Myra MacPherson, a former Washington Post reporter and author of All Government’s Lie! The Life of and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone (Scribner, 2006), has won the 2007 Ann M. Sperber Biography Award.
MacPherson’s biography details the life of iconoclastic investigative journalist I.F. Stone, who through his self-published I.F. Stone’s Weekly took on everything from McCarthyism to the Vietnam War. In 1964, Stone was the only American journalist to challenge President Johnson’s account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
The Sperber award, which is administered by Fordham University, is given annually to an author of a biography or autobiography of a journalist or other media figure. The award was established with a gift from Liselotte Sperber, in memory of her daughter Ann M. Sperber, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Fordham University Press, 1998).
MacPherson’s book was chosen by a six-member committee of experts in the field of media and communications. Albert Auster, Ph.D., associate chair of the Fordham Department of Communication and Media Studies, called the book “a superb biography, and a welcome addition to the literature of how radical political discourse is carried on in the United States.” MacPherson will receive the award at a ceremony on Nov. 27, at 6:30 p.m. in the 12-Floor Lounge in the Lowenstein Center at the Lincoln Center campus.
