Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone Accepts the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award

Kevin Sites was proud to receive the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism.

On June 24, the Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone team accepted the Daniel Pearl Award at 46th annual Southern California Journalism Awards.

Given for courage and integrity in journalism, the Los Angeles Press Club presents the award in consultation with Judea and Ruth Pearl, parents of slain Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl.

The Pearls said Kevin Sites' style of work and commitment to the truth mirrored their son's work.

Due to his Hot Zone travel schedule, Kevin Sites was not able to attend the event in person. But, he did send back an acceptance speech for the awards dinner, which you can view here.

Excerpts from the LA Press Club story on Kevin Sites can be found below.

Kevin Sites - On Site
by Jill Stewart 

At 43, Yahoo's "Hot Zone" war correspondent Kevin Sites has reported on, and been the subject of, more controversy than a typical war journalist experiences during an entire career.

He is the recipient of the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism, given by the Los Angeles Press Club in consultation with Judea and Ruth Pearl, parents of Wall Street Journal reporter assassinated by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.

Sites was tapped by Yahoo! last September to launch his news journal (http://hotzone.yahoo.com), where he plans in a single year to cover all of the roughly three-dozen armed conflicts identified globally by the international Institute for Strategic Studies. His most recent assignment, as of press time, was in troubled Sri Lanka.

The multi-media program Sites produces includes print reports, still photography, live video and audio — all gathered using an ingenious array of technology stuffed into a single backpack.

His Los Angeles based senior producer, Robert Padavick, formerly of CNN and NBC News, says, "If he'd been in the Middle East or Africa, some place closer to California, he would have been there to receive the Daniel Pearl Award. But he couldn't make it from a remote place in Asia. This award for Kevin is a huge honor, and it shows that we are on people's minds."

While things have gone surprisingly well from a technical standpoint, Padavick worries about Sites' safety — he was surrounded in Somalia by "nerve-wrecking anarchy." Padavick does, however, see ample rewards in Sites coverage. The most disturbing was a piece on a child bride in

Afghanistan, given up at the age four to a family who "tortured her for years," Padavick says. She escaped, and Sites discovered her in an orphanage transformed into "a girl with so much poise beyond her years that Kevin was floored." After it ran, Sites received 16,000 emails, and another 8,000 reactions appeared on Hot Zone's comment board.

Sites has been a lightning rod for controversy since he blazed onto the public conscience in November of 2004 after he videotaped a U.S. Marine shooting an already-wounded Iraqi insurgent in a Fallujah mosque. Then an NBC correspondent, Sites was eviscerated by some as a traitor to U.S. troops, but praised by others as an impartial journalist.

The embattled Sites later defended himself on his blog, www.kevinsites.net, saying, "I never got an angry email from the unit I was with nor from Marine battlefield commanders who, though, saddened by the incident, knew I reported with fairness and context."

His work continued to draw strong reaction as he reported from the Colombia drug wars, Haitian slums, Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands, Iranian religious communities in Tehran and grim surgery wards on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a Jewish Review article in March, Sites said public reaction to online reporting, including his own, tends to be "very vitriolic" — a response he welcomes for providing a "self-correcting mechanism," but says can also discourage "reason and dialogue..."

As a CNN correspondent, he and his team were captured while trying to be first into volatile Tikrit during the U.S. invasion of

Iraq. Threatened with death by the Fedayeen militia controlled by

Saddam Hussein, the CNN team was released thanks to the efforts of a Kurdish translator traveling with them.

Things have changed dramatically since his bosses at CNN ordered Sites to suspend his "war blog" three years ago, with a CNN spokesman explaining to USC Annenberg's Online Journalism Review at the time, "We do not blog."

Last fall, Sites bucked tradition again, signing onto Hot Zone. At the time, Yahoo! said he would cover conflicts "typically left uncovered or under-reported by mainstream new organizations." The job came with an even more unusual four-part credo: "transparency" in his reporting process so online users can see him overcoming real-time problems in the field; "vulnerability" as Sites experiences the same dangers to which his interview subjects are exposed; "empathy" as Sites pursues local sources regardless of what they believe; and "solutions" provided to his readers, who are given online links to organizations working in war-torn areas.

Few journalists could work under such non-traditional conditions, but Sites has made a career of defying tradition. Today, he usually works without a safety net, traveling solo and relying on high-definition digital cameras and satellite modems to get his stories out — with help from Los Angeles producer, Padavick, associate producer, Erin Green, formerly with C-SPAN and NBC, and researcher Lisa Liu, formerly with Radio Free Asia.

"Kevin was in the Sudan, in a very difficult and remote place, then after a short break he was heading into Fallujah, and he tells me, ‘Man I think I have malaria. I have night sweats,'" Padavick recalls. "Before I could ask him if he was taking his medication he was saying, ‘I have my next story set up tomorrow,' and then he was off and running. It reinforces the point that we are doing this without bureaus or contacts along the way."

Yahoo! describes the brand of journalism Sites is practicing as "a nexus of backpack journalism, narrative story-telling techniques, and the Internet."

Perhaps. But for millions of online users who have seen his work and images, both terrible and beautiful, the untraditional risk-taker Kevin Sites is practicing journalism in its most unfettered form.

 

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