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TechnoratiResembling I.F. Stone
I.F. Stone’s Son on the Izzy Awards, Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald
This is adapted from comments made at Tuesday's inaugural ceremony of the Izzy Awards for independent media - named after legendary journalist I.F. "Izzy" Stone. Blogger Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! shared the award presented by Ithaca College's Park Center for Independent Media.
When I first heard about an award for people who most "resembled" Izzy, I had high hopes that I might finally win a prize. Unfortunately, the selection committee appears to have been concerned with behavior.
Resembling Izzy in behavioral terms does not lead to an easy life. His capacity for thinking independently, and acting on principle, isolated him from just about everyone.
In the McCarthy era, because he spoke in defense of Jeffersonian principles, people were afraid to be seen with him. When he supported the rights of Palestinians, Jewish institutions would not invite him to speak. And when the National Press Club refused to serve his black guest lunch, he quit the club, isolating himself from his colleagues.
He said he was so happy in his work that he should be "arrested." But the consequence, for him, of speaking truth to power was loneliness.
Inevitably, the reward of such a man comes late. I.F. Stone knew this. He said: "I began as a pariah and then was treated as a gadfly. If I live long enough, I will become an institution." And indeed in his lifetime, he moved on to become an icon.
Last year, Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism began awarding an annual I.F Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence with a follow-on panel on strengthening this independence. So two decades after his death, he became a fulcrum for journalistic independence.
Now, following the I.F. Stone Medal of 2008, comes the Izzy Award of 2009 with different criteria but a common goal. Rest assured that I.F. Stone is rotating in his grave with pleasure over these annual awards.
Today's Izzy Award winners do have points of resemblance to I.F. Stone. Glenn Greenwald is a close reader of official documents and a principled critic of the tendency of the Executive Branch to exceed its rightful powers. He has been a fearless critic of government officials and complacent reporters. He has shown a willingness to challenge conventional pieties, including unthinking support for Israeli hardliners.
Amy Goodman career also has similarities. She speaks up for the disenfranchised and gives her audience facts they don't hear from the traditional media. She is an investigative journalist and writes often about human rights. Like I. F. Stone and his weekly, she founded a vehicle, "Democracy Now!", that takes no advertising or money from corporations or government. She confronts authority no matter how high. And she has repeatedly shown physical courage, something that I.F. Stone showed in accompanying Jewish refugees of World War II in their illegal and dangerous travel from Europe to Palestine.
I.F. Stone once said: "If the Government makes a mistake, the newspapers will find out and the problem may then be fixed. But if freedom of the press were lost, the country would soon go to pieces."
What will this crucial freedom of the press amount to in coming years in the face of so much technological change? And how to protect it? The Park Center for Independent Media's answer is to indentify role models by giving them Izzy Awards. It has made a good beginning.
In conclusion, I.F. Stone once said that he resembled nothing more than a "great Jewish bullfrog." With this in mind, I congratulate the awardees on two grounds: their prize-winning resemblance to I.F. Stone in behavioral terms and their abysmal failure to resemble him in person.
15 Comments so far
Show Allgreat stuff! Amy and Glenn are part of the silver lining.
As a great fan of Mr Greenwald and Ms Goodman's work, I can without question state that they are standing in the footprints of giants. There are few to compare with your father today, most of what are called "journalists" are nothing more than parrots. My seven year old could do as well, given that he knew how to type (he does) and that he could string words into a cogent sentence (not yet!).
Somewhere along the line "courage of conviction" became an ugly phrase, which is truly sad. Your dad had it in spades. He is missed.
docpatmac April 2nd, 2009 12:21 pm, you're being too kind. Rather than 'parrots,' the more accurate term would be 'pimps.'
RSJ,
I believe you have the job descriptions mixed up. Publishers are pimps; journalists are whores.
J4zonian April 3rd, 2009 2:44 am, I stand corrected. I meant that modern 'journalists' were pimps in the sense of selling corporatism to the rest of us, but I think you're right: They serve the master at his whim to earn the master more money, so that would be the definition of a whore in the pimp-whore context, the difference being that the hooker who sells herself for the pimp often gets little money out of the deal whereas the modern 'journalist' is well paid. Is it possible they are both pimp and whore simultaneously -- a 'pimpore' perhaps?
Not sure what part of the world you live in but journalists there are well-paid?
Get the passports, Martha we're movin today!
I.F.Stone and George Seldes before him were powerful influences shaping my view of the political world. Izzy Stone was a superb researcher for facts and truth. He couldn't be bought. He was deeply respected by many journalists who sold out for money and the limelight. If I believed in reincarnation I'd bring him back as himself. Burt Shachter
shach April 1st, 2009 10:32 pm, the great George Seldes accurately predicted long ago the insanity of letting the rich become too rich -- eventually every government turns into an oligarchy when the wealthy have the abiity to bribe the legislators and buy up the media outlets:
"The main threat to Democracy comes not from the extreme left but from the extreme right, which is able to buy huge sections of the press and radio, and wages a constant campaign to smear and discredit every progressive and humanitarian measure."
-- George Seldes
Abraham Lincoln also had his priorities right:
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
-- Abraham Lincoln, First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.
"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny."
-- Abraham Lincoln, Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland, April 18, 1864.
Before him, Thomas Jefferson also outlined the situation we face:
"Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to ... the general prey of the rich on the poor."
-- Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787.
"There is... an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy."
-- Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams, 1813.
"By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline."
-- Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, 1788.
A shame most of our lawmakers don't read Lincoln and Jefferson anymore, and I don't think most of them ever paid attention to Seldes or I.F. Stone.
Izzy didn't know about the Internet.
What will this crucial freedom of the press amount to in coming years in the face of so much technological change?
If Ariana Huffington can be capitalized to the tune of $10 million to start HuffPo, the MSM will have no trouble creating space for itself. The Ruling Order must always have a large place two inches in front of everyone's noses so they can spread their lies and bullshit. And depending on how bad things get in this country, if, for example, the Republicans and Democrats are somehow threatened by third parties in some state, you can expect a crackdown on independent media of any kind. The regime of George Wanker Bush poisoned the American well. It can't be flushed out of the system because the Democrats are too cowardly and too complicit to do so. Its ghost is still out there, waiting patiently.
Mordechai Shiblikov April 1st, 2009 7:35 pm, you're right to a point but, if the Ruling Order's Big Media were all that powerful, there would be no Izzy Stone award -- indeed, we wouldn't even read his name these days.
I think all of the old institutions of the Powers-That-Be are losing traction in our present Great Depression, although, just like the good Versailles court aristocrats they are, they don't fully realize it yet. The GOP is still echoing lines that were a sour joke a year ago; Wall Streetwalkers continue to whine for their unearned bonuses; CNN's Ali Velshi still has a job. The credit card debt bubble, bigger even than the over-priced housing balloon, is just about to pop and wash away the last vestiges of the gleeful Milton Friedman free marketeers, greedily counting their devaluing paper in the back room.
It will all be crumbling around them -- what will emerge from the ashes is uncertain, but I think it won't be friendly to the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Punch Sulzberger or Sumner Redstone.
"The credit card debt bubble, bigger even than the over-priced housing balloon, is just about to pop and wash away the last vestiges of the gleeful Milton Friedman free marketeers, greedily counting their devaluing paper in the back room."
RSJ,
And we still await the devastation from Credit Default Swaps which according to some analysts amounts to Hundreds of $$Trillions.
The powers that be are losing traction.
With 46 out 50 states in the red, and little hope that the federal government will help bail them out, perhaps leaders of the 50 states will get together and demand that the Federal Government follow the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and then take back State powers which are inherent in the Constitution but have been usurped by the federal government.
If Congress cannot identify their constitutional authority on the bills/mandates they've passed and continue to pass, then the States should be able to ignore them, given they are in violation of the Tenth Amendment.
Gail April 2nd, 2009 11:06 am, you're absolutely right. I've read that the credit-default-swap-hedge-fund-derivatives mess totals more than the entire GDP of the United States. It can't possibly be bailed out by the US Treasury.
Along with that, we're going to have a massive defaulting of credit card debt as everyone except the top ten percent simply can't afford to pay all of their usurious credit card bills any longer.
You may be right that the states will assert their power to operate in the best interests of their own citizens (Texas, South Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi, under GOP rule, would be the exceptions for now), and start to act locally instead of globally.
Obama's doing the best he can, IMO, but his economic advisors, trained in the belly of the beast in New York and 'free market' academia, are all locked into the importance of the Wall Street stock markets, which are not a true indicator of how our economy and the people are doing.
I hope Obama wakes up and realizes that listening to Lawrence Summers or Tim Geithner on curing our economic problems is like taking the advice of an active crack addict on how to solve the problems of drug addiction.
The decision may be taken out of his hands, however -- a flat-broke federal government will not have much sway over Wall Street, the states, nor the people who live in them. The effects will be worse than the Great Depression since we no longer have the manufacturing base to recover as we did in the 1930s, and we're due for a drastic drop in real estate values as they fall back to earth.
I hope we can duck this bullet, but, realistically, I just don't see how.
Thanks for this article that brought me back to my undergraduate days when an Aunt of mine mailed me 'I.F. Stone's Weekly' regularly. One dorm mate of mine asked me once why I read that "commie stuff". That might have been the first time I realized that I wanted to be a leftist.
I had forgotten that I.F. Stone was one of the Great American Heroes and spoke for the disenfranchised.... Your father was a Great Man.... I only wish that people who had the chance to speak out against "The Lies of 9/11 and the Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan."
Too bad Dan Rather did not do it!