The University of Arizona School of Journalism will honor New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet with the 2017 Zenger Award for Press Freedom for championing the news media’s rights to question authority and for defending the public’s right to know.
 
Given by the school since 1954, the award is named after pioneering journalists John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger. Past winners include Walter Cronkite, Katherine Graham, Bill Moyers and 2016 recipient Dana Priest.
 
Baquet will accept the award at a dinner Oct. 20 at the Westward Look in Tucson, open to the public. Click here to buy tickets or a 10-person table.

“It is such an honor to receive this award for press freedom at a time when the truthful, mission-driven press is under assault,” Baquet said. “And it is humbling when I look at the list of past winners, all of them courageous journalists who exposed wrongdoing and told truth to the powerful.”
 
The New York Times’ coverage of Vladimir Putin and Russia won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for revealing techniques that included assassination, online harassment and the planting of incriminating evidence on opponents.
 
Baquet also has been a leading voice refuting President Trump’s assertion that the news media are the “enemy of the American people,” and cautioned the administration against trying to change libel laws.
 
“It illustrates, perhaps, not understanding the role of the media," Baquet told CNN on April 29. “We’re supposed to be tough. We’re supposed to ask him hard questions.”

Baquet worked with UA journalism professors William Schmidt and Nancy Sharkey at the Times, where he was a metro reporter and special projects editor for the business desk in the 1990s. He returned in 2007 as Washington Bureau chief, national editor, assistant managing editor, managing editor and then executive editor in 2014.
 
He joined the Los Angeles Times in 2000 and became managing editor and editor. In November 2006, Baquet defied orders from his corporate bosses to make cuts in the newsroom and was forced out after giving a rousing speech to the staff. He also led a team of three Chicago Tribune reporters that won the 1988 Pulitzer for investigative reporting for uncovering city corruption.

"Dean is an extraordinary, tenacious journalist," Schmidt said.
 
Tickets for the Zenger Dinner, at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 20 at the Westward Look, 245 E. Ina Road, are $85 per person ($35 tax-deductible), $85 to sponsor a student (fully deductible) and $1,000 for a 10-person table ($500 deductible).

• Click here for a full story and more Zenger details.