Journalists mighty and modest gathered at the New-York Historical Society last night for the presentation of the Eric Breindel Prize to Claudia Rosett for her coverage of the oil-for-food scandal at the United Nations. We’d like to be able to say “our own” Claudia Rosett (for she filed some of her reporting on the U.N. scandal for The New York Sun). But no one owns Claudia Rosett. She is a one-woman freelance news service and an extraordinary example to aspiring reporters looking for inspiration at a time of hand wringing in the journalistic world.

Ms. Rosett came up through the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and has done memorable work for Fox News, National Review, Commentary, and the Weekly Standard, among others. Ms. Rosett has been backed by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, she pointed out in remarks prepared for delivery last night, has been the only think tank to have assigned a beat reporter to the United Nations story.

The Breindel award is named for the late editor of the editorial page of the New York Post. Last night, Ms. Rosett recalled that, in February 1998, a month before Breindel died, he wrote an article about the return of Secretary-General Kofi Annan from a parley in Baghdad with Saddam Hussein. She reminded us that the trip was “hailed by many in the press, and by Annan himself, as a triumph, in which he announced he could ‘do business’ with Saddam.” Yet it paved the way for what she called “the U.N.’s stampede of corruption and deception.”

At the time, Ms. Rosett said, Breindel had observed that the final chapter of the appeasement of which the United Nations had become a part “has yet to be written.” No doubt one of the reasons that the givers of the Breindel prize chose Ms. Rosett is that she has been, in a sense, working to finish the chapter Breindel was writing when he died at such a young age. He could not have had a more worthy successor, which is why so many gathered with such warmth and affection to congratulate Ms. Rosett last night.