Issue of
February 25, 1998

Elie Abel awarded Grand Prize for Press Freedom

Elie Abel, former chair and professor emeritus of the communication department, was recently awarded the Grand Prize for Press Freedom of the Inter-American Press Association for his past efforts to fight proposed United Nations regulation of journalists. Abel was the chief U.S. delegate to the communications policy group of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in the early 1980s when the leaders of many Third World countries, frustrated by Western media dominance of news, proposed licensing journalists and other measures they felt would ensure more favorable coverage. Abel battled the effort to "protect" journalists through licensing, even winning support from the Soviet delegate.

The Miami-based association that gave Abel the award at its annual convention in Guadalajara, Mexico, is an organization of journalists from Latin America and the United States focused on press freedom and related issues in Latin America. Their major effort over the past few years has been to pressure Latin American governments to investigate the dozens of unsolved murders of journalists in Mexico, Colombia and other countries.