AWARD DATE: 1967
AWARD NAME: Best Daily Newspaper or Wire Service Reporting From Abroad
AWARD RECIPIENT: Joe Alex Morris, Jr.
AWARD RECIPIENT AFFILIATION: The Los Angeles Times
AWARD HONORED WORK: Coverage of the Israeli-Arab war
Joe Alex Morris, Jr., Los Angeles, Los Angeles Times, for his coverage of the Israeli-Arab war.
Joe Alex Morris, Jr., is a second-generation journalist who had roved widely and heard many a shot fired in anger before conflict erupted in June, 1967, in the Middle East, where he is Los Angeles Times
man in Beirut. To the OPC panel of judges his reports on the Arab-Israeli war were vividly written, “in-depth, perceptive and interpreted.”
From graduation at Harvard in 1949 he went into the U.S. Army, serving in Belgium and Germany. His newspaper work was for the Minneapolis Tribune and the Hartford Times, after he joined United Press and later the New York Herald Tribune spending ten years as a foreign correspondent before returning to the United States.
He covered the Bay of Pigs invasion for the Herald Tribune before moving to Newsweek and assignment to the Middle East, in 1963. His report on India’s leadership in 1964 was a Newsweek cover story, and was reprinted by Readers Digest.
Before leaving United Press he turned out “Deadline every minute,” a history of the wire service’s first 50 years. In trekking after tops news stories from the Himalayas to Equatorial Africa he has covered uprisings and revolutions in many countries–including both sides of the Civil War in Yemen.
Citation for Excellence: The New York Times, for team reporting in 1968 the series “1917-The Russian Revolution-1967”.
Citation for Excellence: Peter Arnett, Associated Press, for “Ordeal on Hill 875” and other Vietnam
stories.