Fourth Estate dinner speakers Don Graham, Sandy Rowe to honor Amanda Bennett
Amanda Bennett, best known for her award-winning leadership in investigative reporting at The Wall Street Journal, The Oregonian and Bloomberg News, will receive the National Press Club's most esteemed prize, the Fourth Estate Award, at a Club gala in her honor on Oct. 17.
Bennett is the 47th recipient of the award, which recognizes journalists who have made significant contributions to the field.
She will be honored that night with tributes by Donald Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post, and Sandra Mims Rowe, former editor of The Oregonian, where Bennett was managing editor and led an investigation into the Immigration and Naturalization Service that won the paper the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Tickets can be purchased online.
Bennett won her first Pulitzer earlier in her career with her colleagues at The Wall Street Journal, for their coverage of the AIDS epidemic.
Bennett was also editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader and later of The Philadelphia Inquirer, the first woman to lead that newsroom in its 174-year history.
Bennett served as executive editor of Bloomberg News from 2006-2013, where she led a global team of investigative reporters and editors that won numerous awards under her direction, including two Polk Awards. Bennett was named director of the Voice of America in March 2016.
The Fourth Estate Award is the top honor bestowed on a journalist by the Club's board of governors. Previous winners include Marty Baron, Dean Baquet, Wolf Blitzer, Gwen Ifill, Andrea Mitchell, Bob Woodward, Jim Lehrer, Walter Cronkite, Christiane Amanpour and David Broder.
The gala dinner is a fundraiser for the Club's nonprofit affiliate, the National Press Club Journalism Institute, which advocates for press freedom worldwide, equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire civic engagement and provides scholarships to aspiring journalists.
At the gala dinner, Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist who gave voice to Jeffrey Epstein’s long-ignored victims and prompted a legal re-examination of Epstein’s predatory behavior, will receive the Journalism Institute’s 2019 Neil and Susan Sheehan award for investigative journalism.
Brown’s work revealed a decade-old secret plea bargain that hid the scope and details of the accusations against Epstein and denied the young women he victimized their day in court. The Herald’s series, “Perversion of Justice,” led to a federal sex trafficking indictment against Epstein and the resignation of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta for his past role in the deal. Acosta was a federal prosecutor at the time and agreed to the plea deal.
Brown will be introduced with a short tribute by Michael Sallah, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at BuzzFeed who worked with Brown at The Miami Herald.
The evening will also feature the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award winners: Aasif Sultan, a journalist with the Kashmir Narrator magazine who has spent a year in jail for his reporting, and Politico reporter Mackenzie Mays for her dogged pursuit of the truth in the face of harassment while reporting for McClatchy's Fresno Bee.