Ridenhour Awards

Yesterday at the National Press Club, the fifth annual Ridenhour Awards & Luncheon took place. The Ridenhour Awards seek to recognize and encourage those who persevere in acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society. GAP is a strategic partner in producing the event, and a past winner of the Truth-Telling prize is Climate Science Watch Director Rick Piltz.

The awards are named in honor of Vietnam veteran Ron Ridenhour, who famously wrote a letter to Congress and the Pentagon describing the My Lai Massacre. Ridenhour later became a very respected investigative journalist before his death in 1998. Awards this year were handed out as follows (from the Ridenhour Awards Web site):

Bill Moyers is awarded the 2008 Ridenhour Courage Prize in recognition of his fierce embrace of the public interest and his advocacy of media pluralism, and for contributing an unyielding moral voice to our national discourse.

James D. Scurlock is awarded the 2008 Ridenhour Book Prize honoring an outstanding work of social significance from the prior publishing year. Scurlock’s book, Maxed Out: Hard Times in the Age of Easy Credit is a disturbing account of America’s unsustainable relationship with debt, revealing the vulnerability of the average person to the predatory and unethical lending methods of banks and credit card companies.

Matthew Diaz has been awarded the 2008 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling. Diaz is a former JAG officer who, while stationed at Guantánamo Bay, was the first person to release the names of the prisoners at the detention camp. In early January 2005, on the last night of his tour, he mailed a list—with the names and corresponding serial numbers of the 551 prisoners—in a Valentine’s Day card to a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Diaz hoped that his actions would help lawyers file habeas corpus petitions on the prisoners’ behalf.

-- Dylan Blaylock