The Hartford Courant's Les Gura wins the first Taylor award. (Nieman Notes).(Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspaper)(Yale University)(Brief Article)

Nieman Reports, June, 2002

In a surge of media coverage and rumor, a Yale University instructor was implicated as a suspect in the 1998 killing of a Yale student. While no evidence was produced and no charges were leveled against the instructor, James Van de Velde, he became the subject of local coverage that portrayed him as the suspect, eventually costing him his teaching contract at Yale.

Les Gura of The Hartford Courant wrote an article examining the escalating situation, concluding that standards of fairness had been abandoned by news media (including the Courant), law enforcement, and Yale. For this work, Gura is the inaugural recipient of the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers, a $10,000 prize endowed by the Taylor family, long-time publishers of The Boston Globe....

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.