Asia Society Bestows the ‘Ozzies’
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The Asia Society board chairman, Richard Holbrooke, welcomed attendees at a luncheon last Thursday to honor winners of the 2006 Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism. The awards, he said to audience laughter, have become “known as the Ozzies.” The award has also affectionately been called the “Oz Prize.”
Mr. Holbrooke told of his 34 years of friendship with Mr. Elliott, who served as editor in chief and chairman of Newsweek from 1961 to 1976. Mr. Elliott was founding chairman of Citizens for NYC and became New York’s first deputy mayor for economic development.
Mr. Holbrooke told about the time he helped plan a surprise lunch at the Asia Society in honor of Mr. Elliott. Mr. Holbrooke accompanied him up Park Avenue, and after getting off the elevator and seeing the party, Mr. Elliott expressed his surprise. But, Mr. Holbrooke said, it turned out “he knew all along.” He had been tipped off by an out-of-town friend who had spilled the beans by calling to tell him, “Oh, I’m sorry I can’t go to the lunch.” That shows, Mr. Holbrooke said that “you can’t surprise” Mr. Elliott. He’s so nice he wants to help you keep the surprise. So it ends up: “The surprise is on you.”
Jury chairman Norman Pearlstine introduced the two winners of the 2006 Osborn Elliott Prize, each of whom spoke. The first was Barbara Demick, who has been bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times Seoul since 2001. She showed video clips of one of the largest private markets in North Korea, a place that most foreigners have not seen. The video clip even caught on tape an attempted shoplifting incident in action. “Almost all the commerce in North Korea is illegal,” she said.
She also showed video clips of makeshift restaurants set up alongside a road. She will be teaching a course at Princeton next year called “Covering Repressive Regimes.”
The other winner, Matthew McAllester of Newsday, spoke about his reporting on the tumultuous events in Nepal, where King Gyanendra reinstated the House of Representatives after massive protests in that Himalayan country in April.
Mr. McAllester’s writing has captured the texture of a nation caught between Maoist insurgents in the countryside and an autocratic king in power.
He talked about young children being pressed into working on roads. He had praise for photographer Moises Saman, whom he worked with: “I see myself as a large caption writer” for his pictures, he said.
Mr. McAllester also had a request to make of the news executives who were in the room: “Could you add [foreign] bureaus” instead of reducing the number?
Audience members had several questions, such as how the Nepalese view the monarchy. The president emeritus of the Asia Society, Nicholas Platt, asked how porous the North Korean border was. Ms. Demick said North Koreans could very easily get into China by bribing a border guard and walking or wading across. “The problem is,” she said, “when they get to China, they have no place to go.” Robin Duke of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation asked about counterfeiting in North Korea.
Others in the audience included William vanden Heuvel of Allen & Company; Morley Safer of CBS Television Network and his wife, Jane, a consultant to arts organizations; and Ernest Pomerantz of StoneWater Capital LLC.
Other events taking place at the Asia Society include a breakfast on June 8 on “Making Sense of the Iranian Nuclear Threat” with the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, David Albright, and a professor of international policy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, Lawrence Scheinman. On June 16 there will be a program on “Competitiveness in India’s Growing Manufacturing Sector,” where the speaker will be Ashwani Kumar, minister of state in the department of industrial policy and promotion, within the Ministry of Commerce and Industry of India.
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OUTDOOR CHATTING Mayor Bloomberg presented the Doris C. Freedman Award recently at Gracie Mansion to Barry Benepe and Barry Lewis, founders of the Greenmarket. The audience laughed when Mr. Bloomberg cited research that showed that people were “10 times as likely to strike up a conversation in a greenmarket than in a supermarket.”
