CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (March 13, 2008) – Tim Golden, senior writer for The New York Times, will present the 2008 Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard on February 21, 2008.
Golden has written extensively on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and at other U.S.-run prisons abroad including those in Afghanistan. His reporting has been recognized for its fresh, balanced portrayal of the U.S. military’s tactics in dealing with prisoners that have resulted from broader American policies.
The Morris Lecture honors the foreign correspondent of the Los Angeles Times who was killed in February 1979 while covering the Iranian Revolution in Tehran. The lectureship was created in 1981 by family members, Harvard classmates and friends.
Morris was a member of the Harvard Class of 1949. He inherited an interest in international news from his father, who had served as foreign editor of United Press International and the New York Herald Tribune. After working as a local reporter at The Hartford Times and Minneapolis Tribune, Joe Jr. worked at Newsweek and later the Los Angeles Times. The Middle East was his journalistic home for 25 years.
In February 1979, Morris and other Western journalists were in Tehran covering one of the final events of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. On February 10, in a clash between forces loyal to the government and those committed to the Ayatollah Khomeini, Morris was struck by a bullet and killed. In the fall of 1981, he posthumously received the Nieman Fellows’ Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity.
Tim Golden, the 2008 Morris Lecture speaker, was a Nieman Fellow in the Class of 1996 and currently serves as a member of the Nieman Advisory Board. Prior to joining The New York Times, Golden worked for The Miami Herald and United Press International. He was a member of the Times team that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for articles about drug corruption in Mexico. He also shared a 1987 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for stories on the Iran-Contra affair while working at The Miami Herald. Golden’s stories on the drug trade received awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Nancy Dickerson Whitehead Prize. He is a 1984 graduate of Dartmouth College.
Last year, Golden was a finalist for the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers for his stories on Guantanamo. The award is presented by the Nieman Foundation.
The Nieman Foundation administers the nation’s oldest midcareer fellowship program for journalists. Nieman Fellows are U.S. and international reporters, editors, photographers, producers, editorial writers and cartoonists who come to Harvard for a year of academic study. Since 1938, more than 1,200 men and women from the United States and 87 other countries have received Nieman Fellowships.
The Nieman Foundation publishes the quarterly magazine, Nieman Reports, written by journalists for a worldwide audience of leading journalists in all media and journalism educators. The foundation is also the home of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism, which seeks to advance the craft of narrative reporting and writing in newspapers and other media, and the Nieman Watchdog Project, which encourages reporters and editors to monitor and hold accountable those who exert power in all aspects of public life.