On October 7, the first I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence was awarded to John Walcott, now of McClatchy Newspapers. As the Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder, Mr. Walcott led a team of reporters including Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel who distinguished themselves for thoughtful, critical and skeptical news coverage of the lead-up to the war in Iraq.
The award ceremony served as an occasion for an assessment of the state of journalistic independence, and an attempt to derive the lessons of the recent past. The highlights of the ensuing discussion were presented by Dan Froomkin of the Nieman Watchdog in “The Lessons of our Failure,” October 17.
The I.F. Stone Award is administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University along with the Nieman Watchdog.
A rich archive devoted to the life and work of I.F. Stone may be found here.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?
Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.
If the government wants a system of learning and adaptation that improves results in real time, it has to treat translation, utilization, and adaptation as core functions of governance rather than as afterthoughts.
Coordination among federal science agencies is essential to ensure government-wide alignment on R&D investment priorities. However, the federal R&D enterprise suffers from egregious siloization.