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First Amendment Award to Jerry Roberts

 

Los Angeles — Pen USA, the West Coast center for the worldwide writers’ organization International PEN, has named Jerry Roberts as the recipient of its 2007 First Amendment Award.  Roberts resigned in July 2006 as Executive Editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press, citing concern for the principles of ethical journalism; dozens of his colleagues followed suit in the months that followed.  On behalf of himself and those colleagues, Roberts will accept the award from writer/director Taylor Hackford, a Santa Barbara native and himself a former News-Press newsboy, at PEN’s annual Literary Festival Awards Gala. The gala will be held Nov. 6 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Larry Gelbart serving as master of ceremonies and MSNBC commentator and “West Wing” writer/producer Lawrence O’Donnell sharing in the hosting duties.

           

              A veteran prize-winning journalist who previously served as Vice President and Managing Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Roberts was hired as the Chief Editor of the News-Press in 2002.  Four years later, he — along with four other senior editors and the longtime community columnist —  left the paper in protest of what he believed was the impermissible imposition of the co-publishers’ personal views on the preparation and presentation of the news. Dozens more journalists left in the months that followed, citing similar concerns. The protest itself became news, attracting at first  local, then statewide, and finally national and even international media attention — and arousing intense community uproar, the vast majority of it highly supportive of Roberts and the other journalists.  Today, a more than a year after he walked out of the News-Press, Roberts faces a $25 million legal action filed against him by the paper’s owner Wendy McCaw.

 

            In announcing the award, Marvin S. Putnam, Chair of PEN USA’s First Amendment Committee, explained, “The PEN First Amendment Award honors those who have courageously —  and often at great personal loss — defended freedom of expression. This year’s Award honors those men and women of the Santa Barbara News-Press who sought to do just that.

 

“Despite its august history, the First Amendment today is challenged anew in a national debate about a confounding war, divergent national-security concerns, and the need for ‘unity’ and ‘patriotism.’  Although the News-Press controversy might at first appear to be a parochial small-town dust up, the fundamental values and journalistic principles at stake have  commanded widespread attention and passionate reaction. It’s a response consistent with our national commitment to, belief in and reliance on the idea of free speech and an unfettered press.  In giving this award we honor a particular group of men and women who recognized the extraordinary powers granted to the press by the First Amendment, and who held inviolate their conviction that those powers must be exercised in the public interest through scrupulous attention to the highest values, standards and ethics of journalistic practice.”

 

Beyond the First Amendment Award,  the Literary Festival gala will feature prizes for literary achievement in ten separate genres, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award, to be presented by Gore Vidal to this year’s honoree Clancy Sigal, author of the National Book Award nominee, Going Away, and A Woman of Uncertain Character. Additionally, Awards of Honor to four nationally prominent First Amendment attorneys--Martin Garbus, Laura R. Handman, Thomas R. Julin, and Charles D. Tobin—will be presented by prominent Los Angeles civil rights attorney Connie Rice. Academy-Award winning actress Helen Mirren will present the Freedom to Write International Award to Sahal Abdulle, the Mogadishu-based Reuters columnist, for his coverage of the conflict in Somalia, where seven reporters or other media personnel have been killed so far this year, making Somalia the deadliest conflict in Africa for journalists and the second deadliest in the world after Iraq. The evening will also pay tribute to Linda Deutsch on the occasion of her 40th Anniversary with the Los Angeles bureau of the Associated Press. Best-selling author and former police detective Joe Wambaugh will be saluting Deutsch.

 

Recipients of the literary awards were chosen by a distinguished panel of writers, editors and journalists; winners were selected from among more than 500 entries. Each winner will receive a $1000 cash prize presented at the gala. Past recipients of the honorary awards include: Jeff Bezos, Robert Shaye, Otis Chandler, HBO, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ray Bradbury,  Walter Mosley, Robert Towne, Kevin Starr, Gore Vidal, and Billy Wilder.

 

PEN USA is the West Coast center for the worldwide organization International PEN. The non-profit group  includes approximately 1,000 members who work in fiction, non-fiction, film, television, drama,, journalism, poetry, translation and children’s literature. Among its ongoing programs are Emerging Voices, which pairs selected writers of promise from underserved communities with established writers as their mentors, and PEN In The Classroom, which sends members into local high schools to teach. In addition, PEN USA fights to secure the release of writers around the world imprisoned or otherwise oppressed by their governments, and, increasingly, monitors First Amendment issues here at home.

 

 

For further information, visit www.penusa.org

Or contact, Mann Productions (323) 314 – 7000.

 

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