2007 Sidney Hillman Prize Winners

“Fiasco,” Thomas E. Ricks

Thomas E. Ricks is The Washington Post’s senior Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the U.S. military since 2000. Until the end of 1999, he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for 17 years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Making the Corps and A Soldier’s Duty.

Today, the war in Iraq is such a terrible, inescapable fact of our time that it’s hard to remember back to its build-up in 2002. That it was a war of choice, justified by sheer fiction and tragically mismanaged by the Bush Administration, is powerfully established by Tom Ricks’ authoritative, damning account of the Iraq war’s first years. Fiasco recounts the early policy decisions, the fatal lapses in judgment by U.S. civilian and military leaders in charge of the post-war theater, including the shameful record at Abu Ghraib, and the disastrous insurgencies that flourished as a result.

It all still has the power to shock. With his deep sourcing among all levels of the U.S. military and his careful reconstruction of events (many of which are told for the first time), Ricks lays bare one of the darkest chapters of U.S. history from which we have yet to extricate. ourselves.

“The Invisibles,”
Douglas McGray, West Magazine (Los Angeles Times)

Douglas McGray, a California-based fellow at the New America Foundation, writes about social and political issues for the Atlantic Monthly, This American Life, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, and West, the Sunday magazine of the Los Angeles Times. His work has been profiled on the cover of Time Asia and in the “Year in Ideas” issue of the New York Times Magazine. Previously a features editor at Foreign Policy, McGray was an architect of its transformation from a quarterly journal into an award-winning magazine. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN, NPR, and the Charlie Rose Show. McGray studied history and international affairs at Brown University.

McGray tells a fascinating, little-known story of a group of college students caught in a strange netherworld of statelessness. Across California—and in other states, as well—there are large numbers of undocumented immigrant youths trapped between their illegal immigrant status since arriving in the U.S. as infants or small children and their thoroughly American lives. These often high-achieving youths, who should be headed for great careers and hopeful futures, find they can’t get student loans or lack the documentation to graduate. They symbolize the larger problems of long-stalled immigration reform but remind us of the human costs meanwhile. McGray spent nearly a year finding, interviewing, and gaining the trust of about 30 undocumented immigrant college students from across California, spending time with them at home, in school, even in class. And he has become an energetic advocate for a bill pending in Congress, the Dream Act, that would address the injustice he has helped to illuminate.

“Coverage of Hurricane Katrina aftermath,”
Rukmini Maria Callimachi
The Associated Press

Rukmini Callimachi joined The Associated Press in Portland, Oregon, in 2003 and spent a year in New Orleans documenting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Her reporting has won the Templeton Religion Story of the Year award, the Associated Press Managing Editors’ Charles Rowe Award, and the Peter Lisagor Award for public service for a project on immigration, co-written with two of her colleagues. She began her career as a freelancer for Time magazine in New Delhi, India. Born in Bucharest, Romania, Callimachi graduated with honors from Dartmouth College and completed her masters in linguistics at Exeter College, Oxford. Her poetry has been published in over 20 journals, including The American Scholar. In 2000, she co-led the Royal Geographical Society of London’s expedition to Tibet. In late 2006, Callimachi began reporting out of Dakar, Senegal, as a correspondent for the Associated Press in West Africa.

Many news organizations sank a lot of time and money into reporting the effects of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Yet even amid the continuous coverage, the work of Rukmini Maria Callimachi stands out. Assigned by the AP to New Orleans for a year to help report on the recovery, Callimachi was tireless and creative as she sought out fresh ways to tell the story of the wrecked region.

Callimachi followed up big themes, looking into the ugly racial divide in New Orleans, comparing insurance payouts to blacks and whites. But she also used small details to tell powerful stories. She noticed, for example, that the 2006 Yellow Pages was nearly half the size of the previous year’s—showing in a glance how much business had been lost. She also created a touching series for AP online of children’s stories about their storm-tossed lives and lost homes and belongings. Callimachi brought energy and urgency to the story of the still-struggling city and environs.

“Aids Orphans ,”
Mike Stocker and Joe Amon,
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Mike Stocker has been a staff photographer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel since 1998. Previously, he worked at The Miami Herald for 9 years. He has covered stories in Haiti, Israel, Latin America, Africa, and throughout Eastern Europe. He has been recognized by the World Press, NPPA, the Southern Short Course, the Atlanta Seminar on Photojournalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for outstanding coverage of the problems of the disadvantaged. He was a Pulitizer Prize finalist for Spot News Photography in 1999 of Hurricane Mitch in Central America and as part of a team in 2002 for Feature Photography. In 2006, he was again a finalist in feature photography “for his imaginative exploration of Holocaust survivors as Judaism faces a new century.” A graduate of the University of Florida, he lives in Hollywood with his wife Susan and children Mimi, 13, and Ben, 11.

Joe Amon has been a photographer at the South Florida Sun Sentinel since 2003. A native of Pittsburgh and a former Marine who served in Lebanon in the 1980s, he has won numerous awards in feature photography and editing.

He was part of the team named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of hurricanes that hit Florida. Amon is also an advanced open-water diver with extensive underwater photographic experience.

Amon, 47, is a graduate of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the invitation-only Eddie Adams Workshop. He has worked at newspapers in Pennsylvania and Virginia as both an editor and photographer over the last two decades. He lives in Boca Raton, Florida.

The AIDS epidemic is hardly a new story, and it’s even possible that newspaper readers could tire of the subject, given all the coverage over the past few years. But Mike Stocker and Joe Amon—and Sun-Sentinel’s editors and writers—blow away all reader fatigue. In a moving and thorough four-part series, the photographers introduce us to the orphans of AIDS in the Caribbean and South Florida, children whose families are decimated by the disease. Stocker traveled to Haiti, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere and zoomed in on a few children’s stories, documenting their struggles with beautiful, life-affirming portraits. Amon followed the sad decline of a young South Florida girl as she futilely fought the disease. The series, said the Hillman judges, showed an unusual commitment by the Sun Sentinel to support extended photographic essay work requiring time and investigation in an era when few publications still do so. 

“When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts ,” Spike Lee and Sam Pollard
40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks/HBO

Spike Lee, as a writer-director, producer and author, has helped to revolutionize the role of black talent in cinema. Widely regarded as today’s premier African-American filmmaker, Lee is a forerunner in the do-it-yourself school of independent film. His latest film, “Inside Man,” received acclaim from critics and audiences alike. His recent critical and box-office successes have also included such films as “She Hate Me,” “25th Hour,” and “The Original Kings of Comedy.” Lee’s films “Girl 6,” “Get on the Bus,” “Do the Right Thing” and “Clockers” display his ability to showcase a series of outspoken and provocative socio-political critiques that challenge cultural assumptions not only about race, but also class and gender identity. His debut film, the independently produced comedy “She’s Gotta Have It,” earned him the Prix de Jeunesse Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986 and set him at the forefront of the Black New Wave in American Cinema.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Brooklyn, Lee returned south to attend Morehouse College. After graduation, he moved back to Brooklyn to continue his education at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan, where he received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in film production. He founded 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, based in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York. Lee has been a professor at The Tisch School of the Arts—NYU Graduate Film, where he is also the artistic director.

Sam Pollard’s professional accomplishments as a feature film and television video editor, and documentary producer/director span almost thirty years. His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton’s Blackside production Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crosswords. For one of his episodes in this series, he received an Emmy. He recently received another Peabody Award as one of the producers on the 2002 PBS series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.

Between 1990 and 2000, Pollard edited a number of Spike Lee’s films: Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers and Bamboozled. As well, Pollard and Lee co-produced documentary productions for the small and big screen, including Four Little Girls, about the 1965 Birmingham church bombings which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Pollard began in 1972 as an apprentice in a WNET-sponsored film-training workshop. In between films, throughout the 1980s, he edited for the highly acclaimed children’s programs, NBC’s Vegetable Soup and The Children’s Television Workshop’s 3-2-1-Contact for which he received two Emmys. Pollard is a Professor of Film Studies at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

Spike Lee and Sam Pollard’s documentary is one of those rare journalistic gems—a living record of a historic moment that gives voice to the disempowered. For hour upon hour, Levees walks us through the rising waters and the lives of people of every social level who were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, left to fend for themselves as government lost its way. Though there’s no omniscient narrator, the cumulative effect is a powerful indictment of local and federal officials’ neglect and incompetence. The film refuses to steer away from the most sensitive of subjects—the complications of race and poverty and the myths that grow out of decades of distrust—and forces us to look straight ahead at the devastation that ignorance and indifference can cause. This documentary is an important record of a tragic moment in American history that continues to unfold.

"Tapped,"
Sam Rosenfeld, Web editor
Ann Friedman, Web deputy editor
Garance Franke-Ruta, Ezra Klein, and Matthew Yglesias, bloggers

Sam Rosenfeld has been editor of American Prospect Online since July, 2006. Before that, he was a staff writer for the magazine. Ann Friedman has been associate editor of American Prospect Online since November, 2006. Previously, she was the managing editor of Alternet, an editorial fellow at Mother Jones, a program associate at Legal Momentum, and a reporter for several local newspapers in Missouri and Iowa. Matt Yglesias began work at the Prospect in 2003 as a writing fellow and became a staff writer the following year. In addition, he writes an eponymous blog and, in 2005 and 2006, wrote for Josh Marshall’s TPMCafe. His blog is now hosted by the Atlantic, where he is associate editor. Ezra Klein began work at the Prospect in 2005 as a writing fellow and was promoted to staff writer this year. He has written for numerous publications, including The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times. Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor. She has also worked at The Washington City Paper, The New Republic, and National Journal magazine, and has written for many publications. In 2006, she was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“Tapped is a link-intensive collection of musings, ramblings, opinions and other assorted writing on the developments of the day—from political gossip to policy debates to commentary on material from other publications.” That’s how the blog of the American Prospect magazine modestly bills itself. What it doesn’t say is that it’s smart, newsy, witty, and an important weapon for progressive readers in today’s media wars. The range of topics addressed is wide, from Presidential politics to Plan Colombia to health plans. It does a good job of telling readers what’s good in the rest of the media, while breaking some original news itself. In the open-source spirit of the Web, the generous sprinkling of links expands visitors’ choices even more. Tapped is an unabashedly progressive site with a voice that’s strong but not shrill.