Israeli journalist Amira Hass is the recipient of the first Anna Lindh award in Sweden. Some excerpts from her remarks on that occasion follow:

“Journalism’s main task is to monitor Power, to locate Domination and to follow its characteristics and effects on the people, to observe the relations developing between Power and the Subjugated. Even between these two ends there is always a dialogue, an exchange of behaviours, opinions, emotions, habits, influences. Power is never a one-track, one direction action. In schools, teachers and the education system as a whole are the centre of Power, but aren’t students playing with them a game of shifting places? Still, men hold the positions of Power in our societies, but aren’t they required to permanently alter their forms of domination because of women’s conscious demand or implicit aspiration for equality and permanent sense of dissatisfaction? In class relations between the employed and the employer the permanent conversation between the two unequal parties is being expressed in a thousand forms: not just strikes or negotiations, raise of salaries or cuts, but by flattery to the boss and sabotage, laziness and telling of lies or jokes, bringing psychologists to spy or offering benefits and weekend excursions.

“Monitoring Power is a voluntarily adopted mission of journalism, I believe, in a centuries-old development of the media and its social contract with the society in which journalists operate. It’s not the only role – but it is the most important one. I believe the mission of journalism is to scrutinize the actions of Power: not to overlook the relations of dialogue, and yet to question the motives of those in power and their acts: because they’d do anything possible to retain power and deepen it, because they hold the means to perpetuate the false equation between the ruler’s good and the public’s good, or portray their Power as God-sent and natural. By monitoring Power, the media is contributing to the dialogue between the sides. They are not equal, not symmetrical, and still they converse. The media reports about this conversation, but it also participates in it, by the very publication. It mediates information and by doing so it helps develop the dialogue. And the media should do the impossible: scrutinize itself as to what extent it silences or not the voice of the disadvantageous party in the relations of dialogue.”