The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) congratulates Dr. Lindsay Palmer (University of Wisconsin-Madison) as winner of the annual Covert Award for best mass communication history article, essay, or book chapter published in the previous year.
The award memorializes Dr. Catherine L. Covert (right), professor of journalism at Syracuse University, the first woman professor in Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Journalism and the first woman to head the AEJMC History Division, in 1975.
Dr. Covert died in 1983. The award has been presented annually since 1985.
Palmer’s winning piece is: “The Reagan Doctrine or “Sandinista Chic”? Political Balance in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 1982 Mission to Central America,” and was published in Journalism History 50, no. 3 (2024): 253-269.
The article was a strong contender throughout the competition judging phases and received the top marks and praise by judges. “It’s a great piece of transnational research that does an excellent job triangulating numerous historical sources, from oral histories to news content, to government documents and other archives,” said one judge.
“The author has begun – and will continue, I hope – the essential archival work of reclaiming and critically analyzing the origins of the international press freedom movement. There are dozens, perhaps more, local, national, and international press freedom groups, and they deserve a history,” wrote another judge.
Dr. Lindsay Palmer is a Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has written two books on international reporting: Becoming the Story: War Correspondents since 9/11 and
The Fixers: The Underground Labor of International Reporting. Palmer is currently working on her third book that tells the history of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“It’s such an honor to win this amazing award, which is named for a true luminary in our field. I deeply appreciate the vote of confidence,” said Palmer (right).
Covert Award Committee chair Dr. Elisabeth Fondren (St. John’s University) thanked the four judges for their service and for grappling with a particularly rich field of entries.
“This year’s submissions covered an impressive range of mass communication and journalism history topics,” Fondren said, “including labor history, Black history, women’s history, free speech topics, gender newsroom inequalities, government-press tensions, propaganda, and audience research.”
The History Division will honor Palmer as part of the annual AEJMC convention in August 2025.
An abstract for the winning article follows:
The Committee to Protect Journalists is a world-renowned press freedom organization that advocates on behalf of journalists being persecuted for doing their work. Launched in 1981, CPJ was originally imagined as a group of US journalists who would speak out on behalf of beleaguered colleagues working under both right-wing and left-wing dictatorships. CPJ was a product of the late Cold War, and its members found it particularly challenging to navigate US foreign policy—especially when advocating for journalists in Central America. This article tells the story of CPJ’s first international mission to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, showing that the mission was riddled with internal tension. Such tension centered on the question of how to gain credibility with both conservative and liberal lawmakers in Washington. CPJ members each believed that they could and should gain this credibility by striking a political balance among the delegates themselves, as well as in the official statement that followed the mission. Yet, the political differences among the people who went on the mission ultimately led to bitter disagreements about how to represent journalists’ persecution in that region of the world.
For additional references on Dr. Covert, see:
https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1063&context=sumagazine
https://roghiemstra.com/covert-bio.html