Posted on 02/21/2007 4:38:10 AM PST by abb
Mass communication turns election campaigns into sound bite contests and makes millionaires of impudent paparazzi. But it also offers the press more opportunity to live up to the billing William Hazlitt gave the British journalist William Cobbett more than 175 years ago as "a kind of fourth estate." By unearthing myriad forms of scandal and deceit in the last half-century, reporters have assumed an increasingly vital role in alerting and, ultimately, protecting the public.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the list of winners of the George Polk Awards. Established by Long Island University in 1949 to memorialize the CBS correspondent slain covering a civil war in Greece, the George Polk Award has become one of America's most coveted journalism honors -- and probably its most respected.
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(Excerpt) Read more at brooklyn.liu.edu ...
I think the press is a bit more concerned with Smith and Spears then with any news coverage worthy of an award.
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