In an evening celebrating excellence in journalism, the biggest winner of the evening was the free press.
“We think of this as the Kennedy School’s feast day for the First Amendment and all the freedoms it protects,” said Nancy Gibbs.
Gibbs, the Lombard Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, was the host at the event at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Information, she said, is a critical resource and a paradoxical one. “Reliable information, revelatory information, inspiring, insightful, instructive, investigative, explanatory information is more valuable than ever and more easily lost in the noise,” said Gibbs.
The occasion was the presentation of the 2026 Goldsmith Awards, honoring a career in journalism, as well as recognizing achievements in investigative reporting and explanatory reporting, and awarding Goldsmith Book Prizes.
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic received the Goldsmith Career Award. While listing his many achievements over his career—writing a humor column, covering organized crime for New York Magazine, the Middle East for The New Yorker, named the “most pugnacious journalist” by the Washingtonian magazine—Gibbs noted his most recent claim to fame.
“About a year ago,” said Gibbs, “he read the Pentagon’s war plans on his phone and faced a set of journalistic and ethical decisions that were truly without precedent.”
Before diving into “Signalgate,” the security leak when Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accidentally included Goldberg on a phone chain on the Signal chat platform discussing sensitive miliary plans, Gibbs asked about covering wars, especially the current war against Iran.
“One particular challenge that is unlike previous wars,” said Goldberg, “is that the things the president says on Monday are unrelated to the thing he does on Tuesday.” Journalists, he said, are trying to make sense of a complicated world and explain it to readers. “It presupposes we are covering coherence in some way,” he said.
The challenge for all journalists, he said, is that everything a president of the United States says is axiomatically newsworthy. There is a constant dilemma of deciding how to report what Trump says or tweets when he makes blatant threats, like annihilating an ancient civilization.
The challenge extends beyond war coverage and is a hallmark of the Trump era, said Goldberg. “The unprecedented quality of his style of communication,” he said, “means you are trying to keep up with them, and you can never keep up. Every day is a Watergate.”
Turning to the “Signalgate” scandal, Gibbs acknowledged Goldberg’s experience of balancing the public’s right to know with legitimate national security concerns. “That’s an eternal journalistic challenge,” she said.
“My first reaction [when he saw the text] was that this was a disinformation operation being targeted at me,” said Goldberg. “This can’t happen because it is too stupid, it must be an op.”
When he suspected that he was in fact, included in a text detailing sensitive national security, he became nervous. “If this was real, and my phone contained information that enemies of the United States could use to kill American pilots, I didn’t know what to do with that. I just sat in my car with the doors locked.”
He also saw the irony in it. As a national security reporter, a war correspondent, Goldberg was always trying to find such details out. “Now, they’re just sending it to me,” he said.
After much deliberation and consultation—“Our lawyers had lawyers,” said Goldberg—The Atlantic reported the full story the next day.
But despite the challenges facing journalism from AI, the defunding of public media, and corporate moguls, Goldberg is positive about the future. “My attitude is that everybody is trying to find out something that is true.” Rather than letting the state of things keep you up at night, he says, the role of journalists today is to keep the powerful people up at night.
“You sleep well at night because you are doing a job that the founders of the United States want you to be doing,” he said. “The reason it’s so great to be in journalism right now is that there is a job to do.”
The Shorenstein Center also awarded a new special citation for excellence in documentary film this year at the Goldsmith Awards. Gibbs awarded directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman for their film, The Alabama Solution. The Alabama Solution’s revelatory power, the judges wrote, is in the voices of these men offering the closest possible lens on contemporary mass incarceration and forcing the public to confront a system that too often continues to deny the humanity of incarcerated people.
Thomas Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at HKS, presented the book prizes:
The Goldsmith Book Prize, Academic to Eunji Kim for The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy
The Goldsmith Book Prize, Trade to Carla Kaplan for Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford
Gibbs presented the following reporting prizes:
The Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Reporting to Monica Samayoa and Tony Schick of Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in collaboration with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network for Power Struggle: What Stalled the Northwest’s Push for Green Energy?
The Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting to Hannah Dreier and the staff of the New York Times for Exposed and Expendable.
The complete ceremony, and the full discussion with Goldberg, can be found on the Institute of Politics YouTube page.
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Photos by Martha Stewart