Long Island University to honor 16 Laureates in celebration of the 75th anniversary of its George Polk Awards in Journalism

Long Island University today announced it will mark the 75th anniversary of its George Polk Awards in journalism by honoring 16 individuals whose careers reflect the awards' commitment to outstanding investigative reporting as the first-ever Polk Laureates.

The university is inviting all previous Polk Award winners, numbering about 600, to a daylong celebration in New York on Friday, April 12, which will include a luncheon to present this year's Polk Award winners and also to honor the 16 laureates "for outstanding contributions to American journalism in the spirit of George Polk." The event, to be held at Cipriani 42nd Street will be hosted by CNN anchor and CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper.

That evening a symposium, "Journalism in an Age of Disinformation, Digital Media and AI," will be held at the Times Center on West 41st Street. It will be moderated by Richard Tofel, founding general manager of ProPublica, and feature Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour, former New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and Associated Press executive editor Julie Pace as panelists.

The Polk Awards were established in 1949 by Long Island University to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. The awards, which place a premium on investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and achieves results, are conferred annually to honor special achievement in journalism. The 2023 winners will be announced Feb. 19.

"We are grateful to CBS News, George Polk's network, for serving as the presenting sponsor of this year's special awards luncheon," said John Darnton, curator of the awards. "Since the award's inception, CBS has won 31 Polk Awards, more than any other network. We are also grateful to The New York Times for helping us sponsor and facilitate what promises to be a compelling look at the future challenges of journalism. Recognizing just 16 individuals as exemplars of great reporting is inevitably a somewhat arbitrary exercise but I think we have come up with a very impressive list."

"Long Island University has long recognized the importance of investigative journalism through the George Polk Awards and our George Polk School of Communications which is helping prepare an international class of the journalists of tomorrow," noted Dr. Kimberly Cline, president of Long Island University.

These are the 75th anniversary Polk Laureates:

• Lynsey Addario, fearless and resourceful combat photographer whose photo in 2022 of a Ukrainian family slain by a Russian mortar was just one example of compelling work in war zones across the world.
• Christiane Amanpour, trailblazing TV correspondent whose reporting provided real-time context to conflagrations in eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa and could spur world leaders to act.
• Martin Baron, transformative editor at newspapers in Miami, Boston and Washington whose focus on thorough and principled investigative reporting produced stunning revelations and impactful results.
• Dean Baquet, leader of the New York Times' rise to preeminence, embracing new and rapidly changing methods of reporting and delivering the news to attract and engage a national audience.
• Carl Bernstein, half of a reporting partnership that turned "Watergate" into an iconic word, brought down a President and changed journalism and politics for the better.
• Alma Guillermoprieto, for four decades a singularly authoritative and news-breaking source of information on the politics, culture and criminality of Latin America often at personal peril.
• Laurie Garrett, prescient chronicler of global health threats whose well researched warnings of the likelihood of deadly outbreaks of communicable diseases from Ebola to Covid proved fatally accurate.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, guiding force behind The New York Times 1619 Project four years after her "This American Life" segment on the segregation in Michael Brown's school district won the first of her two Polk awards.
• Seymour Hersh, five-time Polk award winner for investigative exposés starting with his 1969 account of an American massacre of hundreds of civilians a year earlier in the Vietnam village of My Lai.
• Laura Poitras, documentarian whose "Citizen Four" on Edward Snowden and the NSA typified a career of such efforts, most recently "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" on the Sacklers' Opiod empire.
• David Remnick, editor who has made The New Yorker a must-read for 25 years and author of "Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire," winner of a 1993 Polk Award.
• Wilbert Rideau, a lifer in Louisiana who exposed prison inequity and brutality from the inside as co-editor of the Angolite and winner of a 1979 Polk Award that he accepted 32 years later after his release.
• Gene Roberts, an admired reporter's editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times after his own years of reporting on the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of a native North Carolinian.
• James B. Steele, with Donald Barlett a six-time Polk Award winner for deeply researched series that exposed misguided government programs and served as a blueprint for a generation of investigative reporters.
• Paul Steiger, visionary founding editor of ProPublica following 16 years as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal who designed a model for the survival of investigative journalism in the Internet era.
• Bob Woodward, renowned for Watergate and also author of 21 books in a career that moved his erstwhile editor Ben Bradlee to call him "the best of his generation at investigative reporting."