Barry Bearak '71 Receives Award for "Committing Journalism" in Zimbabwe

New York Times correspondent Barry Bearak '71 has been awarded The George Polk Award in Journalism, one of the most coveted journalism honors in the U.S. He shares the award for foreign reporting with his wife, Celia W. Dugger.

The pair serve as co-bureau chiefs in Johannesburg, South Africa, and risked their freedom and lives in Zimbabwe to expose the violence that shook that country in the wake of last year's disputed elections. Even after Bearak spent five days in jail for "committing journalism," the reporters continued to file dozens of stories that painted a vivid picture of the repression, disease, and hunger that still torment the African nation.

This is the second Polk award for Bearak, the first coming in 2001 for his reporting in Afghanistan on the struggle between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance for months before the U.S. joined the war. In 2002, Bearak received a Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, "for his deeply affecting and illuminating coverage of daily life in war-torn Afghanistan," as cited by the Pulitzer Prize committee.

"The truth is that it is not wars, chaos, or mayhem that Barry excels at covering. It is his special gift of telling stories about the lives of people we would never know and describing their common humanity across great distance of place and culture," said John Podesta '71, who presented Bearak with a Doctor of Humane Letters at the 2008 Knox College Commencement ceremony. "He has a rare ability to listen carefully and write beautifully about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, or at least ones that we are not used to experiencing."

Bearak came to Knox from Chicago, where he received a degree in political science, then a master's degree in journalism from the University of Illinois. He was a general assignment reporter for The Miami Herald and a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times before joining The New York Times in 1997. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize and two Polk Awards, Bearak has won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice for a series on the American labor movement and the Mike Berger Award for a series on heroin addicts in Brooklyn.

Bearak gave the Opening Convocation Address at Knox in 2002 and received a Knox College Alumni Achievement Award in 2003.