John Peter & Anna Catherine
Zenger Recipient ~ 2001

Louis Boccardi, The Associated Press

Louis D. Boccardi, left, President and CEO of the Associated Press, displays the John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Award for Freedom of the Press and the Public’s Right to Know he received March 29, 2001 in Tucson. Jacqueline Sharkey, acting head of the Journalism Department at the University of Arizona, displays the award presented to the Associated Press. The awards were presented jointly to Boccardi and AP for their ongoing efforts during the past decade to support access to government records.

The Associated Press and longtime AP President Louis D. Boccardi were the 2001 recipients of the John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Award for Freedom of the Press and the Public's Right to Know. Boccardi and the AP were honored Thursday, March 29, 2001 at the Tucson University Park Marriott in an event sponsored by the University of Arizona Journalism Department and the Arizona Newspapers Association Foundation.

“The Associated Press has long been a champion of freedom of the press and the public’s right to know, so it is fitting that the AP and Lou Boccardi be recipients of this award,” said Don Soldwedel, chairman of the UA Journalism Advisory Council. “We want people throughout the state who are interested in the right of the public to know what goes on in government at all levels to attend this dinner.”

ANA Executive Director John Fearing said, “Freedom of the press and the public’s right to know are cornerstones of our democracy. It is a continuing fight waged by journalists and concerned citizens to ensure these rights are not diminished.”

The Associated Press and Boccardi were chosen by the UA journalism faculty to receive the award because of their continuing support for government records access audits throughout the past decade, Fearing said.

Boccardi has been president and CEO of the AP, the world’s largest news organization, since 1985. He has taken a leading role within the news industry on crucial First Amendment issues and problems involving press credibility.

Boccardi has guided efforts to rebuild AP services using state-of-the-art technology and to modernize management practices.

He was elected a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists, the highest honor SPJ awards journalists for public service, in 1990. He was the 1988 winner of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism award and was elected a Distinguished Service Member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He was the 1992 recipient of the William Allen White Foundation Award for Journalistic Merit and was honored in 2000 with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Overseas Press Club.

Boccardi is a member of the Pulitzer Prize board and is on the board of trustees of the Freedom Forum Newseum.

Boccardi joined the AP as executive assistant to the general news editor in 1967. He previously had served eight years with New York newspapers, where he rose to be assistant managing editor of the World-Telegraph and Sun and its successor, the World Journal Tribune. He was appointed AP managing editor in 1969 and executive editor in 1973. He was elected a vice president in 1975.

Remarks of Louis D. Boccardi at Zenger Awards dinner March 29, 2001

Thank you very much.

In the ramp up to the Academy Awards show the other night, the producers promised a new HDTV set to the recipient who made the briefest acceptance remarks.

Since no such offer was made to me, relax. We're going to be together for a while.

You humble me tonight with your tribute to me and my colleagues at The Associated Press.

For all of us, thank you for this very special honor and for recognizing the work that AP does on behalf of free speech and open government.

Perhaps I should start by returning the salute. The names of John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger are familiar symbols of the headwaters of free speech in America, more than half a century before the First Amendment was written.

The Zenger trial is described every year in thousands of classrooms as the story of the birth moment of one of our country’s most cherished values. It is a tale whose significance school children can easily grasp.

And even after we’re grown-ups, the Zenger name retains its power to evoke the recognition that the right to speak out against the powerful is at the core of our national heritage, one of the things the founding fathers got absolutely and perpetually right.

So your granting an award each year in the names of these pioneer defenders of free expression is a valuable reminder to all Americans that the liberty they enjoy was hard won, by people who wanted it enough to risk everything for it.

I salute the University of Arizona and the Arizona Newspaper Association Foundation for sponsoring these awards and drawing public attention each year to the cause.

It is a troubling fact that such reminders are necessary. The need for a constant watch on government and for vigorous defense of the legal rights that make that watch effective doesn’t seem to be widely understood.

The good news in this is that most Americans don’t feel personally threatened by government in the same way our colonial forebears of the 18th Century did... although with two weeks to go before income taxes are due, I suppose I’ve picked a bad time to say so. (Taxation without representation was intolerable, but at this time of year taxation WITH representation may not look so good either. But I digress.)

Today, it appears from studies in recent years that when it comes to abuse of power, Americans are at least as likely to be wary of the news media as they are of the people and institutions we cover.

Polls indicate that many of our readers, viewers and listeners think we need to be taken down a peg. A Harris poll several years ago found that some Americans wouldn’t mind seeing licenses for reporters, fines for inaccurate or unfair coverage, more plaintiff-friendly libel laws, and a freer hand for government in keeping official information secret.

There’s clearly a disconnect between the public service we think we’re performing when we fight for access to government proceedings and documents, and the view of some of our critics that we’re serving nobody but ourselves, that we’re in it to boost circulation and profits, and then pat ourselves on the back with awards and prizes.

I will say again how grateful I am for this opportunity to point out how badly mistaken this view is. And to point out how great an injustice it does to people and organizations who go to work every day and every night determined to shine a light into places that the powerful would prefer to keep secret.

It is hard work, and often it’s dangerous. Before addressing some issues we face here at home, a few words about what our staff at the Associated Press faces around the world in the name of all the readers and viewers and listeners we serve here under the protection – and I might say – the inspiration of the First Amendment.

Two dozen journalists were killed in the line of duty in 2000, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists – many of them simply assassinated in retaliation for their work.

One of those was a gifted AP television news cameraman shot dead while covering civil strife in Sierra Leone. He was the second AP journalist in two years to lose his life on that lethal story in that dangerous land, in eerily similar circumstances.

And while here today, I learned of yet another tragic AP loss – the killing of APTN producer Kerem Lawton at the border of Kosovo and Macedonia. He was widely admired, professionally and personally. His death is our 9th in the line of duty in the last decade – a terrible toll that saddens us indescribably.

We have suffered elsewhere as well, though not with the ultimate price of life itself.

The danger to reporters is global. Riot police in Jakarta beat one of our photographers who was taking pictures of anti-government protests last year.

Another AP cameraman was shot in the leg during sectarian violence in another part of Indonesia.

In the Middle East, an AP reporter covering a local election runoff just outside Cairo was slapped and kicked by a police officer.

A photo stringer covering a confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis in Bethlehem was shot and seriously wounded by an Israeli soldier.

During rebel violence in Fiji last year, an AP video producer was shot in the arm. AP reporters covering the Falun Gong movement in China have been repeatedly detained and harassed and seen their film stolen.

In Chechnya last September, one of our reporters was seized, beaten and then held overnight in a covered pit by Russian troops. Just a few weeks ago, police in Seoul, South Korea, clubbed another AP video producer with their riot shields as he was filming a labor demonstration.

One of those who has endured such dangers is here tonight – your alumnus Mort Rosenblum of our International staff.

I won’t go on. You get the point. These are not risks anyone takes for the sake of a chance at a prize or a promotion.

To make sure our staff is as well prepared as they can be to deal with them, we’ve put scores of our people through an intensive five-day course on how to handle themselves in danger zones. More will get the training this year.

Fortunately here at home, reporters are far, far less likely to encounter even threats of violent injury. But official determination to control the flow of information can be just as fierce as it is abroad.

Over the past two years, AP bureaus in nearly a dozen states have led or helped coordinate county-by-county Freedom of Information audits to see how well local government and police agencies comply with sunshine laws.

The findings vary widely, but even in the best areas there is plenty of room for improvement, and improvement generally follows publication of our findings.

I am aware of at least four more such statewide checkups planned for this year.

Either on our own or in partnership with other news organizations, AP has repeatedly opposed specific official efforts to control or silence the news.

We fought a recent decision by Michigan corrections officials to restrict reporter access to prisoners. We’re fighting similar efforts by their counterparts in Illinois to conceal evidence of wasteful or fraudulent spending.

We joined other news organizations in Arizona to open up what would have been secret meetings to discuss financing for a proposed new sports arena in Phoenix. In Utah, we’re among media plaintiffs in a fight to keep the state Board of Regents from conducting public business behind closed doors.

When Montana officials tried to seal the terms of a deal they made to settle a wrongful death suit, we were among news organizations who sued successfully to open the record.

AP fought with some success in Australia last year alongside other international news agencies for wider media access to Olympic athletes and spectators in the areas next to the arenas and other venues.

Closer to home in Florida, AP has been part of the nearly continuous tussle with officials over access to the disputed presidential ballots still being counted and recounted there.

Just recently, we stood up successfully against the long-time practice in the Baltimore police force of fingerprinting anybody who asked for press credentials.

AP campaigns regularly to open courtrooms to still and video cameras, as we’re doing now in a case involving the massacre of five people and the wounding of two others in a fast food shop in New York.

The courts are frankly a mixed blessing to us in the F-O-I arena. On the one hand, they often help us vindicate our rights under the law. On the other hand, the courts themselves often stand between us and the news we seek to report.

In the Firestone and Goodyear tire cases... in the civil suit by a former Olympic official over athlete drug testing... in the spy proceedings against nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee... and in dozens of other cases, AP has sought to persuade or force judges to unseal evidence or open proceedings that either they or the parties in the case wanted to keep hidden.

There is nothing the least bit self-aggrandizing about this work. It is difficult; it is often invisible; it is sometimes unsuccessful; it is expensive. And however much of it you do, there is more where that came from.

There are easier ways to boost circulation. Low hanging fruit is everywhere in this business, stories that can be plucked and published without any help from a First Amendment attorney. There is only reason for commitment to this perpetual guerrilla warfare... because it helps keep government power in check and keeps the people’s business in the public eye.

AP and our fellow news organizations have prevailed in a majority of the cases I’ve cited. That’s been possible because we’re on the side not only of the angels as we see it, but of the law of the land.

That includes not only the First Amendment but also the federal Freedom of Information Act, which, by the way, just turned 35 years old.

Former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta said in an address just a few weeks ago on F-O-I Day that this law in its brief lifetime has done democracy a service of immeasurable value – it has shifted the burden to government to justify withholding information. The law helps keep the people in power honest.

“Power may be justly compared to a great river which, while kept with its due bounds is both beautiful and useful; but when it overflows its banks, it bears down all before it.”

Not my words, though I would be proud if they were. They were uttered in a courtroom in 1735 by Andrew Hamilton, John Peter Zenger’s attorney. He went on to say this:

“Let us at least do our duty, and like wise men use our utmost care to support liberty, the only bulwark against lawless power.”

There’s a crucial lesson for us today in noticing exactly to whom Hamilton was addressing this call to action. It wasn’t to the reporters and editors of his day.

Hamilton was doing something unheard of in the courtrooms of that time. He had turned his back on the judge and was making his argument directly to the jury of common citizens who would decide the case.

“The question before the Court and you gentlemen of the Jury is not of small or private concern,” he told them. “It is not the cause of a poor Printer of New York alone, which you are now trying; No! It may in its consequence affect every Freeman that lives under a British Government on the main of America.”

John Peter Zenger didn’t walk out of the courthouse because the jury thought a publisher should be able to talk back to the government. Zenger walked because ordinary citizens were persuaded that their own liberty was at stake along with his.

Many ordinary citizens need persuading now that what we do is not just for us, but for them.

When we report on our efforts to obtain government documents or open proceedings...when we editorialize about them... when we speak about them to community groups or in public schools... we need to make it clear that we’re not just exercising a news media right. We’re performing the service that the People of the United States said they expected of us when they ratified the First Amendment.

It’s not an abstract service to abstract principle. It’s real service with measurable benefit. As Podesta put it in his recent address:

“The successes of the Freedom of Information Act can be counted in the foreign policy mistakes uncovered so as not to be repeated, the unsafe consumer products recalled and the potentially wasted federal dollars that have been saved.”

Freedom of Information is as vital to good government and individual liberty today as it was in the days of John Peter Zenger. It matters to everyone, and we must never cease reminding everyone how much.

Thank you for encouraging us with this wonderful award to keep the faith.