UNBELIEVABLE – AT 9:03 P.M. ET:   From Fox:

Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism will bestow its highest honor to Al Jazeera English, the university announced Wednesday.

The Columbia Journalism Award is given annually during the school's commencement to recognize an individual or organization for "singular journalism in the public interest," according to a press release. It will mark only the second time that the award is being given to an organization.

"Al Jazeera English has performed a great service in bringing the English-speaking world in-depth coverage of the turmoil in the Middle East," said Dean Nicholas Lemann. "We salute its determination to get to the heart of a complicated story unfolding in countries where news has historically been difficult to cover."

The school’s faculty, which selects the awardees, voted for Al Jazeera English for the "overall depth and quality of its peerless coverage of the ongoing protests in the Middle East," the release continued. Al Antsey, managing editor of Al Jazeera English, will accept the award and address the school's graduating class of 2011 on May 18.

Elizabeth Fishman, the school's associate dean of communications, told FoxNews.com the selection was made during a private faculty meeting. Past winners of the Columbia Journalism Award, which was established in 1958, include Walter Cronkite and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour was the first outlet to win the award in 1993.

COMMENT:  That is my alma mater, and it's not the first time I've been embarrassed by it.  Al Jazeera is largely a function of a foreign government, Qatar, which is not even a democracy.  It has probably improved in recent years, and has done some good coverage of the upheavals in Arab countries.  But it has a pretty bad history of anti-Americanism, not to mention anti-Israelism, and was roundly denounced by Secretary Rumsfeld for its coverage of the Iraq war.  (That may be one reason it got the award.)  It is not worthy of this prize.  It would have to prove itself over another, say, ten years, before being in that league.

But Columbia is to the left, and the school probably thinks it is acting nobly.  The journalism school has drifted further and further left over the years.  Its magazine program is headed by the former editor and publisher of The Nation, which tells you something.  Its former dean was Bill Moyers's partner, which tells you the same thing. 

I'm embarrassed again.

May 5, 2011