Ithaca College

The Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College will present the 13th annual Izzy Award “for outstanding achievement in independent media “on Tuesday, April 27, at 7:00 p.m. EDT.

The ceremony will honor the winners, who will each discuss their intrepid work in 2020. The recipients are Truthout, represented by Editor-in-Chief Maya Schenwar; Liliana Segura; and Tim Schwab.

To attend the virtual ceremony, register on Zoom here.

Share our Facebook event here.

The nonprofit news outlet Truthout extensively covered the injustices enmeshed in the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting its political, economic, environmental, and racial issues. Truthout’s coverage included stories by incarcerated people and their families, pieces on the surge in overdoses during the pandemic, and more that the Izzy judges say exposed “systemic flaws that worsened the pandemic.”

Liliana Segura’s reporting at The Intercept laid bare the unfairness of capital punishment — from its disproportionate impact on people of color to the arbitrariness of how people end up on death row. Segura’s work stands as a crucial public record of the Trump administration’s killing surge. It lets her readers “accompany the trauma, solidarity, hope, and ultimate cruelty that is involved in capital punishment.”

Tim Schwab writing in The Nation uncovered The Gates Foundation’s striking conflicts of interest, complicated web of influence, and troubling monopoly power in the field of global health. Schwab revealed the undemocratic hold billionaires wield over public policy by doing the “hard digging and thoughtful analysis that exemplifies fearless, independent journalism at its best.”

The Izzy Award is named for I. F. “Izzy” Stone, the dissident journalist who launched I. F. Stone’s Weekly in 1953. This year’s judges were Robert W. McChesney, Raza Rumi, Jeff Cohen, and Patricia Rodriguez.

Read more about this year’s Izzy Award winners here.