The 2010 Izzy Awards honored Jeremy Scahill. The Izzy Award recognizes “special achievement in independent media.” View the official program here: 2010IzzyProgram
JEREMY SCAHILL – Jeremy Scahill is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books, 2007). He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Insti- tute, a frequent contributor to The Nation, and a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!. He was a 2008 election correspondent for HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
In continuous reporting throughout 2009, Scahill followed the trail of military contractors that he’d first pursued for the Blackwater book. His work appeared in many independent outlets, including AlterNet, HuffingtonPost, CommonDreams and his own Rebel Reports blog. Mainstream news organizations eventually picked up the story; this past January on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow ended an interview with Scahill about security contractors in post-earthquake Haiti by saying, “Whenever I read stories like this – even when you don’t write them – I think of you.”
In 1998, he won his first Polk Award – with Amy Goodman – for the radio documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dic- tatorship, which exposed the company’s alliance with a dictatorship that led to the deaths of environmental activists. A decade later, he won his second Polk Award for Blackwater. This is his first Izzy.
