Josh Marshall Wins 2007 George Polk Award

Ever since I began blogging, Josh Marshall has been my hero and my mentor. He has courage and integrity, intelligence and wit, talent and dedication that is rare in any profession, let alone journalism. He is modest. He is humble. He is kind. I could go on, but he would hate that, so I won't.

Instead, what I will say is this--today, Josh Marshall was awarded the George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism, Legal Reporting. It was awarded to him for his work, along with Justin Rood and Paul Kiel, in leading the national news media on the story of the politically motivated firings of the US Attorneys.

From the Polk Awards announcement press release:

The Polk Award for Legal Reporting will go to Joshua Micah Marshall, editor and publisher of the widely read political blog, Talking Points Memo. His sites, www.talkingpointsmemo.com and www.tpmMuckraker.com, led the news media in coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall and his staff (with his staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding. Marshall’s tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/us-attorneys/2007/03/

We extend our personal and professional congratulations to our friend Josh, who is not only a deserving reporter and editor, but a real leader in the field of journalism. Real journalism. The way it used to be practiced--with grit and guts, intelligence and hard work.

The Polk Award is not merely prestigious, it is coveted and its list of winners reads like a who's who of real journalists. I know that others love their Pulitzer Prizes. Leave them to it. Who knows, Josh may win that, too, but for my money, the Polk Award is for the reporters who have displayed courage and an unrelenting resilience in their work. And I'm not the only one that thinks so:

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. Russell Baker and Bill Moyers, among others, say the George Polk Award means more to them than any other prize. When Washington Post reporter Ronald Kessler won a George Polk Award for national reporting some years ago, his boss, Ben Bradlee, was taken aback because the Post hadn't even submitted Kessler's stories. "I can't believe it," Bradlee said on learning of the award. "We thought it was far and away the best thing we printed all year, but we didn't enter it because we felt it was not the kind of work that wins awards."

Some of the biggest names in journalism have won George Polk Awards -- Christiane Amanpour, Roger Angell, R. W. Apple, Homer Bigart, Jimmy Breslin, Walter Cronkite, Gloria Emerson, Frances FitzGerald, Thomas Friedman, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, Marguerite Higgins, Chet Huntley, Peter Jennings, John Kifner, Ted Koppel, Charles Kuralt, Joseph Lelyveld, Tony Lukas, Mary McGrory, Edward R. Murrow, Jack Newfield, Roger Rosenblatt, Morley Safer, Oliver Sacks, Harrison Salisbury, Sidney Schanberg, Daniel Schorr, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, Red Smith, I. F. Stone and Nina Totenberg.

And now we add Joshua Micah Marshall's name to that list.

It looks good there. It's right where it belongs.