At a time when political discourse is dominated by spin, attitude, and rhetoric that seems remote from the lives of real people, you have made it your mission to document suffering and struggles that would otherwise remain invisible. As a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times you have ventured far from the comforts of the newsroom to research and report the bleak conditions that confront so many people, especially children. You forced your readers to face how a shocking number of school districts refuse federal funds to provide poor students with free breakfasts. You brought to life children driven to suicide, some as young as ten. You documented the lives of the “Orphans of Addiction,” such as Ashley Barbie who prayed not for a bike, or to become a firefighter, but for heroin and speed to loosen their grip on her father. Most remarkably, your six-part story, “Enrique’s Journey,” broke through the rhetoric over illegal immigration to show how thousands of these travelers are children who set out alone—risking kidnapping, robbery, and fatal accident—to find parents who went before them seeking jobs. As always, you wrote not about anonymous or composite figures but about Enrique Lourdes of Honduras, whose struggle time and again to make the perilous trip to America to find his mother was all too real. The series won more than a dozen prizes, including a Pulitzer. But your work, though often honored, has not been about material rewards. For you write about people of whom, as the playwright Arthur Miller put it, “attention must finally be paid.” In recognition of your distinguished achievement in journalism, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.