Michael A. Smith

Recipient of the STAR OPINION WRITER OF THE YEAR award in The Charles E. Green Awards (2025)

Michael A. Smith
Galveston county daily news

Judge’s Comments:

Michael A. Smith, the Galveston County Daily News opinion writer, produced an impressive body of work that exhibited depth and breadth on issues local and national. Writing across disparate topics with balance and insight, Mr. Smith — who also serves as the daily’s editor — “takes complicated topics and boils them down, making them easy to digest without talking down to readers,” his nomination letter said. We agree. In a piece about the controversy surrounding the posting of the Ten Commandments in Texas public schools, he wrote that posting the commandments could be construed as indoctrination, but their posting also could provide lessons for students. Students might ask, he wrote, how well, based on their words, advocates themselves embraced the values of the commandments. In a companion piece, Mr. Smith defended the Galveston board of education for refusing to post the commandments until lawsuits about the matter were resolved. Then he took to task Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for filing suit against the board while the matter was still in legal limbo, an action Smith asserted was a political ploy by Paxton to align himself more closely with the ultra right in his campaign for the U.S. Senate. A common theme throughout Mr. Smith’s work are the insights he brings to widely-known events and presenting new questions about them. In a piece written for the 24th anniversary of 9-11, he writes how the terror attacks so many years later lays bare the best and worst of American character. He invites readers to examine where they stand, for example, on the Patriot Act, federal legislation passed after 9-11 in the name of national security but that many regard as one of the most aggressive intrusions into personal freedoms. Mr. Smith’s unflinching examination of our increasingly complicated nation was perhaps at its strongest in a piece about the Trump administration’s immigration policies. A year after the administration's use of ICE to raid American workplaces, farms, construction sites and schools, to name a few, Mr. Smith asks his readers: “How much greater are we?”  In work solidly anchored by history, content, analysis and original reporting, Michael A. Smith and the Galveston County Daily News are deserving of this recognition.

Bill Celis
Journalist, educator and author

Judge’s Bio:
Bill Celis was a journalist for 20 years, most of them as a reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. For 25 years, he was a journalism professor, substantially all of that time spent at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he served as a program director, associate director and associate dean. In his administrative posts, he led several major initiatives, including efforts to create the school’s first diversity plan in 2012, which won a national award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Education; in 2018, he won the Barry Bingham Fellowship for his USC work in diversity and inclusion. He also served on the board of the Maynard Institute for Journalism. He lives in San Antonio, his hometown.

To read Michael A. Smith’s prize-winning commentary, please click the links below:

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