The Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) announced the recipients of the 13th annual Izzy Award on April 2.
This year, the award will be presented to one publication, Truthout, and two journalists, Liliana Segura and Tim Schwab. The award highlights achievements in independent media and is given in honor of I.F. “Izzy” Stone, a politically radical American investigative journalist in the 20th century. The judges for this year’s award were Raza Rumi, director of the PCIM; Jeff Cohen, founder and former director of the PCIM; Patricia Rodriguez, associate professor and chair of the Department of Politics; and Robert McChesney, professor emeritus in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Truthout is an independent, nonprofit news organization that reports on social justice issues. Throughout 2020, Truthout produced a series called “Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19,” which is composed of 250 articles about the political, economic, environmental and racial aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Through the year of social distancing, Truthout proved that journalists need not be distant from the people hardest hit by the pandemic, including prisoners and ICE detainees,” the Izzy Award judges said in a statement. “Its work during 2020 exposed social and racial injustices baked into COVID’s impacts and systemic flaws that worsened the pandemic.”
Liliana Segura is a senior reporter at The Intercept. In 2020, Segura reported that former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had carried out federal executions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Through her stellar investigative journalism, Segura lets her readers accompany the trauma, solidarity, hope and ultimate cruelty that is involved in capital punishment,” the judges said in the statement. “Her stories lead us to deeply ponder the absurdity of the government’s execution sprees and of a system so unwilling to engage alternatives.”
Tim Schwab exposed the operations at the Gates Foundation in a three-part series published by The Nation and raised questions about the power that billionaires have surrounding public policy.
“Schwab has ‘brilliantly gone where journalists belong, and he has taken both Gates and the Gates Foundation into account for their actual conduct and their clear self-interest,’” the judges said in the statement.
The Izzy Award ceremony will be presented virtually at the end of April.
