The George Polk Awards for 2006 were announced on Monday by Long Island University. The awards seek to honor journalism in the tradition of George W. Polk, a CBS correspondent killed in 1948 covering the civil war in Greece. The New York Times carried a good summary of the 12 winners. Some of the winners seem deserving of recognition for excellence, some not. Among the winners was Spike Lee, who won for "When the Levee Broke," his HBO documentary on Hurricane Katrina. Stephen Spruiell's NRO review dissented from the acclaim that greeted Lee's film:

When the Levees Broke fails because it consciously does what the media did so naturally: It channels the emotions of a devastated population at the most convenient and obvious targets. To this end, much of the film is recycled news footage from the week after the disaster, when the media brimmed with outrage. We see the maddened crowds at the Morial Convention Center. We see CNN’s Soledad O’Brien eviscerating the bumbling and hapless FEMA director Michael Brown. We are treated to the filmic equivalent of a high-five for rapper Kanye West for his silly “Bush doesn't care about black people” remark.

Even the favorable Newsday review gives one pause:

There are also a handful of blessedly brief interviews with "celebrities" and other notables - the Rev. Al Sharpton, Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Kanye West and so on. But their presence is usually the equivalent of fingernails dragging across the chalkboard. When Belafonte starts chatting about a meeting he had with Venezuela president Hugo Chavez "to discuss what he could do to help and while we were at it, to see what he could do to help other needy black people in the United States," you can almost feel "Levees" sag to the point of rupture. West has a deer-in-the-headlights stare when asked about his controversial "Bush doesn't care about black people" remark made during a Katrina charity telethon - the one that got so much outraged press at the time. Here, he has nothing else to contribute.

Putting Spike Lee to one side, the New York Times article's summary of the Polk Award winners makes me wonder whether journalistic excellence is necessarily the key to the award:

From “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams,” Lisa Myers, a senior investigative correspondent, and Adam Ciralsky, a producer, won the television reporting award for exposing what it called unfair preferential treatment in the awarding of a $70 million contract to Raytheon Company to develop a system to combat rocket-propelled grenades. An Israeli system had already been found to be effective. Congress is reviewing the circumstances.

The military reporting Polk went to Lisa Chedekel and Matthew Kauffman of The Hartford Courant for a four-part series, “Mentally Unfit, Forced to Fight,” detailing a high rate of suicide among American troops, many of them under the severe stress of combat in Iraq, and flawed mental health screening and treatment by the military services.

Robert Little, a national correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, won the medical reporting award for a three-part series, “Dangerous Remedy,” examining the use of an experimental blood-coagulating drug on more than 1,000 soldiers, although it had been linked to fatal clots in the heart, lungs and brain.

Previous Polk Award winners include such journalistic luminaries as Nina Totenberg, I.F. Stone, Diane Sawyer, Henry Louis Gates and Jimmy Breslin. Tne most honored journalists in the history of the Polks are Donald Barlett and James Steele, whose ludicrous economic reportage John and I spent a couple of years debunking. One of our articles on Barlett and Steele was published in National Review in 1994 and is available online: "George Bush's tax return."

The current issue of the Weekly Standard features an article by the prominent World War II historian Richard Frank on George Polk himself: "George Polk's Real World War II Record." The Standard has also made a much longer version of Frank's article along with many of the key documents supporting the conclusions offered available here.

Frank is of course a serious historian of World War II and was familiar with Polk’s actual history in the Pacific, which was perfectly honorable. He came across the claim in Kati Marton’s book that Polk had been a naval aviator and had shot down 11 -- eleven! -- Japanese planes. He started digging. He shows that Polk was never a naval aviator, and that he fabricated evidence that he was.

Frank's article is a remarkable piece of work. It is the kind of work that should win awards established to honor outstanding journalism, such as the Polk Award. Yet Frank's article could barely find the light of day:

Some three years ago I started trying to publish the real story of George Polk. I believed that if the evidence were placed before a fair sampling of prominent outlets of American journalism, one or more of them would be interested in publishing an article and thus would vindicate the oft-repeated claim that the mission of journalism is the fearless pursuit of truth. This story has now been offered to the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Harper's, Slate, the Wilson Quarterly, and the American Scholar. The first three declined to publish it; the others did not respond.

Frank's article casts light not only in the dark corners of George Polk's career, but also in the dark corners of journalism today.

To comment on this post, go here.