This item isn’t news but its low profile is:
Nobody knows better than journalists that the best way an organization can bury an announcement it knows will make news is to do so late on a Friday.
So it’s little wonder that the Society for Professional Journalists decided to announce its retirement of the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award on January 14.
Of course, the SPJ’s release makes clear it’s not because the organization had a change of heart about Thomas’s worthiness of having a namesake award but because “No individual worthy of such honor should have to face this controversy. No honoree should have to decide if the possible backlash is worth being recognized for his or her contribution to journalism.”
It’s understandable they should want to retire it. A journalist getting the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award would be kind of like an actor getting the Mel Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award. In either case, if someone Jewish got it he/she might feel a little (ahem) uneasy..
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.