The publisher and president of RealClear Foundation, David DesRosiers, first started asking himself over a year ago if the news media really needed a rival to the Pulitzer Prize, and when he started asking others, the answer was a resounding yes.
The result became RCP’s brand new Samizdat Prize, whose inaugural winners, journalists Matt Taibbi, Miranda Devine, and Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, all will join Dave Rubin for a live interview at a March 7 awards gala in Palm Beach, Florida.
DesRosiers said RCP wanted to create an event that rewards people of outstanding courage who stood up in front of history and lived up to the high standards of their profession.
“The best journalists are the ones who follow the evidence and the money wherever it leads,” DesRosiers said. “They are the fearless ones.”
In particular, he said today’s media landscape struggles to celebrate our cornerstone political value, “which is the First Amendment.”
DesRosiers said the name “Samizdat” was chosen because that is what the remarkably viable underground press in the former Soviet Union was called.
“It translates as ‘We publish ourselves,’ that is, not the state, but we, the people,” he said.
The New York Times wrote in detail about the oppression and dangers of censorship during the Cold War and the underground newspaper.
“Today’s samizdat has no print ing presses (with rare exceptions): The K.G.B., the secret police, is too efficient,” the story reads. “It is the typewriter, each page produced with four to eight carbon copies, that does the job. By the thousands and tens of thousands of frail, smudged onionskin sheets, samizdat spreads across the land a mass of protests and petitions, secret court minutes, Alexander Solzhenit syn’s banned novels, George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984,’ Nicholas Berdyayev’s philosophical essays, documents of the Czech Spring, all sorts of sharp political discourses and angry poetry.”
DesRosiers, a Worcester, Massachusetts, native who grew up in a working-class Irish family, said he first started asking himself the question after the 2016 presidential election as he watched news coverage in the United States begin to lose the trust of its citizenry.
That trust level has only gotten worse. A Gallup poll released late last year showed an abysmal 7% of adults in America have a ‘great deal’ of trust in news media, while a whopping 38% said they have none at all.
At about the same time, DesRosiers said he started to become deeply concerned about the increasing frailty of the First Amendment in today’s culture.
He wasn’t wrong. In a survey released Tuesday from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, almost a third of both Republicans and Democrats said they believed the First Amendment goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees.
The survey also showed only 25% of respondents believed the right to free speech was completely secure.
Everything hit home last year when RCP learned it was one of several news organizations that appeared on an advertising blacklist put out by a group called Global Disinformation Index that counsels advertisers and search engine companies.
DesRosiers said GDI, a British non-governmental organization, labeled RealClearPolitics as a high-risk news site for disinformation “essentially because we include stories they do not agree with, never that those stories are paired equally beside stories they do approve of.”
The goal of GDI is to persuade advertisers to blacklist what they deem dangerous publications and websites. The Washington Examiner similarly was blacklisted.
The U.S. government not only holds its work in high esteem — the State Department subsidizes it, according to an investigation by the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky.
For over two decades, RealClearPolitics has held a stellar reputation for curating news stories from left, right, and center, often posting pieces that are diametrically opposed but offer the reader the ability to look outside their tribe to understand what is happening in American politics and culture. It was founded 24 years ago by Princeton University roommates and self-admitted news junkies John McIntyre and Tom Bevan as a website that aggregated both political news and polls.
Within 10 years, it had developed and expanded into a Washington-based newsroom that had landed the expertise of journalist Carl Cannon, the son of Washington Post and San Jose Mercury reporter Lou Cannon and a legendary veteran of several major organizations who holds industry-wide respect.
The front above-the-fold page aggregates stories across the political spectrum twice daily, and there are also below-the-fold, in-house investigative pieces, video clips of daily newsmakers, and original reporting that includes daily White House stories.
The polling pages are state by state, in-depth, and curated by aggregating polling from multiple sources, both national and local. They are depended on and regularly cited by national publications and networks.
DesRosiers said he saw a place that defied the logic of the internet when he first came to RealClearPolitics in 2006.
“Everybody said that the internet was just going to separate us and create these info cul-de-sacs, and here I saw this blending of a news that was Aristotelian, in that people are supposed to see outside their tribe,” he explained. “We offer a balanced media diet.”
These new awards come in reaction to the public’s loss of faith in journalism and many other institutions that used to bequeath respectability and honor to people who were doing courageous work.
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When you look at the type of virtual censorship regarding COVID-19, where the messages of scientists such as Bhattacharya were stifled, or regarding first son Hunter Biden’s laptop, on which Devine indefatigably reported, or if you look at Taibbi’s reporting on Twitter’s strange business odyssey, DesRosiers said you can understand why those were the first three Samizdat Prize winners.
“This recognition of these three individuals flows directly from our core mission, which is a resistance to censorship,” DesRosiers said, adding, “There are courageous people in journalism who are on the front lines of defending the First Amendment, and this is a celebration of their fearless efforts.”
