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Awards
Series on secret docket garners fourth national award
Dan Christensen of the Daily Business Review will receive the 2004 Eugene S. Pulliam First Amendment Award for reports on secret court cases in the U.S. District Court in Miami.
It is his fourth national journalism award of the year for the series of articles that focused on the five-month secret detention of Mohamed K. Bellahouel, an Algerian-born South Florida resident taken into custody after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
“Dan Christensen’s work on behalf of the First Amendment is an excellent example of one journalist’s dedication to exposing secrecy that is becoming all too common,” said Georgiana Vines, chair of a five-member panel of judges and past national president of the Society of Professional Journalists. “This was a form of secrecy that hid everything, including the case number.”
The $10,000 award presented by the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation honors Pulliam, who was publisher of the Indianapolis Star and the Indianapolis News at the time of his death in 1999.
Christensen’s nomination was selected from a field of 34 entries.
Earlier this year, Christensen was among several finalists in the inaugural Michael Kelley Award sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly. His series also won the National Press Club’s Freedom of the Press Award and a National Headliner award from the Press Club of Atlantic City.
The Eugene S. Pulliam First Amendment Award was established to honor Pulliam’s name, work and First Amendment legacy. It will be presented during the closing banquet at the annual SPJ National Convention in New York on Sept. 11.
The Sigma Delta Chi Foundation is the fund-raising and educational arm of SPJ.
Christensen broke the Bellahouel story in March 2003. Bellahouel’s case was later filed for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected the case for review. But the articles prompted the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press and a number of news organizations to file amicus briefs. The Reporters Committee also started a study of secrecy in the federal courts.,
“At a time when there is growing secrecy in government as a result of the Patriot and Homeland Security acts, the judges felt Dan Christensen stood out for his efforts in attracting national attention to the Bellahouel case and court secrecy in general,” said Vines, associate editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee.
Bellahouel had been detained for overstaying his student visa after FBI agents learned he had worked as a waiter at a restaurant in Delray Beach patronized by some of the al Qaeda hijackers, and he was accused of accompanying one of them to a nearby movie. He was released after authorities apparently concluded he wasn’t a threat.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, nominated Christensen for the Pulliam award. She said that to her organization’s knowledge, “no other case filed with the Supreme Court has been handled with such excessive secrecy. Only through Christensen’s reporting did the public have any idea what the case was about.”
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