Why Was Juan Gonzalez Left Out of NY Daily News Pulitzer for 9/11 Health Effects?

The New York Daily News has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for an editorial series on the medical fall-out from the 9/11 attacks. In its five month series, "9/11: The Forgotten Victims", the Daily News looked at how more than twelve thousand people have fallen ill from the contaminated air around Ground Zero. But in some circles, the Pulitzer award was as noteworthy for whom it did not mention: Daily News columnist and Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez.

Gonzalez was the first reporter to question government officials' insistence that the air around Ground Zero was safe. While most of his media colleagues bought the official line that 9/11 had posed no contamination threat, Juan continued to pursue the story. He was criticized by New York City and other government officials who even called the Daily News to complain. Juan's editors responded by relegating his columns to the back pages or killing them outright.

The Village Voice reported this week that this background was not lost on several Daily News staffers. According to the Voice, the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize was met with: "muted applause" in the newsroom. The irony, the Voice reports, is: "stunning. The [Daily News] won one of journalism's highest prizes for writing about illnesses that might have been prevented had [it] not bowed to government and corporate pressure in 2001 and instead kept Gonzalez's prescient warnings in the public eye."

* Keach Hagey, covered this story for the Village Voice, where she is a staff reporter. Her piece is called "Dishonorable Non-Mention."
* Joel Kupferman, executive director of the New York Environmental Law & Justice Project.

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/1410245