Honored with the Nellie Bly Award

I delivered these remarks after receiving this year’s award for investigative reporting.

Bruce Roter, founder and president of the board of trustees of the Museum of Political Corruption, hands me the honorarium “under the table.”

I was awarded the annual Nellie Bly award for investigative reporting in Albany last night. Below are my remarks as delivered. The spirited panel discussion about truth and lies in today’s environment will be posted when it’s available.

Thank you, Bruce, and thank you to the Museum of Political Corruption and to the committee that selected me for this wonderful honor. Most of the previous winners are heroes of mine, and I am thrilled to be in the same company.

I especially appreciate the recognition that political fact-checking is a form of investigative reporting. I was a pioneer in this field, long before there were hundreds of political fact checkers in scores of countries around the globe. I always argued that we were investigative reporters. This validation was greatly appreciated by my colleagues in the international fact-checking community.

When Bruce emailed me with the news, I still worked at The Washington Post. As many of you know, The Post offered just about every reporter and editor a voluntary buyout package. I didn’t plan to leave but, after I crunched the numbers, I realized it would be financially reckless to turn it down. So I left The Post at the end of July and, like everyone else, started a Substack where I still dabble in fact checking while working on book projects.

I was given extraordinary freedom while running The Fact Checker for 15 years — complete authority to select the targets and render the famous Pinocchio verdicts. The editors implicitly trusted me to be fair and accurate, and my articles often were the most read on the Washington Post website. I used to say it was the best job in journalism.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, the new Post management has not selected a replacement or even decided whether to continue the feature. I think that is a tragedy, especially in an era of lies and when democracy is under assault.