Seymour Hersh has a knack for uncovering the outrageous side of American wars.

He received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and was lauded for uncovering the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. On Friday, Hersh will be given the William Allen White Foundation’s 2008 national citation.

“As a journalist, it’s an award you have to be very flattered to receive because it comes from peers,” Hersh said. “When you get a journalistic prize, it’s very good. I like that.”

Ann Brill, dean of the School of Journalism at Kansas University, said the foundation nominates a slate of possible citation recipients and then narrows the list down after talking to the nominees.

She offered high praise for the integrity and tenacity Hersh brings to journalism.

“He’s a thorough, investigative journalist of the highest integrity,” Brill said. “He does important work. We like to think of all journalism as important, but especially his writing, it matters. He has a strong sense of journalism’s role in a democracy.”

Hersh said his sense of the role of journalism in society is “truth to power,” to tell political leaders when something isn’t right.

In that vein, Hersh had strong criticism for the press corps for the way it handled the run-up to the Iraq war.

“I talk about these issues a lot,” Hersh said. “Not necessarily when I give a public speech, but when I get to talk to classes, I will talk about that.”

In addition to the importance of accountability journalism, Hersh said ethics are crucial. He said he’s disheartened when he sees the press displayed as dishonorable or in a negative light.

Hersh, who repeatedly described himself as an old man, said he couldn’t imagine a world without newspapers.

“There will always be newspapers, and there will always be a model for investigative reporting,” he said.

Still, he believes, as newspapers develop better models for making money from Web sites, online will become the sole domain for breaking news.

Brill said Hersh is a throwback to some of the best of old-fashioned journalists, “a muckraker, in the most positive sense of the word.”

Hersh will be in Lawrence on Thursday and Friday. His schedule Friday will include speaking to KU journalism classes in the morning before delivering a speech at 1:30 p.m. at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

The speech is open to the public. Previous recipients of the William Allen White citation have included broadcaster Walter Cronkite, New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, reporter and columnist Helen Thomas, broadcaster Charles Kuralt and KU alumnus Gerald F. Seib, Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.