Izzy Award Ceremony Will Bring Brave Journalists to Ithaca College April 12

By David Maley, March 28, 2017

Izzy Award Ceremony Will Bring Brave Journalists to Ithaca College April 12

Journalists who pursued stories of life and death inside American prisons and scandalous efforts to suppress voting will be honored at Ithaca College on Wednesday, April 12, with the presentation of the ninth annual Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media. The 7 p.m. ceremony in Emerson Suites, Campus Center, is free and open to the public.

In a banner year for exceptional journalism from non-corporate outlets, the Izzy Award judges are honoring Ari Berman of The Nation for revealing voter suppression targeting people of color and youth, and Shane Bauer of Mother Jones (“My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard”) and Seth Freed Wessler of The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund for exposing abuse and avoidable deaths inside U.S. for-profit prisons.

A special documentary honor is being conferred on the creators of “America Divided,” a docu-series illuminating issues of U.S. structural inequality such as environmental racism and mass incarceration.

The honored journalists and filmmakers will give talks and discuss their work at the ceremony, with a book signing to follow.

Presented by the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM), the Izzy Award is named in honor of the late I.F. “Izzy” Stone, the dissident journalist who launched I.F. Stone’s Weekly in 1953 and challenged McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, racial injustice and government deceit.

Previous winners of the Izzy Award are Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Robert Scheer, City Limits, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Center for Media and Democracy/“ALEC Exposed,” Mother Jones, John Carlos Frey, Nick Turse, Naomi Klein, David Sirota, Jamie Kalven, Brandon Smith, and Inside Climate News/“Exxon: The Road Not Taken.”

Based in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, the Park Center for Independent Media is a national center for the study of media outlets that create and distribute content outside traditional corporate systems. For more information, visit ithaca.edu/indy or contact PCIM director Jeff Cohen at jcohen@ithaca.edu