SikhSpectrum.com Quarterly Issue No. 17, August 2004
Filipino-American wins Pulitzer
Danny Chan
A Filipino-American photographer was named co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for photography. Cheryl Diaz Meyer, a senior staff photographer with the Dallas Morning News, received journalism’s highest US honor for a picture taken while accompanying US forces in Iraq last year.
Ms Meyer, also a winner of the John Faber Award issued by the Overseas Press Club, tearfully thanked her husband and family “who gave me strength to go on” as well as her fellow photographers and photo editors for “putting up with me and for their support.” She shares her award and its $10,000 (US) prize with David Leeson, a co-worker at the Dallas Morning News.
The winning photograph in the breaking-news category was taken as she accompanied the US Marines’ 2nd Tank Battalion and her colleague traveled with the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. The picture depicts American soldiers attending to a wounded civilian. Robert Mong Jr, president and editor of the Dallas Morning News, cited Ms Meyer’s and Mr Leeson’s professionalism at an impromptu ceremony in the paper’s newsroom.
“They never lost their sense of what a journalist has to do in that kind of horrific environment,” Mr Mong said. “They also maintained the highest levels of journalism but they also had the instincts of artists and the eyes of artists through these photographs.”
Ms Meyer, who lived in Legaspi, Albay until she emigrated to America with her family in 1981, obtained a bachelor’s degree in German from the University of Minnesota. She enrolled in a journalism course at Western Kentucky University then landed a photography internship at the Washington Post before joining the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
In 2001, Ms Meyer documented life under the Taliban in Afghanistan. While in Guatemala later that year, she photographed a country undergoing a rebuilding process following 36 years of civil war. The following year took her to Indonesia then back home to the Philippines to capture the religious turmoil between Christian and Muslim fanatics in those countries.
Ms Meyer’s accolade marks the fourth Pulitzer for ethnic Filipinos. Carlos P. Romulo, a former foreign affairs secretary and the first Asian to serve as president of the United Nations General Assembly, was awarded the Pulitzer for international correspondence for a series of articles about the Second World War published in the Philippines Herald.
In 1997, Byron Acohido of the Seattle Times won for beat reporting. Also at the Seattle Times that year, Alex Tizon shared a Pulitzer Prize with Eric Nalder and Deborah Nelson for investigative reporting.
The Pulitzer Prize was established by the Hungarian-American publisher Joseph Pulitzer in 1917. The awards recognize outstanding achievement in journalism, arts and letters in US-based newspapers or daily news organizations. The Dallas Morning News has been honored with seven Pulitzer’s in its 119-year history in such categories as investigative and international reporting.
Dallas Morning News photographers David J. Leeson and Cheryl Diaz Meyer celebrate their 2004 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography after the awards were announced.
Photo by Michael Ainsworth, Dallas Morning News
Risking their lives to save another, Lt. Jeffrey Goodman and Lance Cpl. Jorge Sanchez of the 2nd Tank Battalion drag a wounded civilian to safety after he was caught in the midst of battle on the road to Baghdad.
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