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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Who’s next?

Who’s next?

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Steve Clemons asks a very good question: now that Fareed Zakaria has returned his prize from the ADL (the Hubert H. Humphrey prize, which comes with $10,000), will other winners of the prize return it too? Here’s a list of other recent winners:

2009 – Nat Hentoff 2009 – Clarence Page 2008 – Tim Rutten 2007 – Jon E. Meacham 2006 – Charles Krauthammer 2005 – Fareed Zakaria 2003 – Floyd Abrams 2003 – Bernard Lewis 2003 – Daniel Pearl (posthumously) 2002 – Bob Schieffer 2001 – Bernard Shaw 2000 – Wolf Blitzer 1999 – Lesley Stahl 1999 – Marvin Kalb 1998 – Arthur Miller 1998 – Meet The Press 1997 – Dr. Seuss (Posthumously) 1997 – C-SPAN 1997 – Ranan Lurie 1996 – Dan Rather 1996 – Mortimer Zuckerman 1995 – Larry King 1994 – Charles Kuralt 1993 – David Kaplan (posthumously) and CNN 1992 – Bill Moyers 1991 – The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour 1990 – Martin Peretz 1990 – A.M. Rosenthal 1989 – George F. Will 1988 – Fred W. Friendly 1987 – William Safire 1986 – This Week with David Brinkley 1985 – The Wall Street Journal 1983 – Dial Torgerson (Posthumously) 1982 – Max M. Kampelman and the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 1981 – Dore Schary (Posthumously) 1979 – Jacobo Timerman 1978 – John Chancellor, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters 1977 – Hubert H. Humphrey

How about Bill Moyers? He ought to return his prize too.

Reader Interactions

28Comments

  1. 1.

    dmsilev

    I’m going to go way out on a limb and guess that it won’t be Charles Krauthammer. Or Marty Peretz.

    Edit: Please fix that link. Promising Steve Clemons and delivering Megan McArdle is just cruel.

    dms

  2. 2.

    Albatrossity

    Wolf Blitzer got this award? Seriously?

    I think I’d return it on that basis alone…

  3. 3.

    aimai

    Wow, what an execrable list. With the exception of Dr. Seuss, Bill Moyers, and about five others its pretty dire. It reads like a “Who’s Who” (the for profit kind, where you pay to get your own plaque) of jerks and right wing stooges.

    aimai

  5. 5.

    Chris P

    Is that this websites’ version of rickrolling to link to Mcmeghan unawares like that? I’d prefer you just skip the intermediate step and slam the ice pick directly thru my brain, thanks

  6. 6.

    cat48

    I don’t see any others who might be Muslim. Unfortunately, I doubt it really hits them personally like it does Fareed. I assume he’s Muslim because he said his young son is one day on his show. He said it was one reason he voted for Obama, his young Muslim son might have a better life. Sigh.

  7. 7.

    dmsilev

    @aimai: They only have a few of the actual award citations online, but here’s what was written for Krauthammer:

    “In his decades as a public intellectual, Charles Krauthammer has weighed in on almost every important issue at some point, including such hot-button subjects as stem cell research, the debate over creationism and intelligent design and the Iraq war,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “In some instances, this extraordinarily shrewd political commentator has argued the administration’s position better than the administration. … “For more than two decades, Charles Krauthammer’s brilliant and influential writings have helped frame the shape of American foreign policy,” said Mr. Foxman, noting that Mr. Krauthammer coined and developed “The Reagan Doctrine,” defined the structure of the post-Cold War in “The Unipolar Moment” (Foreign Affairs 1990/1991) and outlined principles of post 9/11 American foreign policy in his February 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture, “Democratic Realism.”

    Translation: “Krauthammer was a more effective neocon than the neocons in the Bush Administration. Three cheers for the First Amendment!”

    dms

  8. 8.

    steviez314

    Your first line reads: “(the HUMBERT H. Humphrey award)”.

    Isn’t that an award that gives you $10,000 and an underage girl?

  10. 10.

    Jay Schiavone

    We don’t know what Moyers did with the 10 grand, he may well have re-gifted. I think we hold him to a ridiculous standard by compelling him to have anticipated by 19 years that the ADL would espouse disagreeable views. By that standard, we should demand that all prize winners return all prizes prophylactically.
    Say Doug, is every dollar in your pocket of impeccable origin? Do you refuse to pay taxes for moral reasons. I think this purity is a bit much.

  11. 11.

    cmorenc

    Both Zakaria and Blitzer are in the same stable at CNN. Query whether there’s been any conversation (yet) between the two since Zakaria returned the award, whether the specific matter of why Zakaria returned his award and Blitzer has not (yet) chosen to do so came up during that conversation, and if so, at whose initiative it was that the subject came up.

    You would think that even if Zakaria and Blitzer have not had any face-to-face conversations about the matter, the fact that Blitzer has NOT yet made any public comment or move (yet) about the matter surely must be a matter of no small amount of background buzz at CNN, and even Blitzer can’t be so oblivious as to not realize this. The matter has to be like a huge pile of colorful, stinking vomit spattered prominently across the CNN newsroom floor, hard to ignore.

  12. 12.

    Jason

    Here is Foxman’s response to Zakaria:
    http://www.adl.org/media_watch/tv/20100806-Fareed+Zakaria.htm

    Foxman’s position on this, throughout, has relied mostly on an argument from principle that doesn’t seem well-established, and his defense of the ADL doesn’t extend beyond a listing of the ADL’s record as a pro-tolerance organization. Since I haven’t seen a proper substantiation of the ADL’s position besides “well, we did this to Catholics in 1993, so we’re perfectly consistent,” there isn’t much to be said about the issue itself. But I do wonder if the people who might return the prize would issue an editorial (to the extent they’d even think about the matter) about the ADL’s reasoning.

  14. 14.

    New Yorker

    Nat Hentoff sticks out on that list as someone who should return it immediately.

    Chuckie Krauthammer, Bernard Lewis, and Mary Peretz….not so much.

  18. 18.

    New Yorker

    @aimai:

    I don’t think so, unless supporting the Iraq War, which a lot of reasonable people did in 2003, is “bugfuck crazy”. I think the guy has been critical of Obama for not downsizing the Bush national security state, which suggests he’s still sane when it comes to civil liberties.

  19. 19.

    Tom Q

    @New Yorker: My impression is more in line with aimai’s. Hentoff hasn’t had a nice word to say about a Democrat since 1992, but was comparatively restrained in his criticism of Bush II. He’s virulently anti-abortion, which made him hate Clinton with a burning passion. I believe he was very much in support of the Starr witch hunt.

    On the overall question here: I don’t think folks who won over a decade ago are obligated to follow Zakaria’s action, as the ADL wasn’t then what it is now.

  20. 20.

    Brachiator

    @DougJ:

    Thanks. I fixed it. Still getting the hang of this on the pad.

    Somehow, “on the pad” just sounds so wrong.

    @Tom Q:

    My impression is more in line with aimai’s. Hentoff hasn’t had a nice word to say about a Democrat since 1992, but was comparatively restrained in his criticism of Bush II.

    Huh? From the Wiki

    An ardent critic of the Bush administration’s expansion of presidential power, Henthoff in 2008 called for the new president to deal with the “noxious residue of the Bush-Cheney war against terrorism.” Among the national security casualties have been, according to Henthoff, “survivors, if they can be found, of CIA secret prisons (“black sites”); victims of CIA kidnapping renditions; and American citizens locked up indefinitely as “unlawful enemy combatants.” He has advocated prosecuting members of the Bush administration, including torture lawyer John Yoo, for war crimes.

    I’m not sure this counts as restrained criticism of Bush.

    He’s virulently anti-abortion, which made him hate Clinton with a burning passion.

    Hentoff is virulently anti-death penalty as well as anti-abortion. I don’t agree with his anti-abortion stance, but I do see that there is more intellectual consistency here than with the typical wingnut.

  21. 21.

    liberal

    @aimai:
    Actually, while I like Dr. Seuss’ children’s books, he’s about as good a candidate for the prize as some of the other zeroes they gave the award to. During WWII he had some extremely racist cartoons against the Japanese.

  22. 22.

    liberal

    @New Yorker:

    I don’t think so, unless supporting the Iraq War, which a lot of reasonable people did in 2003, is “bugfuck crazy”.

    Bullshit. No one reasonable supported invading Iraq; supporting the invasion made one ipso facto unreasonable.

    The fact that lots of people were crazy, and whose views should now be viewed with a high degree of suspicion, does nothing to change that.

  24. 24.

    liberal

    @Tom Q:

    I don’t think folks who won over a decade ago are obligated to follow Zakaria’s action, as the ADL wasn’t then what it is now.

    Hmm…:

    Martin Peretz 1990 – A.M. Rosenthal 1989 – George F. Will 1988

  26. 26.

    Brachiator

    @liberal:

    RE: [Hentoff] supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq…

    Which is irrelevant to the claim that Hentoff was “comparatively restrained in his criticism of Bush II”
    unless support for the war in Iraq is some kind of original sin that invalidates anything else that a person ever says or does.

  27. 27.

    The Other Chuck

    @Jay Schiavone:

    By that standard, we should demand that all prize winners return all prizes prophylactically.

    If they know ahead of time that the organization giving the award would make a complete mockery of its mission, then perhaps yes.

    No one is morally censuring Bill Moyers; they’re appealing to his decency to make a symbolic gesture *now*. As for the money, he could afford returning it but I don’t see why he should go making a $10K donation to the ADL. I’d say if it was given in good faith decades ago, you keep the cash and return the now worthless symbol.

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