January 20, 2023

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The Izzy Award

Nominations Open for Annual “Izzy Award” for Independent Media

The Izzy Award will celebrate its 15th year this spring, and nominations are officially open for work produced during the calendar year 2022.

The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College (PCIM) will again grant this honor — named after legendary journalist I. F. “Izzy” Stone — for outstanding achievement in independent media. As always, the award will go to an independent media outlet or individual journalist or producer who publishes their work through their own site or that of an independent outlet.

Journalists, academics, and the public at large may submit nominations until midnight EST on Friday, February 3, 2023. The winner will be announced early next spring, with an award ceremony to follow in April 2023.

Read more on how to nominate here.

The Edge

Struggles, Solutions, Solidarities: Julia Reichert (1946-2022)

Films by Julia Reichert (1946-2022) reject individualism, narcissism, isolation, and pessimism. They present a deeply feminist vision of America that shows us how hope resides in loyalty to others and to collective action.

They excise antagonists and protagonists and a single hero and instead, show us that the power of the many always wins out over the solitude of one.

Patricia Zimmermann writes, finally, they carry on Julia’s clear, grounded politics: her conviction that struggle, solutions, and solidarities are what matter most.

Read Zimmermann’s full account on The Edge.

Ukrainian Journalists Reporting Amidst Bombs to Document War

On February 24, 2022, a full-scale Russian military attack changed the destinies of millions of people. Journalists overnight became, in addition to their specialization, war correspondents and war victims, mostly unprepared for reporting amidst bombs.

Some journalists became soldiers, some became reporters in the army, and others continued their work even under mass bombardment. A lot were forced to escape with their families and become refugees and internationally displaced people (IDPs).

Natalie Gryvnyak describes how Ukrainian journalists have had to adapt since the start of the war, leading to learning first aid and collaborations to document crimes.

Read Gryvnyak’s full report here.

Investigation Points to FBI Conspiracy to Silence Martin Luther King Jr.

In the years following Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, documents related to his  murder case were destroyed, and all files of FBI surveillance on King were sealed for 50 years.

The suppression of information prompted human rights lawyer Dr. William Pepper and the King family to file a civil action in Memphis against a man who admitted he was involved: Loyd Jowers, owner of a restaurant near where King was assassinated.

Vital information about the 1999 civil rights trial is extensively revealed in a powerful one-hour interview on The Project Censored Radio Show where Pepper sits down with Project Censored co-hosts Mickey Huff and Kenn Burrows to discuss his newly published volume, “The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Read insights from the interview on The Edge.

Media Lingers on Biden Documents Story, ‘Both-Sidesing’ with Trump

Last week, the discovery of classified documents at Joe Biden’s former office and later his home sparked a flurry of news coverage, including comparisons to Donald Trump’s ongoing classified-records scandal.

Critics called out false equivalency in mainstream media’s framing of the two stories, which are different in that Biden failed to appear fully transparent at first but has now cooperated with investigators, while Trump has not.

To explore media’s responses to these document stories, Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop spoke with Margaret Sullivan, whose column in the Washington Post until last year addressed just this sort of controversy.

Read highlights from their conversation on The Edge.

In Other News

1. Google announces ‘difficult news’ as it fires 12,000 staff | The Independent

2. What Winning Did to the Anti-abortion Movement | The Atlantic

3. Florida Judge Fines Trump, Lawyer For ‘Frivolous’ Lawsuit| HuffPost

4. Ron DeSantis government bans new advanced African American history course | BBC

5. Exxon’s predictions about the climate crisis may have increased its legal peril | The Guardian

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Read previous Briefs and more from independent media on the PCIM website and The Edge, and follow PCIM on social media: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

The Indy Brief is edited by Jeremy Lovelett.