Charles J. Hanley is an American journalist and author who reported for the
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
(AP) for over 40 years, chiefly as a roving international correspondent. In 2000, he and two AP colleagues won the
Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting
The Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting has been awarded since 1953, under one name or another, for a distinguished example of investigative reporting by an individual or team, presented as a single article or series in a U.S. news publicat ...
for their work confirming the
U.S. military
The United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. The armed forces consists of six service branches: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. The president of the United States is the ...
’s massacre of South Korean refugees at
No Gun Ri during the
Korean War
, date = {{Ubl, 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953 (''de facto'')({{Age in years, months, weeks and days, month1=6, day1=25, year1=1950, month2=7, day2=27, year2=1953), 25 June 1950 – present (''de jure'')({{Age in years, months, weeks a ...
.
Early life
Hanley graduated from
St. Bonaventure University in 1968 with a journalism degree. In 1969–1970, he served as a U.S. Army journalist, including in
wartime Vietnam.
Journalism career
Hanley joined the AP's
Albany, New York
Albany ( ) is the capital of the U.S. state of New York, also the seat and largest city of Albany County. Albany is on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River, and about north of New York City ...
bureau in 1968, returning there in 1971 after military service. In 1976, he transferred to the AP's international news desk in New York, where he eventually became a roving international correspondent, reporting on subjects ranging from wars and summit conferences to climate change in the Arctic In 1987–1992 he served as AP assistant and deputy managing editor.
No Gun Ri
In 1998, Hanley and reporters
Choe Sang-hun
Choe Sang-Hun ( ko, 최상훈, born 1962) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning South Korean journalist and Seoul Bureau Chief for ''The New York Times''.
Early life
Choe was born in Ulju County, Ulsan in southern South Korea. He received a B.A. in Ec ...
and
Martha Mendoza
Martha Mendoza (born August 16, 1966) is an Associated Press journalist whose reporting has helped free over 2,000 enslaved fishermen and prompted action by the U.S. Congress and the White House.
She earned her first Pulitzer Prize in the Inves ...
, assisted by researcher Randy Herschaft, confirmed that the U.S. military massacred South Korean refugees – an estimated 250–300, the South Korean government later concluded – near
No Gun Ri, South Korea, in late July 1950. The AP team had located a dozen U.S. Army veterans, witnesses, who corroborated the account of Korean survivors. The reporters also uncovered declassified archival U.S. military documents ordering the shooting of civilians, out of fear of enemy infiltrators.
The story was not published until September 1999, after a year-long struggle with an AP leadership reluctant to run such an explosive report. The AP team subsequently won 11 major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer and a
Polk Award
The George Polk Awards in Journalism are a series of American journalism awards presented annually by Long Island University in New York in the United States. A writer for Idea Lab, a group blog hosted on the website of PBS, described the award ...
.
Iraq reporting
In the years after the
9/11 terror attacks
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated Suicide attack, suicide List of terrorist incidents, terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, ...
, Hanley reported extensively on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Before the 2003 U.S. invasion, he reported from Iraq on the lack of evidence of
weapons of mass destruction
A weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or any other weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to numerous individuals or cause great damage to artificial structures (e.g., buildings), natura ...
in that country, discrediting official U.S. claims. He was the first journalist to report on the
prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and other U.S. prisons in Iraq, months before photos emerging from Abu Ghraib drew international attention to the story.
Awards
In addition to the honors for the No Gun Ri reporting, Hanley’s other journalism won awards from the
Overseas Press Club
The Overseas Press Club of America (OPC) was founded in 1939 in New York City by a group of foreign correspondents. The wire service reporter Carol Weld was a founding member, as was the war correspondent Peggy Hull. The club seeks to maintain ...
, the Associated Press Managing Editors association,
Brown University
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...
’s Feinstein media awards program, the
Korn Ferry
Korn Ferry is a management consulting firm headquartered in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1969 and as of 2019, operates in 111 offices in 53 countries and employs 8,198 people worldwide. Korn Ferry operates through four business segm ...
awards for reporting on the United Nations, and the
Society of Environmental Journalists
The Society of Environmental Journalists is a non-profit national journalism organization created by and for journalists who report environmental topics in the news media. On its website, the organization says that "SEJ’s mission is to strength ...
.
Books
In 2001,
Henry Holt and Company
Henry Holt and Company is an American book-publishing company based in New York City. One of the oldest publishers in the United States, it was founded in 1866 by Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt. Currently, the company publishes in the fields ...
published ''
The Bridge at No Gun Ri'', a narrative recounting of the 1950 massacre and events before and after, written by Hanley with the reporting assistance of his AP partners.
In August 2020,
PublicAffairs
PublicAffairs (or PublicAffairs Books) is an imprint of Perseus Books, an American book publishing company located in New York City and has been a part of the Hachette Book Group since 2016.
PublicAffairs was launched in 1997 by Peter Osnos. ...
, an imprint of
Perseus Books Group
Perseus Books Group was an American publishing company founded in 1996 by investor Frank Pearl. Perseus acquired the trade publishing division of Addison-Wesley (including the Merloyd Lawrence imprint) in 1997. It was named Publisher of the Ye ...
, published Hanley's
''Ghost Flames: Life and Death in a Hidden War, Korea 1950–1953'', a narrative history of the entire Korean War, told through the experiences of 20 individuals who lived through it, civilians and soldiers of several nationalities involved. An underlying theme is the little-known "dark underside" of wartime atrocities.
Earlier in his career, Hanley co-authored ''World War II: A 50th Anniversary History'' (Henry Holt); ''20th Century America'' (Grolier Educational), and ''FLASH! The Associated Press Covers the World'' (Abrams).
References
Further reading
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External links
C-SPAN book discussion, ''The Bridge at No Gun Ri'' Berkeley, CA, September 10, 2001.
"What Really Happened at No Gun Ri?" a Pritzker Military Library discussion, broadcast on C-SPAN, July 20, 2004.
"Charles Hanley on Korean War 70th Anniversary" American History TV, C-SPAN, June 21, 2020.
Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War April 25, 2007, examination of American journalism in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hanley, Charles J
Associated Press reporters
Living people
1947 births
Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting winners