Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism Honors Pentagon Press Corps Members
Three notable members of the Pentagon Press Corps will receive the 2026 Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism from Colby College.
Helene Cooper of the New York Times, Tara Copp of the Washington Post, and Phil Stewart of Reuters will be honored as longtime chroniclers of the Pentagon who continue to deliver exceptional reporting through steadfast dedication, resourcefulness, and unyielding persistence.
The three journalists will be recognized at 4 p.m. on Sept. 25, 2026, for their tenacity and perseverance in reporting on the Pentagon. The public is invited to attend the free event in the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts on Colby’s campus. Brian Carovillano ’95, senior vice president for news at Versant Media, will moderate a discussion with the recipients.
“The public’s right to know about the nation’s security strategy and actions has long been in tension with the government’s expectations around secrecy with respect to security planning and actions. That long-simmering tension has moved to a boiling point in recent years, with reporters being banned from the Pentagon at a time when the country is embroiled in conflicts around the globe,” said Colby President David A. Greene. “The Lovejoy Award for 2026 recognizes those journalists who have navigated these challenges with courage and ingenuity to ensure that government accountability to the nation’s citizens is not compromised at times of war and armed conflict.”
“I am honored to be recognized with the Lovejoy Award, and especially proud to share it with my two colleagues who are the best in the business: Phil Stewart and Tara Copp,” said Cooper. “At a time when journalism feels increasingly under siege, joining the ranks of the awardees who came before me is a welcome and unexpected point of pride.”
Copp also feels privileged to have her name among previous award winners.
“I’m deeply honored to receive the Lovejoy Award,” said Copp. “The journalists Colby College has honored in the past are fearless men and women I’ve looked up to my entire career. It’s also such a good feeling to be reminded that our work is valued—in these very turbulent times, we often hear the opposite.”
Receiving a Lovejoy Award is inspiring for Stewart, who is the first journalist from Reuters to receive the award.
“It is a humbling and tremendous honor to receive this recognition. I see covering conflict as part of a long American tradition in journalism that inherently acknowledges that pursuing the truth can come with some degree of risk,” said Stewart. “Elijah Parish Lovejoy inspires those of us who believe in press freedom.”
Carovillano, a member of the Lovejoy Selection Committee, said that covering the Pentagon has always been challenging, especially during wartime. “Through their resourcefulness and deep sourcing, these three reporters—along with the Pentagon Press Corps in general—have continued to break important news and keep us all informed,” he said.
Lovejoy’s legacy
Since 1952, Colby has presented the Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism to honor contemporary journalists for their courageous reporting. The award is named for Elijah Parish Lovejoy, the 1826 valedictorian at Colby and a crusading abolitionist editor murdered by a mob in Illinois in 1837 for his impassioned anti-slavery editorials. John Quincy Adams called him America’s first martyr to freedom of the press.
This year’s award winners join a lengthy list of notable recipients, including Bill Owens, veteran producer with CBS News and 60 Minutes; Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter held for 16 months in a Russian jail and released in 2024 in the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War; and Ukrainian photojournalists Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov.
The 2026 Lovejoy Recipients
Helene Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author who currently serves as a Pentagon and national security correspondent for the New York Times. At the Times since 2004, she has also served as an editor, White House correspondent, and diplomatic correspondent, reporting from 86 countries. Previously, she worked for the Providence Journal and the Wall Street Journal, where she served as a foreign correspondent, reporter, and editor.
Born in Monrovia, Liberia, she moved to the United States in 1980 and earned her bachelor’s in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2008, she published her autobiography, The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood, which became a New York Times bestseller. Her 2017 biography of Liberia’s women’s movement leader, Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was a Washington Post bestseller.
Accolades for Cooper’s work include the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, an Overseas Press Club Award for International Reporting, three George Polk Awards, and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for International Journalism.
A national reporter for the Washington Post, Tara Copp focuses on the military and national security. A longtime investigative reporter, she joined the Post in 2025 after covering the Pentagon for the Associated Press, serving as Pentagon bureau chief for the Military Times, and reporting throughout the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. She also served as a senior defense analyst for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, working in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar. Prior to that, she was one of the original reporters embedded in Iraq at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.
Copp’s education includes the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s in security studies from Georgetown University. She is the author of the 2017 award-winning memoir The Warbird: Three Heroes. Two Wars. One Story.
Phil Stewart is an award-winning national security reporter who has worked for Reuters since 1998 and is currently the agency’s chief national security correspondent. Based in Washington, D.C., he has reported from more than 60 countries, including Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, and South Sudan. Earlier, he spent nearly 12 years as a foreign correspondent based in Brazil, Colombia, and Italy. Previously, Stewart was a Washington-based reporter for States News Service, covering U.S. politics.
Stewart has provided commentary on the BBC, NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Fox News, and he has moderated national security events, including at the Reagan National Defense Forum and the German Marshall Fund. He is a recipient of the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence from the National Press Club and a two-time winner of the Joe Galloway Award from the Military Reporters & Editors Association.
He earned his bachelor’s and master’s in international studies from Georgetown University.
Current Lovejoy Selection Committee members include Brian Carovillano ’95, senior vice president for news, Versant Media; Sewell Chan, senior fellow, USC Annenberg Center on Communication Policy and Leadership; Katrice Hardy, CEO, The Marshall Project; Martin Kaiser, editor and senior vice president, retired, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and director of the Capital News Service at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism; and Amna Nawaz, co-anchor, PBS NewsHour
