Ukraine’s only independent press, Goryachova was walking home from work when an unknown assailant sprayed her eyes and face with hydrochloric acid. She was temporarily blinded in one eye and spent three months in a clinic recovering. Her expose of a plan to turn a library into a nightclub and an investigative piece about a bribery scandal at a local kindergarten provoked the attack, along with her determination to give political challengers equal coverage in her newspaper. “I don’t know the real ending of this story, but I’m not quitting my newspaper,” she said. Her story brought tears to many eyes in the ballroom.
The lunch concluded with a solemn video tribute to 18 journalists who died in Iraq. They came from many nations, but they were all drawn there to learn the truth, “or whatever is closest to it,” said CNN’s Judy Woodruff, who acted as moderator.
