College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

• Protecting journalists

  For years Ann Cooper helped protect journalists instead of reporting the news.

• 
  Editor's Note: Since the original publication of this article Ann Cooper has taken a new position as director of the broadcast department at Columbia University.
  
  As a journalist, Ann Cooper has few peers.
  
  The walls of the veteran newspaper reporter's New York City office are covered with memorabilia from her journalistic career, including the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award in broadcast journalism and the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication's Schwartz Award.
  
  Millions of Americans became familiar with her voice when she was a correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR). As NPR's first Moscow bureau chief, she covered the 1991 failed coup attempt in Moscow.
  
  She was also on the front lines of some of the late 20th century's most important events for NPR: the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, refugee issues in Bosnia, and the 1994 elections in South Africa that ended the Apartheid Era. For three years in the '90s, Cooper criss-crossed Africa, writing features and analysis on the famine in Somalia, the Rwandan refugee crisis, and the cholera epidemic in Zaire.
  
  Now Cooper ('71 journalism) has traded in her reporter's notebook and microphone. The executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) since 1998, Cooper heads the independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide by "defending the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal."
  
  "This is a great job for a journalist," Cooper said. "We are defending the rights of journalists everywhere. We're defending a basic principle; not the ideas the journalists are expressing, but the ideal that they have to report the news and without fear of repression."
  
  Cooper coordinates a full-time staff of 22 at CPJ's New York headquarters. Cooper and her staff publicly reveal abuses that include murder, death threats, imprisonment, and harassment against the media by governments throughout the world.
  
  "Journalists throughout the world tell us that it is important that someone is paying attention to the abuses and that we are reinforcing the message that what they are doing is not wrong," she said.

Ann Cooper

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October 16-29, 2006

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