The NPF Newsbag

Breitbart As A Journalist? And Other Flying Pig Stories

I go out of town for two weeks to do our training program at the International AIDS Conference and  all kinds of stuff happens. There's the phony video about a non-existent racist speech, distributed by the disreputable eye-poker Andrew Breitbart, which gets a government employee fired and sets off a whole series of apologies and "who's a racist?" deep-thinks from the White House on down. Then there's the Journolist issue (which I'll get to in another post). And then finally New York Times media critic David Carr ventured into the murky swamp of identifying the aforenamed Mr. Breitbart as a real journalist, as if its OK to jettison integrity in favor of a-t-t-i-t-u-d-e.

NPF Educates Global Health Media in Vienna

NPF will be in Vienna, Austria this week for our Journalist to Journalist HIV/AIDS Media Training prior to the XVIII International AIDS Conference. We have awarded 59 journalists from 40 countries with all-expenses-paid fellowships to attend our J2J training and AIDS 2010.

During the 4-day J2J program, our journalists will hear from more than 20 experts on important topics such as AIDS in children, HIV in prisons, tuberculosis, and more. They’ll also tour Viennese hospitals caring for HIV/AIDS patients and participate in special discussions about journalism practice issues relating to HIV/AIDS coverage.

To take part in the action, make sure to check out our global public health issues blog, the NPF Helpdesk. We’ll be posting updates from J2J sessions and the International AIDS Conference. You can also check out our Twitter page, where we’ll use #J2JVienna for all Vienna-related content. 
 

1997 NPF Winner Nina Totenberg Receives the CPB Murrow Award

Nina Totenberg, NPR's award-winning legal affairs correspondent, was named recipient of the 2010 Edward R. Murrow Award by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "Nina Totenberg represents public media's excellence in journalism," said Pat Harrison, president and CEO of CPB.  "Her work embodies the legacy of Edward Murrow, and we're pleased to honor her with this distinguished award." Nina Totenberg has worked with NPR for thirty-five years.  Her reports air regularly on NPR's All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition.

NPF honored Totenberg in 1998 with the Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. View the video of her acceptance speech from the 1998 NPF Annual Awards Dinner below.
The NPF Annual Awards Dinner recognizing journalistic achievement is one of the largest media dinners in Washington, bringing together more than 1,000 journalists, media, public relations and corporate executives, policy makers and trade groups.
 

 

Kelly Kennedy, Journalist-Soldier

We are starting a new series of video interviews with journalists who have gotten really interesting stories, how they did it and what the impact has been on them. The first in this new series is with Kelly Kennedy, a reporter for Army Times. Her first book is, They Fought for Each Other: The triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq (St. Martin's). The book is unrelenting in its depiction of the stomach-churning stress the troops live under, and shows the same kind of detail and respect for soldiering found in Michael Herr's Dispatches. I interviewed Kelly after she spoke to our Paul Miller fellowship group, on July 7, 2010. The interview is on YouTube here. (Bob Meyers)