Welles Hangen Award takes on special poignancy in year of war and death

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli to receive journalism achievement award. Her lecture is part of a series of events dedicating the new Watson Institute building.

by Mary Jo Curtis

When Sylvia Poggioli comes to campus May 3, the award-winning National Public Radio correspondent will receive the University’s Welles Hangen Award for Superior Achievement in Journalism.

Poggioli – who will be honored at 4 p.m. in Sayles Hall – never knew Welles Hangen ’49, the NBC Hong Kong bureau chief who was captured and executed by Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge guerillas while covering the Vietnam War. But in a year marked by the gruesome murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and too many other war correspondents, she is achingly familiar with his story.

“I knew Daniel Pearl and the Spanish journalist of El Mundo who was killed with three other journalists in Afghanistan last fall,” Poggioli recently told the George Street Journal. “I also knew Kurt Shork, who was killed in Sierra Leone, and other journalists killed in the Balkans.”

Indeed, 37 journalists were killed in 2001, a number that rose from 24 the previous year, in part due to the war in Afghanistan, where eight reporters perished. Although, according to the New-York based Committee to Protect Journalists, the majority of those 37 were murdered in retaliation for their coverage of crime, corruption and other sensitive stories, war reporting clearly involves special danger and risk.

“Experienced journalists do not take on risky assignments lightly,” said Poggioli, senior European correspondent for NPR’s foreign desk. She maintains that reporters should always put personal safety first and take precautions in dangerous areas, never traveling alone and always working with one or two colleagues. While “every effort must be made to maintain control of a situation,” she knows from personal experience that reporters will take calculated risks.

“The wars I covered were anomalous: They were civil wars, where reporters cross from one side of the front line to the other,” she said. “In the Balkans, we were on our own – there were no military briefers or escorts. And the frontline moved constantly. Assessing the risk was often difficult, and the most important thing was to keep a cool head.

“Sometimes a reporter finds herself in a dangerous situation without knowing it beforehand. This happened to me several times covering the Balkan wars,” she continued, noting that in the end, “I found that I only truly understood just how risky a situation was later, once I was out of the danger zone.”

For Hangen and many of Poggioli’s contemporaries, there has been no return to safety.

“When I have received news of the death of a fellow journalist, I've asked myself why am doing this,” she concedes. “I haven't been able to come up with a satisfactory answer.”

Since joining NPR’s foreign desk in 1982, Poggioli’s reports from Rome, the Middle East, the Balkans and other European locations have captivated audiences of NPR’s award-winning programs “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and “Weekend Edition.” She’s provided listeners with on-air analysis of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the turbulent civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and European reaction to the events of the Gulf War.

Poggioli has earned her numerous accolades, including a Peabody Award and several other honors for her reports on the war in Bosnia in 1993 and 1994. The daughter of Italian anti-fascists forced to flee their homeland under Mussolini’s reign, she was born in Providence and grew up in Cambridge, Mass. (Her father, Renato Poggioli, once taught comparative literature at Brown.)

Putnam Welles Hangen was a gifted student who spoke five languages and had a passion for international relations and debate. He began his career with The New York Times in 1950 as a correspondent in the Paris bureau. In 1953, at the age of 23, he established a bureau in Ankara, becoming the Times’ reporter in Turkey, then moved to Moscow. He made the move to television in 1956, taking over the Cairo bureau for NBC. The network sent him to New Delhi in 1960, to Germany in 1964 and finally to Hong Kong as bureau chief.

Hangen was last seen alive on May 30, 1970, when he and his NBC crew were traveling with a crew from CBS about 25 miles south of Phnom Penh. The group was attacked just beyond a friendly checkpoint, when an antitank rocket hit the CBS jeep, killing the reporter and crew. Hangen and his NBC crew were surrounded and led away; they were executed three days later. He left behind his wife, the former Pat Dana, and two young children.

Created in 1993, Welles Hangen Award has been presented to Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, John Chancellor, Christiane Amanpour and Morley Safer. After accepting her award, Poggioli will speak on “Terrorism, Wars and the Trans-Atlantic Relationship.” The ceremony and lecture, part of the Watson Institute dedication, are open to the public.