I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence

Alfredo Corchado, executive editor of the El Paso, Texas-based Puente News Collaborative, is winner of the 2026 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. The award honors his work directing Puente’s innovative, partnership-driven approach to reporting along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. A bilingual journalism nonprofit, the Puente News Collaborative has connected independent journalists to newsrooms in the U.S. and Mexico since 2021, adding high-quality, fact-based reporting to the region’s local news ecosystem. The Puente network includes more than two dozen publishing partners whose shared reporting goes beyond border security issues to provide a range of critical news stories and features for and about communities in the U.S. and Latin America.

Commenting on this year’s decision, I.F. Stone Medal jury member Bernice Yeung said: “In addition to a distinguished career covering the U.S.-Mexico border, Alfredo Corchado’s current work with the Puente News Collaborative is a powerful response to the collapse of local news outlets in communities deeply impacted by increased policing of immigrants and migrants. Puente, with Alfredo at the helm, supports journalists and journalism aimed at combating disinformation and community polarization.”

Read the announcement.

About the Award

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.

An independent committee of journalists chaired by PBS Public Editor Ricardo Sandoval-Palos oversees nominations and selection of the medal winner. Committee members are Jasmine Brown, a senior producer at ABC News’ “World News Tonight with David Muir” and a 2020 Nieman Fellow; Bernice Yeung, managing editor of the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism; Michael Riley, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg News and Businessweek magazine; and Phillip W. d. Martin, a 1998 Nieman Fellow who most recently worked as a senior investigative reporter for the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting.

Myra MacPherson, author of the biography “All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone,” a juror emerita on the selection committee, died on Feb. 2, 2026. 

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.