Hasan Cemal wins Harvard top journalist prize

Hasan Cemal-  journalist, former editor-in-chief and columnist for T24.com.tr was selected as this year’s winner of the  Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.  The prize is awarded by the fellows of the Harvard Nieman Foundation for Journalism and carries a $1000 honorarium. Cemal is also the president of Punto24 Platform for Independent Journalism.
 
In his letter of commendation, Henry Chu, Nieman Fellow and London bureau chief for the LA Times, declared the award acknowledged  a  “lifetime of achievement in upholding freedom of the press in Turkey” but was intended as a more general recognition of “the struggle of Turkish journalists to speak truth to power during increasingly difficult circumstances in Turkey.” 
 
“ We applaud your commitment and that of many of your colleagues in demonstrating the importance of media freedom,” Chu wrote.
 
Cemal’s career in the Turkish press spans 45 years including over 10 years as editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet newspaper including the 1981-3 period when Turkey was under martial law. 
 
He now joins such distinguished laureates as Edward R. Murrow (in 1965), the broadcaster who exposed Senator Joseph McCarthy; as well as (in 1993) the journalists of the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje, (Liberation) who kept publishing even when their premises came under Serbian attack and colleagues died.  Last year’s winner was Pamella Colloff, executive editor of the Texas Monthly, whose painstaking investigations exposed miscarriages of justice and deep flaws in the criminal legal system.
 
Cemal was constructively dismissed in 2013 as lead columnist for Milliyet newspaper after a very public row with then prime minister, now President Tayyip Erdoğan. Cemal had defended the right of the paper to publish the leaked minutes of a parliamentary visit to the convicted leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party, Abdullah Öcalan. His argument was that that the responsibilities  and priorities of government and media were not the same.
 
“Damn your journalism,” Erdoğan publicly replied. In phone conversations, leaked through social media, the prime minister is heard putting  pressure on Milliyet’s owner to toe the government line– at one point reducing him to actual tears.
 
The Harvard citation refers to Hasan Cemal’s defence of a journalistic profession under siege: “Cemal is one of hundreds of journalists who have been fired or who have resigned in the past few years as a result of the Turkish government’s crackdown on freedom of the press. In 2012 and 2013, Turkey jailed more journalists than any other country in the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. On Sunday, December 14, some two dozen media executives and journalists were arrested under Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws,” it reads.
 
The citation also refers to Hasan Cemal’s role in helping to found P24, described as “a nonprofit initiative aimed at promoting editorial independence, best journalistic practice, and the use of digital media in Turkey.”
 
Hasan Cemal is the author of a dozen books including 1915: The Armenian Genocide, which urged the Turkish government to acknowledge apologise for the fate of Aremians during the First World War. His clear recognition of genocide is all the more remarkable as his grandfather and namesake Cemal Pasha was one of the military triumvirate who ruled the Ottoman empire at the time.
 
He will accept the award during the spring Harvard Term. The Louis M. Lyons Award was established in 1964 in honour of the Nieman Foundation curator who retired that year after leading the institution for a quarter of a century. The jury consists of the year’s intake of Nieman Fellows, distinguished journalists from the United States and around the world. 

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