Seymour Hersh and Chris Hedges, winners of Pulitzer Prizes separated by three decades, will be the featured speakers Friday morning at Fresno State's first Roger Tatarian Symposium in Journalism.

The journalists will discuss "Covering the War after the War," a look at how news organizations have reported the Iraq conflict since President Bush declared victory May 1.

The event is sponsored by the university's Mass Communication and Journalism Department and the Roger Tatarian Endowment for Journalism.

The endowment was named for the late Roger Tatarian, a journalism professor at California State University, Fresno, and before that, editor-in-chief of United Press International.

"Hedges is one of the best war correspondents in the world, and Hersh is regarded as one of the best investigative reporters on military affairs," said Tommy Miller, who holds Fresno State's Roger Tatarian Endowed Chair in Journalism.

Hersh was the first to report details of Lt. William Calley's court-martial on charges stemming from the massacre of more than 500 civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. That story won the Pulitzer in 1970.

Hersh now contributes regularly to The New Yorker magazine on military and security issues.

He began his career as a police reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago, and eventually reported for the New York Times' Washington bureau. He has written eight books, including "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Hedges, a New York Times reporter, worked on that newspaper's team that investigated global terrorism and won the 2002 Pulitzer for explanatory reporting.

More recently, Hedges' remarks at the Rockford College graduation in Illinois last May touched off applause and screaming objections.

He complained of "abysmal coverage" of war in Iraq and condemned "the curfews, the armed clashes with angry crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the military governor, the Christian evangelical groups who are being allowed to follow on the heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about Jesus."

The conference also will present a panel discussion on war, featuring:

Kevin Diaz from McClatchy Newspapers' Washington bureau.

James Hattori, an NBC News reporter in San Francisco, who recently covered the conflict in Iraq.

Pauline Lubens, a photojournalist for the San Jose Mercury News since 2000, who covered the Iraq war as a "unilateral" journalist who was not embedded with a military unit.