On the occasion of the first annual Izzy Awards from Jeff Cohen's Park Center for Independent Media, the son of progressive journalism icon I.F. Stone, Jeremy Stone (Consortium News, 4/1/09), describes Stone's most journalistically valuable quality--"his capacity for thinking independently"--along with its rewards and consequences:

In the McCarthy era, because he spoke in defense of Jeffersonian principles, people were afraid to be seen with him. When he supported the rights of Palestinians, Jewish institutions would not invite him to speak. And when the National Press Club refused to serve his black guest lunch, he quit the club, isolating himself from his colleagues....

Today's Izzy Award winners do have points of resemblance to I.F. Stone. Glenn Greenwald is a close reader of official documents and a principled critic of the tendency of the Executive Branch to exceed its rightful powers. He has been a fearless critic of government officials and complacent reporters. He has shown a willingness to challenge conventional pieties, including unthinking support for Israeli hardliners.

Amy Goodman's career also has similarities. She speaks up for the disenfranchised and gives her audience facts they don't hear from the traditional media. She is an investigative journalist and writes often about human rights.

Jeremy goes on to identify a key factor in Goodman's success: "Like I. F. Stone and his weekly, she founded a vehicle, Democracy Now!, that takes no advertising or money from corporations or government. She confronts authority no matter how high."

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen's Park Center for Independent Media has decided to give its new Izzy Award (3/4/09) "for special achievement in independent media" to Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman, specifically lauding the "two pillars of independent journalism" for "pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception and controversial issues":

Week after week, in meticulously documented and detailed blog posts, [Salon's Glenn Greenwald] skewers hypocrisy, deception and revisionism on the part of the powers that be in government and the media.... With devastatingly crisp arguments, Greenwald has inveighed against torture and defended constitutional rights for all, whether they be "enemy combatants" or American protesters. He has toughly criticized both Republicans and Democrats, and his blogging frequently sparks debate in major media and on Capitol Hill.

Over the past 12 years, Amy Goodman has built Democracy Now! into the largest public media collaboration--it can be found on television, radio and the Internet--in the country.... Democracy Now! offers a daily cutting-edge broadcast featuring issues, experts and debates rarely heard in corporate media, including the voices of both policymakers and those affected by policy. Through timely interviews with heads of state, opposition leaders, artists and organizers, Goodman in 2008 maintained an ongoing, tenacious focus on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. violations of the Geneva Conventions, racial justice issues such as the still-displaced poor of New Orleans, and political repression overseas.

The Izzy Award itself "is named after the legendary dissident journalist Isidor Feinstein 'Izzy' Stone, who launched his muckraking newsletter I.F. Stone's Weekly in 1953 during the height of the McCarthy witch hunts." An influential figure in the formation of FAIR's journalistic ideology, "Stone, who died in 1989, exposed government deceit and corruption while championing civil liberties, racial justice and international diplomacy." See our 20th Anniversary issue of Extra!: "On the Shoulders of Giants: The unbroken tradition of press criticism" (1-2/06) by Robin Andersen.