Muckraker Farm

Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism (Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard)

The Worth Bingham Prize honors investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served.

These stories may involve state, local or national government, lobbyists or the press itself wherever there exists an “atmosphere of easy tolerance” that Worth Bingham himself once described in his reporting on the nation’s capital.

The investigative reporting may cover actual violations of the law, rule or code; lax or ineffective administration or enforcement; or activities which create conflicts of interest, entail excessive secrecy or otherwise raise questions of propriety.

Judges will be guided by such factors as obstacles overcome in getting information, accuracy, clarity of analysis and writing style, magnitude of the situation, and impact on the public, including any reforms that may have resulted.

The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism

The Martha Gellhorn Prize is given in honour of one of the 20th century’s greatest reporters. It is awarded to a journalist whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts that expose establishment propaganda, or ‘official drivel’, as Martha Gellhorn called it.

Martha Gellhorn was one of the most experienced and distinguished journalists of the 20th century. In the 1930s she travelled across the US for the Roosevelt Administration reporting on the effects of the Depression. Later she used her research for The Trouble I’ve Seen, a book of four novellas about the American poor. With world war looming, she chronicled the rise of fascism in Europe for Collier’s magazine: her reports on the Spanish Civil War are among the best dispatches from Spain at the time. After 1939 she covered several key military confrontations in Western Europe, including Monte Cassino and the Battle of the Bulge. In June 1944, she stowed away on a hospital ship to report on the D-Day landings and entered Dachau with American troops in May 1945. In 1966 she covered the war in Vietnam with a series of six dispatches for The Guardian. The authorities later refused her accreditation to work in South Vietnam. In the 1980s she travelled in Central America, writing about the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. A few years later she published a report from Panama in the wake of the US invasion. Her last long piece of reportage, written shortly before she died, was about street children in Brazil. She was the author of several novels and collections of short stories. Her war reportage can be read in The Face of War. The View from the Ground, a collection of her other journalism, was published in 1988.