Arthur Ross Media Award
Arthur Ross Media Award
for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis on Foreign Affairs
The American Academy of Diplomacy annually honors one outstanding reporter and one distinguished commentator with its two Arthur Ross Awards for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis on Foreign Affairs. The awards, endowed by and given in honor of the late Arthur Ross, seek to recognize individuals or groups of individuals (e.g., a news bureau) whose reporting and analysis on diplomacy and foreign affairs is making a singular contribution to public understanding of the critical role played by diplomacy in the furtherance of America’s foreign policy interests. One award is given to a journalist/reporter and another to a commentator/columnist. Each award includes a cash stipend of $5,000.
Recipient - 2025
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Previously, she was a Washington Post columnist for more than 15 years and a member of the editorial board. She has also worked as the Foreign and Deputy Editor of the Spectator magazine in London, and as a columnist at Slate as well as the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs.
Her most recent books include the New York Times best sellers Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Her earlier books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. She is also the co-author of a cookbook, From a Polish Country House Kitchen, and a recently re-published travelogue, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which describes a journey across Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine made in 1991, just before the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Over the years, her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.
She has lectured at Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Columbia Universities, as well as Oxford, Cambridge, London, Heidelberg, Maastricht, Zurich, Humboldt, Texas A&M, Houston and many others. In 2012-13 she held the Phillipe Roman Chair of History and International Relations at the London School of Economics. She received honorary doctorates from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and Kyiv-Mohyla University.
Recipient - 2025
Anas Baba is NPR’s reporter in Gaza. He is one of the few Palestinian journalists who have remained in Gaza working with a U.S. news organization, documenting one of the deadliest and most destructive wars of the 21st century. He has delivered frontline reporting from Gaza to American audiences at unprecedented risk during the most lethal period for journalists recorded worldwide in decades. He has done so while facing hunger, displacement and Israeli fire.
In audio, images and video, Baba has reported from the aftermath of Israeli strikes on shelters, hospitals, tents and homes. He has chronicled the collapse of Gaza’s health system, given voice to famished children, captured the stories of entire families killed, documented evidence of the use of U.S.-made weapons, and reported at the funerals of his own journalist colleagues. He has risked his life reporting on the deadly quest to get food in Gaza. He has also captured scenes of resilience, from a baker making cakes to a puppeteer entertaining children.
Baba and the NPR Mideast reporting team have received awards for coverage of the war, including a duPont-Columbia award, a National Press Club award, and recognition from the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for War Correspondents.
A multimedia journalist for more than a decade, Baba photographed one of the most iconic images of the 2021 Gaza war. He has worked with NPR for five years, and is a member of the Foreign Press Association in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
