The World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC) has created an annual award for press freedom champions, the Dana Bullen Press Freedom Advocacy Prize, in honour of the organisation's first Executive Director.
The committee also announced that the first prize would be bestowed on veteran free press activist Leonard R Sussman, Senior Scholar of Freedom House and its Executive Director for 21 years (1967-88), during which he created that organisation's annual press freedom survey, now seen as the statistical standard, ranking how free the press is in every major country.
A prolific author on freedom of the press, Sussman has been tireless internationally, championing the right during major world controversies on press freedom for the past four decades. Among the 10 books he has written on the subject, was the first book length study, in 1989, of the likely impact of new media technologies, Power, the Press and the Technology of Freedom.
Dana Bullen, himself a distinguished press freedom advocate, was the WPFC's director for 15 years, 1981-1996, and continued to be closely associated with it as Senior Advisor, until his death last year. A longtime working journalist, he was the Foreign Editor of the Washington Star until that newspaper went out of business in 1981.
The prize is to be awarded by WPFC Chairman Richard Winfield, on December 9 in conjunction with WPFC's 20th Annual Lecture on Global Communications Issues. This year's lecture is to take place at the United Nations, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The World Press Freedom Committee is an umbrella organisation, bringing together 45 journalistic groups on five continents, representing labour and management and print, broadcast and online press, united to defend and further press freedom.
