The Ridenhour Prizes are awards in four categories given annually in recognition of those "who persevere in acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society".
History
The awards are presented by
The Nation Institute
Type Media Center (formerly The Nation Institute) is a nonprofit media organization that was previously associated with ''The Nation'' magazine. It sponsors fellows, hosts forums, publishes books and investigative reporting, and awards several an ...
Ron Ridenhour
Ronald Lee Ridenhour (April 6, 1946 – May 10, 1998) was an American known for having played a central role in spurring the federal investigation of the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam. When he first learned of events there, he was serving i ...
, the
Vietnam War veteran
A Vietnam veteran is a person who served in the armed forces of participating countries during the Vietnam War.
The term has been used to describe veterans who served in the armed forces of South Vietnam, the United States Armed Forces, and ot ...
who exposed the
My Lai Massacre
My or MY may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* My (radio station), a Malaysian radio station
* Little My, a fictional character in the Moomins universe
* ''My'' (album), by Edyta Górniak
* ''My'' (EP), by Cho Mi-yeon
Business
* Market ...
. Each prize carries a $10,000 stipend. The prizes were first awarded in 2004.
Prize categories
* The Ridenhour Courage Prize
* The Ridenhour Book Prize
* The Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize
* The Ridenhour Documentary Film Prize (since 2011)
Seymour Hersh
Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Investigative journalism, investigative journalist and political writer.
Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam Wa ...
* 2006:
Gloria Steinem
Gloria Marie Steinem (; born March 25, 1934) is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Steinem was a c ...
* 2007:
Jimmy Carter
James Earl Carter Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 76th governor of Georgia from 1 ...
* 2008:
Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers (born Billy Don Moyers, June 5, 1934) is an American journalist and political commentator. Under the Johnson administration he served from 1965 to 1967 as the eleventh White House Press Secretary. He was a director of the Counci ...
* 2009:
Bob Herbert
Robert Herbert (born March 7, 1945) is an American journalist and former op-ed columnist for '' The New York Times''. His column was syndicated to other newspapers around the country. Herbert frequently writes on poverty, the Iraq War, racis ...
* 2010:
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922January 27, 2010) was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist thinker and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a politica ...
(posthumous)
* 2011:
Russ Feingold
Russell Dana Feingold ( ; born March 2, 1953) is an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States Senator from Wisconsin from 1993 to 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he was its nominee in the 2016 election for the same U ...
* 2012:
John Lewis
John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1987 until his death in 2020. He participated in the 1960 Nashville ...
James Risen
James Risen (born April 27, 1955) is an American journalist for ''The Intercept''. He previously worked for ''The New York Times'' and before that for ''Los Angeles Times''. He has written or co-written many articles concerning U.S. government ...
* 2016: Jamie Kalven
* 2017:
Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere Smith is an American actress, playwright, and professor. She is known for her roles as National Security Advisor Dr. Nancy McNally in '' The West Wing'' (2000–06), hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus in the Showtime series ''N ...
George Soros
George Soros ( name written in eastern order), (born György Schwartz, August 12, 1930) is a Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist. , he had a net worth of US$8.6 billion, Note that this site is updated daily. having donated mo ...
Denis Hayes
Denis Allen Hayes (born August 29, 1944) is an environmental advocate and an advocate for solar power. He rose to prominence in 1970 as the coordinator for the first Earth Day.
Hayes founded the Earth Day Network and expanded it to more than 18 ...
* 2021:
José Andrés
José Ramón Andrés Puerta (born 13 July 1969) is a Spanish chef, and founder of World Central Kitchen (WCK), a non-profit devoted to providing meals in the wake of natural disasters. A Spanish-born and raised cook, he is often credited with b ...
* 2022:
Anita Hill
Anita Faye Hill (born July 30, 1956) is an American lawyer, educator and author. She is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university's Heller School for Social Policy and ...
The Ridenhour Book Prize
* 2004: Deborah Scroggins, for ''Emma's War: An Aid Worker, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil – A True Story of Love and Death in the Sudan''
* 2005:
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is an American journalist whose works focus on the marginalized members of society: adolescents living in poverty, prostitutes, women in prison, etc. She is best known for her 2003 non-fiction book '' Random Family''. She wa ...
, for ''Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx''
* 2006:
Anthony Shadid
Anthony Shadid (September 26, 1968 – February 16, 2012) was a foreign correspondent for ''The New York Times'' based in Baghdad and Beirut who won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting twice, in 2004 and 2010.Rajiv Chandrasekaran, for '' Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone,''
* 2008: James Scurlock, for ''Maxed Out: Hard Times in the Age of Easy Credit''
* 2009:
Jane Mayer
Jane Meredith Mayer (born 1955) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the Uni ...
Joe Sacco
Joe Sacco (; born October 2, 1960) is a Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist. He is best known for his comics journalism, in particular in the books '' Palestine'' (1996) and '' Footnotes in Gaza'' (2009), on Israeli–Palestinian rela ...
Wendell Potter
Wendell Potter (born July 16, 1951) is an American advocate for health insurance payment reform, ''New York Times'' bestselling author, and former health insurance industry communications director. A critic of HMOs and the tactics used by health ...
, for ''Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Healthcare and Deceiving Americans''
* 2012: Ali H. Soufan, for ''The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al‐Qaeda''
* 2013: Seth Rosenfeld, for ''Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power''
* 2014:
Sheri Fink
Sheri Fink is an American journalist who writes about health, medicine and science.
She received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting "for a story that chronicles the urgent life-and-death decisions made by one hospital’s exhau ...
Heather Ann Thompson
Heather Ann Thompson is an American historian, author, activist, professor, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan. Thompson won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2016 Bancroft Prize, and other awards for her work '' Blood in the Water: The A ...
Eliza Griswold
Eliza Griswold (born February 9, 1973) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to ''The New Yorker'' and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of ...
Rick S. Piltz Frederick Steven "Rick" Piltz (July 29, 1943 – October 18, 2014) was a former senior associate in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. In March 2005, he resigned over political interference in the program's climate change reports. In June 200 ...
Thomas Tamm
Thomas Tamm (born 1952) is a public defender in Washington County, Maryland. He formerly worked as an attorney in the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ) Office of Intelligence Policy and Review during 2004 when senior Justice officials res ...
* 2010: Matthew Hoh
* 2011:
Thomas Andrews Drake
Thomas Andrews Drake (born 1957) is a former senior executive of the National Security Agency (NSA), a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower. In 2010, the government alleged that Drake mishandled doc ...
Jose Antonio Vargas
Jose Antonio Vargas (born February 3, 1981) is a journalist, filmmaker, and immigration rights activist. Born in the Philippines and raised in the United States from the age of twelve, he was part of ''The Washington Post'' team that won the P ...
Aicha Elbasri
Aicha Elbasri is a writer and former United Nations official. She is the author of L’Imaginaire carcéral de Jean Genet, a book on Jean Genet, a prominent, controversial French writer and later political activist. She was previously the Spokes ...
* 2016:
Mona Hanna-Attisha
Mona Hanna-Attisha is a Pediatrics, pediatrician, professor, and public health advocate whose research exposed the Flint water crisis. She is the author of the 2018 book ''What the Eyes Don't See'', which ''The New York Times'' named as one of t ...
Kirby Dick
Kirby Bryan Dick (born August 23, 1952) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor best known for directing documentary films. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary Feature for directing ''Twist of Fait ...
Joshua Oppenheimer
Joshua Lincoln Oppenheimer (born September 23, 1974) is an American-British film director based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is known for his Oscar-nominated films ''The Act of Killing'' (2012) and ''The Look of Silence'' (2014), Oppenheimer was ...
National Bird
This is a list of national birds, including official birds of overseas territories and other states described as nations. Most species in the list are officially designated. Some species hold only an "unofficial" status.
National birds
See al ...
Nanfu Wang
Nanfu Wang (born 1985) is a Chinese-born American filmmaker. Her debut film '' Hooligan Sparrow'' premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017. Her second film, ''I A ...
and Jialing Zhang, for ''
One Child Nation
''One Child Nation'' is a 2019 American documentary film directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang about the fallout of China's one-child policy that lasted from 1979 to 2015. The documentary is made up of various interviews with former village c ...
''
* 2021:
Ramona Diaz
Ramona S. Diaz is a Filipino-American documentary filmmaker best known for creating "character-driven documentaries". Her notable works include the 2012 film '' Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey'', featuring the band Journey and its new l ...
, for ''
A Thousand Cuts
''A Thousand Cuts'' is a 2020 Philippine-American documentary film about Maria Ressa, the founder of the online news site Rappler. Directed by Ramona Diaz, it explores the conflicts between the press and the Filipino government under President R ...
Attica
Attica ( el, Αττική, Ancient Greek ''Attikḗ'' or , or ), or the Attic Peninsula, is a historical region that encompasses the city of Athens, the capital of Greece and its countryside. It is a peninsula projecting into the Aegean S ...
''
Special Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction
* 2009:
Nick Turse
Nick Turse (born 1975) is an American investigative journalist, historian, and author. He is the associate editor and research director of the blog TomDispatch and a fellow at The Nation Institute.
Education
Turse earned an MA in history from R ...