Three women reporters win Courage in Journalism Awards from media foundation

Associated Press Worldstream · October 16, 2002

By DEEPTI HAJEL

Three reporters, including the Islamabad bureau chief of The Associated Press, were recognized Wednesday with the International Women's Media Foundation's Courage in Journalism Awards.

Kathy Gannon, Anna Politkovskaya and Sandra Nyaira were honored at a ceremony that also featured Mariane Pearl, the widow of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and killed in January while doing investigative work in Pakistan.

"Journalism is the best way to change the world nowadays because journalists are the only ones who see with their own eyes what is really going on in the world," said Pearl, a free-lance journalist and guest at the ceremony, as she cradled her son, Adam.

The baby was born a few months after her husband's death.

The awards, given out in a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, recognize women who have risked their lives to report about war and repression.

"We have the responsibility to ensure that we report the news as fully and accurately as we can," Judy Woodruff of CNN said in introducing the recipients. "These women of courage each made it their personal mission to take on this fight ... without regard to their own physical safety."

Gannon has covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for The Associated Press since 1988. She was in Afghanistan on Sept. 11 and wrote about the Taliban's reaction to the attacks. Ejected with other foreign reporters, she returned twice after the American bombing campaign began. On Oct. 25, she was the sole Western reporter allowed into Kabul.

Politkovskaya is a reporter for the Moscow-based independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, whose reporting on the war in Chechnya has earned her threats from both the Russian government and the Chechen rebels.

Nyaira is political editor of The Daily News in Harare, Zimbabwe. She was arrested and charged with "criminal defamation" in April 2001 because she wrote articles accusing President Robert Mugabe of corruption. The case has not been settled.

The foundation also awarded Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory its Lifetime Achievement Award.

The International Women's Media Foundation was founded in 1990 to advance the role of women in the media throughout the world.
 
On the Net:

International Women's Media Foundation: http://www.iwmf.org/