Awards & Conferences

Pioneering journalist Maria Hinojosa, founder of The Futuro Media Group, is winner of the 2020 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. During her 30-year career, Hinojosa’s groundbreaking documentaries and investigative reports have brought to light stories about the lives, challenges and contributions of millions of Americans living in communities too often ignored by traditional media.

Announcing the award, Florence Graves, chair of the I.F. Stone Medal selection committee said: “As Hinojosa worked on her vision to make diverse Americans more visible in news reporting, she had a stunning insight: The country’s rapidly growing multicultural population was becoming the new American mainstream. And although they didn’t ask for anyone’s permission or issue any press releases, Hinojosa could see that they were influencing every aspect of contemporary life and changing America—just as waves of immigrants before them, including Hinojosa and her family, had done.”

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.