I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence

Jerry Mitchell, director and co-founder of the nonprofit Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting (MCIR), is winner of the 2024 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, selected in recognition of his exemplary body of work and lifelong commitment to investigative journalism. For the past four decades, his stories have exposed injustices, corruption and abuse of power in the American South and his work has prompted prosecutions, important reforms of state agencies and firings of state board officials. Mitchell’s hard-hitting cold case investigations helped lead to convictions of Ku Klux Klan members many years after they committed some of the nation’s most notorious crimes.

Speaking about this year’s decision, I.F. Stone Medal jury member Michael Riley said: “Mitchell continues to shepherd amazing work as a mentor and editor to up-and-coming young reporters. I think the continued work coming from MCIR – and its collaboration with Mississippi Today – really does show the profound and ongoing influence Mitchell has had in Mississippi and nationally.”

Read the announcement.

Established in 2008, the I.F. Stone Medal recognizes journalistic independence and honors the life of investigative journalist I.F. Stone.

The award is presented annually to an American journalist or news executive whose work exemplifies the independent spirit, integrity, courage and indefatigability that characterized I.F. Stone’s Weekly published from 1953 to 1971.

A committee of journalists oversees nominations and the selection of an annual medal winner. The committee is chaired by PBS public editor Ricardo Sandoval-Palos. Other members are Jasmine Brown, a senior producer in the race and culture unit at ABC News’ “World News Tonight with David Muir”; Myra MacPherson, author of “All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone”; Phillip W.d. Martin, a senior investigative reporter for WGBH News; Michael Riley, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg News and Businessweek magazine; and Bernice Yeung, managing director/managing editor of the Investigative Reporting Program at Berkeley Journalism.

Journalist I.F. Stone’s passion for speaking his mind incurred the wrath of the powerful. His opposition to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his determination to expose the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI led to attacks on his credibility and reputation during the McCarthy Era in the early 1950s.

The I.F. Stone Medal bears a likeness of an issue of I.F. Stone’s Weekly with a headline on the Tonkin Gulf affair, ‘All We Really Know Is That We Fired The First Shots.’ (PDF)

Stone was one of only a few journalists who reported on the U.S. government’s false allegations that the North Vietnamese had attacked a U.S. destroyer in 1964, the claim President Johnson used to persuade the Senate to approve the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which ultimately paved the way for the country to enter the Vietnam War.

In 2006, I.F. Stone biographer Myra MacPherson waited with trepidation as Jeremy Stone read the galleys of her book “All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone.”

As executor of Stone’s estate, Jeremy could have interfered in the publication of a biography he deemed too critical: Jeremy, as independent as his famous father, was the only Stone family member who had refused a request to be interviewed for the book. But he ultimately approved, saying the work depicted his father as a human being, “warts and all,” and not as an icon.

Jeremy said the biography spurred him to create an award in his father’s name. In doing so, he invited a group of journalists to his home to interest them in the effort. Among them was Bill Kovach, former curator of the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University, where the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence was established.

Izzy, as everyone from the corner grocer to Albert Einstein had called him, was a singular voice in American journalism, noted for courageous reporting on McCarthyism and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In his eponymous I.F. Stone’s Weekly, he immediately calling out the lie of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which had led to escalation of the Vietnam War.

In establishing the award, Jeremy planned every aspect of the I. F. Stone medal, including succinctly summing up what his father had stood for: independent spirit, integrity, courage and indefatigability.

Jeremy Stone himself was an independent, persistent and outspoken activist on arms control, human rights and international scientific cooperation. He was also a noted critic of Pentagon spending, earning him a spot on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list. His ideas helped form the framework of the U.S.-Soviet ABM Treaty of 1972.

Jeremy turned down his father’s invitation to run the muckraking I.F. Stone’s Weekly, writing that he strongly preferred to “create my own identity.” Yet his own autobiography stressed a theme similar to his father’s – that one person can make a difference.

Jeremy helped create another tribute to Izzy: the Canadian documentary “All Governments Lie: Truth Deception and the Spirit of I.F. Stone,” which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016, a few months before Jeremy died, on January 1, 2017.

The son who had worked hard to carve out his own identity ended up revering and lauding the same in his father.