NO DEGREES OF SEPARATION
The Party of the Year

BY MICHAEL HOYT

For the tenth annual International Press Freedom Awards dinner, the venue was the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria on Manhattan's Park Avenue. The dress code: black tie. Over time the affair has become the A-list media gathering, where powerful New York press people and several hundred of their acquaintances meet each year to briefly regard the rest of the troubled world. It is an event with many parts, not all of them seamlessly joined.

The dinner is in support of the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization that does just what its name promises for reporters, editors, and publishers facing repression and worse around the globe. The committee came up with the idea of a benefit dinner a decade ago, around the time it lost its office lease, and the affair saved its bacon. Pass-the-hat cocktail parties didn't raise enough money, nor did journalist membership drives. But going upscale did. By now, tables are available on a sliding scale, from $5,000 to $25,000, purchased by the likes of Bloomberg, Lexis-Nexis, Verizon Communications, Dan and Jean Rather, Continental Airlines, The Industry Standard, The Nation, Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas, The Reebok Human Rights Foundation, Viacom, and Philip Morris Companies.

Like most such events it begins with a cocktail hour. Gene Roberts chats with Clarence Page; Osborne Elliott with Kati Marton and Richard Holbrooke; Mike Wallace with Andy Rooney; David Remnick with James Kelly, who is being roundly congratulated for his elevation to managing editor of Time. This year's dinner features a special award for Otis Chandler, so the east coast party has a west coast wing from the late Times-Mirror. Soon we all migrate to the Grand Ballroom, which is vast and kind of breathtaking. Alex Donner & His Orchestra provide music, to which no one listens.

This is all back on November 21, the night the nation is waiting for big news from the Florida Supreme Court, so the dinner's scheduled host, Tom Brokaw, has to stay late at the office. An affable Dave Marash of Nightline substitutes, and introduces Ann Cooper, the executive director of CPJ, stunning in a thin-strapped red dress. Next come the heroes, the four men who form the centerpiece of the evening, honored for courageous journalism in the face of serious, strong, and sometimes brutal repression. The first is actually present only via video, on a large screen in front of the lush blue curtains at the front of the ballroom. Mashallah Shamsolvaezin is in Evin prison in Tehran, seven months into a thirty-month sentence for running afoul of Islamic principles during the press reform movement that was recently crushed in Iran.

The second honoree is there in the flesh. A fellow Internet journalist, Michael Kinsley, introduces Steven Gan of Malaysiakini.com, an editor who has found that the World Wide Web can provide a route around a repressive government. The third hero, Modeste Mutinga of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a large-shouldered man with a fierce gaze. His speech is translated from the French, and more clearly than some might have wished: "Although three million people have died in my country in the past two years, I feel that the American press has not been moved to action."

"I denounce this indifference," he says. The applause is tepid.

The chill of Mutinga's words is lifted, though, when the fourth hero, a tough but sweet-faced newspaper editor named Zeljko Kopanja, begins his speech with the words, "Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues . . . ."

In 1999, Kopanja started his car one October morning on the way to coffee and found himself looking across the car seat at one of his legs. He lost both of them, in fact, to the bomb. This was payback from fellow Serbs for his newspaper's exposure of their killing of Bosnian Muslims. He climbs the steps to the podium slowly and carefully, a crutch in each hand, and thanks the committee for the award. It will offer encouragement, he says, to "all the people of my country who prefer the truth to lies, the light to darkness . . . ." The crowd explodes in applause. It is the emotional high note of the evening.

There is applause too when Otis Chandler, who gets an award for a lifetime of achievement in the cause of press freedom, uses his speech to eviscerate the "completely unqualified" Mark Willes and Kathryn Downing for dragging down his beloved Los Angles Times. Then we move on to the smoked salmon, medium-rare beef, and some good Merlot.

Two elements brought an extra touch of the surreal to the CPJ affair this time around. One was the imminence of the Florida ruling, which, it was thought at the time, might finally settle the presidential election. At around 10 p.m., the court's pro-Gore, let-the-recount-proceed ruling was announced, the news beamed onto the big screen. A cheer started to rise, then fell, as guests seemed to recall that political neutral is the proper gear at a journalistic event.

The other element was a group of Columbia students, two tables full of them, fanning out before the serious eating began, to question the New York media figures about the nature of the New York media elite. On the whole, the students disapproved of all the glitz. They were there as part of a J-School class meant to consider just what it means to have so many journalists on one island, working and socializing and thinking together and then telling the nation the news.

One student, Donna Ladd, approached Hodding Carter III, who launched into a hearty criticism of the "self-reflecting glory" of the media elite. "One reason we're in deep trouble in this country is it's mostly about our own mirrors," he said, "with half the people adjusting their ties." Camille Finefrock spoke to Peter Arnett, who lamented that the press has cut way back on foreign coverage. "To compensate," he says, "they back this event."

She also spoke to Osborne Elliott, a former dean of the J-School, who declared that "there is a media elite, and I'm the head of it." He would later joke to another student that Walter Isaacson is the elite's only member. Steve Brill announced to Erica Pearson that the subject of New York's media elite is "a ridiculous idea for an issue." (Oh?)

Others saw something to talk about. Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper's, told another student, Lindsay Faber, that he worries about a "total disconnect between the media and the working class now." Danny Schechter, who runs a production company called Globalvision, told Faber that there is indeed such a thing as a media elite, and that the trajectory of the annual CPJ affair, to the ritziest part of New York, is a reflection of its direction. After dessert, after the last of the speeches, and full of dinner and stories of real journalistic courage, we all went out to search for taxis in the cold.

What was that mild glow that some of us felt? Was it the Merlot, or was it a sense of connection to something large? Journalists in places like New York do not face tests of character like car bombs or prison. No Taliban here. No thugs to beat us. Still, we have our demons to face. We have subtle ones, like careerism or cynicism or commercialism, or the failure to see beyond our own gilded worlds. Some inspiration can't hurt.

Andy Rooney, looking rumpled despite a fine black tuxedo, told another of the persistent students, Kate Novack, that at the CPJ dinner "there is a bonding that takes place that strengthens the standards we all hope to maintain." The dinner raised $1,043,515, meanwhile, for the committee to continue its work.

Michael Hoyt is CJR's executive editor.