By: (AP) Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Jackson, Miss., has been named the 2005 winner of the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism.
The honor is presented to the individual whose work best exemplifies the integrity and insight that characterized the late Chancellor's career as an NBC correspondent and anchorman. It is awarded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
Chancellor died in 1996 of cancer. He was 68. Chancellor spent more than 40 years at NBC, reported from more than 50 foreign countries and lived in five, with a two-year hiatus as director the Voice of America in the 1960s. He retired in 1993.
Mitchell, 46, will receive a $25,000 prize during the award presentation Nov. 29 at Columbia University.
Reporting by Mitchell has focused attention on decades-old civil rights murders and renewed investigations by prosecutors.
The results were the murder convictions of white supremacists Byron De La Beckwith in the 1963 death of Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers; former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers in the 1966 firebombing death of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg; and former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County.
David Halberstam serves on the board of the John Chancellor Award and was part of the selection panel.
"Mitchell pursued these stories after most people believed they belonged to history, and not to journalism," Halberstam said in a statement. "But they did belong to journalism, because the truth had never been told, and justice had never been done.
"As each of the guilty convictions was finally handed down, it has been news of the highest order, and Jerry was there still covering the story."
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