Awards & Conferences

Veteran journalists Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery are winners of the 2019 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, selected in recognition of their enduring support of investigative reporting and independent journalists.

Announcing the award, Florence Graves, chair of the I.F. Stone Medal selection committee said: “Since they became co-editors in 2006, Monika and Clara have done a spectacular job of bringing Mother Jones fully into the digital age and continuing the groundbreaking investigative reporting that the publication has been known for since its launch in 1976 during the post-Watergate era. Against the odds for nonprofit (and increasingly for-profit) publications, they have brilliantly stabilized and expanded the muckraking magazine’s finances—a key to their many editorial successes.”

Nieman curator Ann Marie Lipinski added: “Monika and Clara are two of the most admired editors in the country and their stewardship of Mother Jones has been inspirational. During challenging times, they have elevated the magazine and its journalism to new levels of excellence, while modeling a cooperative style of management that is unusual in the industry.”

• Read the press release

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 a journalist whose work captures the spirit of independence, integrity, courage and indefatigability that characterized I.F. Stone’s Weekly, published from 1953 to 1971.

An advisory committee of journalists oversees nominations and the selection of an annual medal winner. The committee is chaired by Florence Graves, founding director of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

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.