Recognition for journalism
Doctorate follows media prizes
In a magnificant ceremony at England’s 13th-century York Minster, on November 17 2016 Brian Deer was admitted Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) and invited to address new university graduates (video above).
The award – presented by the Most Reverend Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York and Chancellor of York St John University – was granted in recognition of what Deer’s degree citation called his “impact on society through his outstanding investigative journalism”.
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Professor Alyson Tobin, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, told the assembly, gathered in northern Europe’s biggest gothic cathedral, of what she called the journalist’s “commitment to truth and his capacity to persist against a very hostile tide of opposition”.
“Brian can reflect on a career that is characterised by persistence, determination and a willingness to hold the powerful to account,” she read from the four-page citation. “There is something outstanding about a voice you can trust.”
Deer’s doctorate came five years after he was honoured with the ultimate accolade from his professional peers – for the second time in his career – at the annual British Press Awards.
Introduced by Sky News anchor Anna Botting at a gala dinner at the Savoy hotel, London, on April 5 2011 Deer was named specialist journalist of the year in recognition of his landmark Sunday Times exposure of a now-notorious medical research fraud by disgraced British ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield.
The Press Awards’ judging panel, appointed by the Society of Editors, said Deer had shown “outstanding perseverance, stamina and revelation on a story of major importance”. Its citation said of his investigation that: “It was a tremendous righting of a wrong.”
The specialist prize was the second British Press Award Deer has received for his investigations. In 1999 judges named him specialist reporter of the year, saying he was probably “the only journalist in Britain that polices the drugs companies”.
Press Awards are the most coveted honours in UK news media – often described as the “Oscars of British journalism” and compared with US Pulitzer Prizes. “Winning a British Press Award is justly seen as the crowning achievement of any journalist’s career – and just being shortlisted is to be set among the elite of the profession,” says the magazine Press Gazette.
In addition to his 2011 win, Deer was also put forward by Sunday Times editor John Witherow and shortlisted by a separate judging panel for the award in the category of news reporter of the year.
In 2007, his second TV documentary, “The Drug Trial That Went Wrong”, investigating the scandal behind the experimental monoclonal antibody TGN1412, was shortlisted for a Royal Television Society award.
In October 2011, Deer was complimented with the annual Healthwatch Award, given to him with the citation: “For his determined pursuit of truth”, while in academic circles he was the 2009 Susan B Meister lecturer in child health policy at the University of Michigan and the 2012 Distinguished Lecturer in Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.
Another honour came in January 2022 when Trinity College Dublin’s Historical Society awarded Deer its Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Discourse. Past recipients have included international statespeople, intellectuals, and personalities. The society, founded in 1770, said the medal was “for his work in holding private companies and public institutions to account, and for exemplary investigative journalism.”
The Doctor Who Fooled the World
Brian Deer’s book, The Doctor Who Fooled the World, published in North America by Johns Hopkins University Press (with the subtitle “Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines”) and by Scribe (with the subtitle “Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines”) in the UK and Commonwealth, exposed wholesale fraud, deception, and betrayal behind an international campaign against vaccines.
In 2021, The Doctor Who Fooled the World was an Amazon best seller and was honored with the Eric Hoffer Award for nonfiction and a gold medal in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards.