This year's winners of the Payne Awards standing with the Awards' founder are (from left) David Offer, D'Anne Hamilton, Dick Schneider of The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun, Ancil Payne and Nellie Moore. Photo by Jack Liu

It was a story that needed to be told.

In 1960, hundreds of black students marched through the streets of Jackson, Tenn. calling for voting rights. But the local paper kept quiet, burying reports on the racial controversy that divided its community.

Forty years later, The Jackson Sun finally broke the silence. In spite of public pressure not to unearth the story, the paper published a seven-day series on the community's civil rights history. In it, The Sun examined its own record of racism and its failure to cover the civil rights movement fairly and accurately.

The series earned the news organization a 2001 Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism. The Payne Awards were established at the School by Ancil Payne, a long-time Northwest leader in broadcast journalism. The awards honor journalists who encourage public trust in the media by courageously practicing the highest standards of their profession in the face of political or economic pressures.
Also honored were three individual journalists who refused to compromise their news standards in the face of tremendous pressure.

The judges selected Nellie Moore, D'Anne Hamilton and David Offer as the 2001 professional winners. When First Amendment issues arose, these journalists could not find solutions that allowed them to continue working and maintain their integrity.

As producers and hosts of "National Native News," Alaska natives Moore and Hamilton became two of the most recognized names and voices on public radio. When management at their station proposed that representatives of corporate contributors co-host a new program, Moore and Hamilton protested. They feared that such an arrangement would threaten the station's credibility and autonomy. As a result of their ethical choices, they were fired from their positions at Koahnic Broadcasting Corp.

Ancil Payne

David Offer, who was executive editor of Stars and Stripes, resigned when the newspaper's publisher killed a front-page story on the possible deployment of a Patriot anti-missile unit. Offer called the publisher's decision a result of pressure from the Pentagon and said that although he was upset at the initial decision to kill the story, he felt compelled to resign when the paper was allowed to run the Washington Post's wire story containing the same information.

Judges for the Payne Awards include SOJC Dean Tim Gleason; Joann Byrd, editorial page editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Everette Dennis, director of the Center for Communication at Fordham University and its Felix E. Larkin Distinguished Professor of Media and Communication Industries; Larry Grossman, author and former president of NBC and PBS; Patsy Smullin, president of California Oregon Broadcasting, Inc (Medford); Mark Trahant, chairman and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education (Oakland, Calif.); Jim Upshaw, KEZI-TV (Eugene), Distinguished Professor of Broadcast Journalism at the SOJC; and Mark Zusman, editor of Willamette Week (Portland).