“The name
of Mencken stands as an enduring symbol for independence of mind, fearlessness
in reporting, excellence of style, and above all, intellectual liberty. My
book, Emergence of a Free Press,
was intended to serve those standards. Each of us, as well as the whole nation,
is beneficiary of the First Amendment. It is the matrix of our freedoms. And we
are all obligated to champion it, as Mencken did, in columns and books.”
—Leonard Levy, author of Emergence of a Free Press, the 1986 Mencken Award winner for Best
Book
From 1982
to 1996, the Mencken Awards honored outstanding writing, reporting, and
cartooning that defend individual rights or expose abuses of power. Named for
H.L. Mencken, the iconoclastic Baltimore
Sun journalist, they were presented in five annual categories: Best Book,
Best Cartoon, Best Editorial or Op-Ed Column, Best Feature Story or Essay, and
Best News Story or Investigative Report.
The awards were established and judged by the Free Press
Association (FPA), a nonprofit group of journalists who, to quote their
founding mission statement, “uphold full First Amendment rights and support
journalism that aggressively uses existing First Amendment freedoms to Question
Authority.” Editor & Publisher, the
trade journal of the news media industry, once described the FPA as “a small
but growing group of journalists who...say they take the Constitution at its
word when it declares that ‘Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom
of speech or of the press.”
“The Mencken Awards are unusual in that, while a panel of
journalists selects finalists, the entire [FPA] membership participates in
voting,” the Orange County Register
noted in a 1984 article about the awards, which were presented that year in
Anaheim, California.
For the first year or two, the nominations were dominated by
small, libertarian-minded publications, but by the mid-1980s the awards were attracting more than
750 entries annually from a wide variety of magazines, broadcasters, big and
small newspapers, publishers, and freelancers. In addition to the five annual awards, three special Mencken Awards were presented. In 1991, a special issue of L.A. Weekly received an award for Best Defense of the First Amendment. And in 1986, Life Achievement Awards were
given to columnists Henry Hazlitt (of Newsweek)
and Robert LeFevre (of the Freedom Newspapers chain).
The FPA held four national conferences in the 1980s. The
speakers at the events included movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, book reviewer Roy
Childs, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting founder Jeff Cohen, First Amendment
attorney Robert Corn-Revere, Pulitzer-winning San Diego Tribune columnist Jonathan Freedman, Wall Street Journal editorialist John Fund, Playboy publisher Christie Hefner, Washingon Post and Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, former FCC inspector general
John Kamp, Barron’s columnist David
Kelly, L.A. Weekly founder Jay Levin,
Creators Syndicate founder Richard Newcombe, syndicated columnist Clarence
Page, Reason editor Virginia
Postrel, ABC Vice President Alfred R. Schneider, New York Times staffer Kalman Seigel, The Advocate senior editor Mark Thompson, legal historian Lucas
Powe, syndicated columnist Walter Williams, and Harper’s staffer Martin Morse Wooster.
Another ongoing FPA program was distribution of media ID
cards to freelance writers to help gain access to news events.
“Without my FPA ID card, I couldn’t have gotten into a
Central American refugee camp,” wrote FPA member Roger Reed, a Switzerland-based
correspondent. “I interviewed prisoners and photographed guards frisking
refugees, and subsequently published an exposé of human rights abuses in the
camp.”
From 1982 to 1993, the FPA published (and I edited) a
quarterly newsletter, Free Press
Network, that reported and commented on First Amendment and media issues
and offered news updates on the organization’s awards, conferences, and other
activities.
FPA conferences and Mencken awards ceremonies garnered
attention and attracted between 120 and 350 people, but the FPA itself remained
a small, all-volunteer organization without any major funding. The group’s
modest budget became strained when its fourth conference failed to break even in
1989. As a result, the organization struggled increasingly in the 1990s. Hoping
to sustain at least the awards, the FPA handed over operation of the annual
prizes to the Invisible Hand Foundation, publisher of Liberty magazine; two Liberty editors, Bill Bradford and Jesse Walker, organized the award juries in 1995 and 1996. The Mencken
Awards ceased after Walker left Liberty.