OPC Begins Its 70th Year at Annual Awards Dinner

This year's OPC Awards honored the amazing work that journalists managed to accomplish in 2008, despite the economic free fall and its impact on media companies. The 2008 OPC Awards marked the beginning of the club's 70th year. Twenty awards were distributed by CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, on the thirty-sixth floor of the Mandarin Oriental ballroom on April 22. The 465 people who attended the ceremony caught panoramic views of Central Park at sunset.

As the program commenced, OPC president Allan Dodds Frank and dinner chairman William J. Holstein took the stage with breaking news: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent an e-mail to show her support to the OPC and for press freedom. In the e-mail she vowed to continue voicing concerns to governments who jail journalists.

Continuing the call for press freedom, Cesar René Blanco Villalón, co-editor of Zeta performed the traditional candlelighting. Villalón traveled for the event from Tijuana where he edits the weekly paper founded in 1980 by his late father Jesus Blancornelas, who survived an assassination attempt in 1997. Zeta is one of the only publications in Mexico that regularly runs investigations on organized crime, drug trafficking, and corruption in Mexico’s northern states, where self-censorship is rampant.

“Zeta will continue to support freedom of the press,” Villalón said.

The first award of the event was The Fay Gillis Wells Award, established this year in honor of Wells, a founding member of the OPC in 1939 and to be given to a woman journalist of exceptional achievement. The first recipient of the award is Ruth Gruber, foreign correspondent, author and photojournalist. Wearing red Western boots, distinguished professor at John Jay College and Eleanor Roosevelt biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook, introduced Gruber and delivered a rousing, poetry-slam style recap of Gruber's many accomplishments.

“I believe journalists are gifted,” Gruber said. “We can shake the world by the lapels and ask, 'how can you let these things happen in our day?' We journalists have the tools: words and images. All of us have to go inside our souls, use our tools to fight injustice so that we can live in a world we're proud of.”

Gruber has written nineteen books, including two memoirs, Ahead of Time and Inside of Time, and is working on her third memoir, Inspite of Time. Gruber said journalists should do everything with heart and to do it right, and that her secret for living a long life – she is 97 – comes down to four words: “Never, never, never retire.”

The awards got underway with Christiane Amanpour echoing Gruber's comments on holding people accountable. “Journalists have this commitment and passion and belief in shaking up the world,” Amanpour said. “Even in these tough times.”

The Los Angeles Times won The Hal Boyle Award for its reporting of drug violence in Mexico. Bureau chief Tracy Wilkinson accepted the award with several colleagues and said that the candlelighting by Villalón is a sobering reminder of what's at stake in Mexico.

“Despite the many, many, obstacles at the LA Times, we do have dedicated resources for reporting in Mexico,” Wilkinson said. “Mexico is our largest neighbor and what happens there affects the U.S. As long as the LA Times is there, we will continue to report.”

Two members of the ABC World News team, Stephanie Sy and Neal Karlinsky accepted The David Kaplan Award, Sy cutting her honeymoon short by a day to attend the OPC event. Sy and Karlinsky relayed the experience of covering China's earthquake. As the ABC World News team was trekking down into the valley, villagers were making their way up the mountain. Karlinsky said it was difficult to cover the earthquake because of the police and yet not difficult because of the people they met along the way.

“There was a frail old man with a hunched back,” Sy said. “On his back he carried his injured wife. To me it said so much about the frailty of life and about the human spirit.”

In closing their acceptance, Sy said that after only 10 days of marriage, she knows her husband would carry her on his back. Karlinksy offered to carry his wife and children, too.

Richard Behar won The Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting from abroad for Fast Company for his report "China Storms Africa." The six-part series looked at China's resource rush in Mozambique, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea and incorporated his experience with a parasitic illness as metaphor for the Chinese invasion.

“The same with the copper, cobalt and coltan that China rips from the ground in Zambia and Congo, much of it illegally, which winds up in our computers, iPods, Sony Playstations for our kids,” Behard said. “We’re all interconnected, and we are all parasitical, until we can devise a better way. If we can." (Read the text of Behar's speech.)

A few of the award winners were in the field the night of the event and sent editors in their stead. The book The Forever War (Alfred A. Knopf) won The Cornelius Ryan Award for best non-fiction book on international affairs. Dexter Filkins sent his editor who said that he went round and round with Filkins on the acceptance speech.

“You know Dex,” the editor said and affected his best Filkins voice. “'I don't know, man. The OPC is great. The jacket design is great. Man, you know how to do all that.'” In a final plea from the editor, Filkins wrote in an e-mail: “I thank The New York Times for letting me do what I do. I love newspapers and we need them more than ever. Long may they live.”

The final award of the evening was the OPC President's Award, which went to legendary newsman Jim Lehrer. In addition to being executive editor and anchor of "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," Lehrer has written 19 novels, two memoirs and three plays. OPC President Allan Dodds Frank introduced Lehrer and displayed his latest novel, Oh Johnny!

“This book combines all three of Jim's interests,” Dodds Frank said. “Baseball, WWII and buses.”

Lehrer took the podium after a standing ovation and said, “I am but one of the keepers of foreign reporting on our show. I thank you for the special attention for my achievements, but please, in television, there is no such thing as false modesty.”

During his speech Lehrer paused and said, “MacNeil always says, 'Jim, you're so emotional, you'd tear up over a light-beer commercial.'”

He spoke of the need of mentors and good editors and closed his speech by recalling his experience in the 1950s.

“I was at a small junior college in South Texas and worked nights in a bus depot,” he said, then broke into a depot-announcers voice. “May I have your attention please?” He listed the various towns and ended the announcement, “All aboard!”