ICFJ Award Winners Show the Power of Journalism in Dangerous Times

Last night, at ICFJ’s Tribute to Journalists 2021, we celebrated outstanding colleagues who produce stellar work in the public interest even as the landscape for truth tellers becomes more perilous around the world.

The urgency of the threat was spelled out in powerful remarks by the evening’s honorees – Bill Whitaker of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, investigative journalist Pavla Holcová of the Czech Republic and fact-checking leader Natália Leal of Brazil.

Anne Applebaum Accepts ICFJ Excellence in International Reporting Award

Colleagues, friends, and fellow journalists! Thank you so much for this award. To receive it from this institution is truly humbling. The International Center for Journalists has created a network that includes thousands of people who report, write, and take photographs in profoundly difficult circumstances. They do so while living in dictatorships, fighting wars, experiencing cataclysmic natural disasters. Some of them pay an enormous personal price to do what they do. But they know how important it is to write the first draft of history, to inform their fellow citizens, to inform the world about what is happening around them.

Bill Whitaker Accepts ICFJ Founders Award for Excellence in Journalism

Good evening. First, congratulations to Anne Applebaum on her ICFJ Excellence in International Reporting Award. Every reporter among us is covering a world under authoritarian threat that Anne has been warning about for decades.