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Type of site | Daily news |
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Headquarters | Sacramento, California |
Editor | Britney Schultz |
Employees | 25 |
URL | www |
Commercial | 501(c)(3) organization |
Launched | 2001 |
Current status | Active |
Truthout is a non-profit news organization which describes itself as "dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues". [1] Truthout reports news from a left-wing perspective, [2] with its main areas of focus including mass incarceration and prison abolition advocacy, social justice, climate change, militarism, economics and labor, U.S. LGBTQIA rights and reproductive justice.[ citation needed ]
Truthout's Executive Director is Ziggy West Jeffery and the Editor-in-Chief is Britney Schultz. [3] The organization’s annual operating budget is approximately $2.2 million as of 2021. [4]
On May 13, 2006, after Jason Leopold posted on Truthout that Karl Rove had been indicted by the grand jury investigating the Plame affair, Rove spokesman Mark Corallo denied the story, calling it "a complete fabrication". [5] Truthout defended the story, saying on May 15 they had two sources "who were explicit about the information" published, [6] and confirmed on May 25 that they had "three independent sources confirming that attorneys for Karl Rove were handed an indictment" on the night of May 12. [6] The grand jury concluded without returning an indictment of Rove. [7]
In his memoir, Courage and Consequence, Rove addressed the Leopold article, writing that Leopold is a "nut with Internet access" and that "thirty-five reporters called [Rove's defense attorney] Luskin or Corallo to ask about the Truthout report." According to Rove, "[Special Counsel] Fitzgerald got a kick out of the fictitious account and e-mailed Luskin to see how he felt after such a long day." [8]
Jason Leopold continued to write investigative pieces for Truthout through 2014; [9] he joined Vice News that year. [10]
60 Minutes cited a report published at Truthout as a source for its May 16, 2010 episode about the BP oil spill and the whistleblower who warned about a possible blowout at another BP deepwater drilling site. [11] Digital Journal wrote up the story. [12] CNN's Randi Kaye in an article cited a report by Truthout as the first article on BP Alaska employee Mark Kovac's inside knowledge about the safety concerns at the Prudhoe Bay, Alaska BP oil field. [13] On July 14, 2010, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure held a hearing in the Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials. The hearing [14] titled "The Safety of Hazardous Liquid Pipelines (Part 2): Integrity Management", cited an investigative report by Truthout as a document for the committee's investigation. [15]
In 2011, Truthout suffered a hacking breach in which ten days of articles were deleted. [16]
In 2013, Truthout journalist Mike Ludwig unearthed with a Freedom of Information Act request with the Interior Department revealed that fracking technology was being used on offshore oil rigs in the ecologically sensitive Santa Barbara Channel. [17] Coastal conservationists were alarmed, and environmental groups sprang into action, generating protests and broad public discussion [18] about offshore fracking. At one point, lawsuits filed by environmental groups forced federal officials to place a moratorium [19] on offshore fracking in the channel while regulators reviewed the practice and their rules for making it safe. In 2014, the EPA issued a new rules requiring offshore drillers to disclose fracking chemicals they dump into the ocean off the California coast. [20]
In 2016, Dahr Jamail and Truthout released [21] Navy documents outlining plans for combat training exercises along vast non-military areas of Washington state coastline. The documents showed the areas the Navy was prepared to utilize, without the mandatory risk assessments, medical plans, surveys of training areas and coordinating their activities with local, state and federal law enforcement officials. The release of these documents forced the Navy to postpone this training for at least 2 years. [22] It caused commotion within the Washington state government, as they were not aware of the Navy's plans. [23]
Freelancer and Truthout writer Aaron Miguel Cantú was one of six journalists faced with felony rioting charges after covering the inauguration of Donald Trump. [24] [25] In July 2018, all charges against Cantu and many of the other protestors were dismissed. [26]
In 2022, the Crossroads Fund presented The Donald F. Erickson Synapses Award to Truthout, for independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues. [27]
The thirteenth annual Izzy Award was awarded to nonprofit news outlet Truthout, journalist Liliana Segura, senior reporter at The Intercept and journalist Tim Schwab, writing in The Nation. [28]
Dahr Jamail was awarded the 2018 Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media for his reporting on climate change and other environmental issues. The judges wrote: "There is an urgency and passion in Dahr Jamail's reporting that is justified by the literally earth-changing subject matter. And it's supported by science and on-the-scene sources, whether covering ocean pollution, sea level rise, deafening noise pollution or Fukushima radiation." [29]
Jamail produces a monthly wrap-up of the latest climate research and trends – "Climate Disruption Dispatches". [30]
A joint Truthout and Earth Island Journal investigation "America's Toxic Prisons" [31] by Candice Bernd, Zoe Loftus-Farren, and Maureen Nandini Mitra won awards in two categories of the 2018 San Francisco Press Club Journalism Awards. [32] The investigation won second place in the Magazines category for environment/nature reporting and investigative reporting.
In 2012, Truthout journalist Gareth Porter was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism [33] for his work uncovering the Obama administration's military strategy in Afghanistan. "In a series of extraordinary articles, Gareth Porter has torn away the facades of the Obama administration and disclosed a military strategy that amounts to a war against civilians." Amongst Porter's award-winning stories were 'How McChrystal and Petraeus Built an Indiscriminate "Killing Machine, [34] "' and 'The Lies That Sold Obama's Escalation in Afghanistan. [35] '
Maya Schenwar, currently the editor in chief of Truthout, was awarded in the 2013 Online Column Writing category by the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Awards [36] for her columns on mass incarceration, [37] the death penalty, [38] and solitary confinement. [39]
Truthout's Executive Director is Ziggy West Jeffery and the Editor-in-Chief is Britney Schultz. [3]
Truthout's Board of Directors comprises Maya Schenwar, McMaster University Professor and educational theorist Henry A. Giroux, policy director Robert Naiman, and Lewis R. Gordon. [40]
Truthout's Board of Advisors includes Mark Ruffalo, Dean Baker, Richard D. Wolff, William Ayers, Mark Weisbrot. [41] The late Howard Zinn was a member of the advisory board.
The late William Rivers Pitt was Truthout's Senior Editor and Lead Columnist. [42]
Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, racial injustice, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Practitioners sometimes use the terms "watchdog reporting" or "accountability reporting".
Amy Goodman is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Her investigative journalism career includes coverage of the East Timor independence movement, Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara, and Chevron Corporation's role in Nigeria.
William Rivers Pitt was an American author, editor, and liberal political activist.
Jason Arthur Leopold is an American senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News. He was previously an investigative reporter for Al Jazeera America and Vice News. He worked at Truthout as a senior editor and reporter, a position he left after three years on February 19, 2008, to co-found the web-based political magazine The Public Record, Leopold's profile page on The Public Record now says he is Editor-at-Large. Leopold returned to Truthout as Deputy Managing Editor in October 2009 and was made lead investigative reporter in 2012 before leaving Truthout in May 2013. He makes extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act to research stories.
Viveca Novak is an American journalist who has worked as the editorial and communications director at OpenSecrets since 2011. She was previously a Washington correspondent for Time and The Wall Street Journal. She is a frequent guest on CNN, NBC, PBS, and Fox.
The Roy H. Park School of Communications is one of five schools at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, New York, United States. The school is named after media executive Roy H. Park, who lived in Ithaca and who served on the board of trustees at Ithaca College for many years.
Gareth Porter is an American historian, investigative journalist, author and policy analyst specializing in U.S. national security issues. He was an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and has written about the potential for peaceful conflict resolution in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In the late 1970s Porter was a defender of the Khmer Rouge (KR) against charges that the KR was pursuing genocidal policies against the Cambodian people. Porter's books include Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (2005), his explanation of the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
Aaron Glantz is a Peabody Award-winning radio, print and television journalist who produces public interest stories. His reporting has sparked more than a dozen Congressional hearings, a raft of federal legislation and led to criminal probes by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission. Because of his reporting, 500,000 fewer U.S. military veterans face long waits for disability compensation, while 100,000 fewer veterans are prescribed highly addictive narcotics by the government.
Dahr Jamail is an American journalist who was one of the few unembedded journalists to report extensively from Iraq during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He spent eight months in Iraq, between 2003 and 2005, and presented his stories on his website, entitled "Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches." Jamail has been a reporter for Truthout and has also written for Al Jazeera. He has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now!, and is the recipient of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. In 2018, the Izzy Award of the Park Center for Independent Media was awarded to Jamail, and shared by investigative reporters Lee Fang, Sharon Lerner, and author Todd Miller.
The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, named for the war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, was established in 1999 by the Martha Gellhorn Trust. The Trust is a UK-registered charity. The award is founded on the following principles:
The award will be for the kind of reporting that distinguished Martha: in her own words "the view from the ground". This is essentially a human story that penetrates the established version of events and illuminates an urgent issue buried by prevailing fashions of what makes news. We would expect the winner to tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment conduct and its propaganda, or "official drivel", as Martha called it. The subjects can be based in this country or abroad.
BP p.l.c. is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. It is one of the oil and gas "supermajors" and one of the world's largest companies measured by revenues and profits. It is a vertically integrated company operating in all areas of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and extraction, refining, distribution and marketing, power generation, and trading.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was an environmental disaster which began on April 20, 2010, off the coast of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, considered the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry and estimated to be 8 to 31 percent larger in volume than the previous largest, the Ixtoc I oil spill, also in the Gulf of Mexico. Caused in the aftermath of a blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, the United States federal government estimated the total discharge at 4.9 MMbbl. After several failed efforts to contain the flow, the well was declared sealed on 19 September 2010. Reports in early 2012 indicated that the well site was still leaking. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is regarded as one of the largest environmental disasters in world history.
Abrahm Lustgarten is an American investigative reporter, author, filmmaker and public speaker specializing in human adaptation to climate change, and an educator training journalists in cross-disciplinary communication about the climate crisis. He writes on staff for ProPublica and has worked with the New York Times Magazine.
Gary Cohn is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Russell Gold is an author and journalist for Texas Monthly. He was previously an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the San Antonio Express-News and suburban correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
David Hasemyer is an American journalist and author. With Lisa Song and Elizabeth McGowan, he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and a 2016 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He graduated, in 1979, from San Diego State University, with a Bachelor's in Journalism. Hasemyer was raised in Moab, Utah.
The Intercept is an online American nonprofit news organization that publishes articles and podcasts.
Ian Urbina is an American investigative reporter who has written for a variety of outlets, including The New York Times and The Atlantic. Urbina is the author of The New York Times bestsellerThe Outlaw Ocean and founder of journalism nonprofit, The Outlaw Ocean Project.
Lisa Song is an American journalist and author. She won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, with David Hasemyer and Elizabeth McGowan, for their report on the Kalamazoo River oil spill. She works for ProPublica, reporting on the environment, energy and climate change.
The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis: From CIA Coup to the Brink of War is a non-fiction book by former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Officer John Kiriakou and investigative journalist and historian Gareth Porter about America's behavior and actions during four decades with Iran. The book was published by Simon & Schuster publishing on February 4, 2020.
Truthout's media bias is left. Ground News assigned this score by aggregating media bias ratings of a Left rating from Ad Fontes Media, a Left rating from Media Bias/Fact Check, a leanLeft rating from from All Sides.