The San Francisco Public Press is proud to announce that our investigative series, “Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point,” has been honored with a 2025 Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media.
The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College presents this prominent national award annually to spotlight exceptional work in journalism. Named for trailblazing investigative journalist I.F. Stone, who in 1953 launched a fiercely independent newsletter that exposed government deception, racism and McCarthyism, the Izzy Award honors muckraking produced outside traditional corporate media structures.
“Exposed” is an eight-part series that uncovers the U.S. Navy’s Cold War-era human radiation experiments conducted at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco — a toxic Superfund site and the locus of the city’s biggest real estate development project in a century. Through meticulous examination of thousands of pages of obscure records and interviews with experts, affected veterans and neighborhood residents, the series reveals that at least 1,073 people were exposed to potentially dangerous amounts of radiation. Military scientists skirted ethical guidelines, and the government never attempted to study the lab’s effects on the surrounding neighborhood, for decades a majority Black enclave with some of the worst health outcomes in the Bay Area.
The investigation garnered significant attention: The Guardian US co-published Part 1 of the six-part text series, extending its reach to a global audience, and the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper reprinted it online and in its print edition. Reporter Chris Roberts was featured on KQED Public Radio’s “Forum,” KALW’s “Your Call” and the “California Sun Podcast.”
A two-part documentary podcast produced by reporter Rebecca Bowe aired locally on KALW and was nationally distributed to more than 150 community radio stations by “Making Contact,” a project of Frequencies of Change Media.
The community response was immediate. Environmental and social justice groups cited the reporting in organizing a protest in January 2025 near the shipyard, demanding accountability from the Navy and local officials. A local attorney cited the series as motivation to explore new legal options for veterans and civilians exposed to radiation.
“It’s an incredible honor to have this work recognized with an Izzy Award,” Bowe said. “I remain grateful to the Bayview-Hunters Point community residents who have devoted many years of their lives to addressing toxic contamination at the Shipyard site, and took the time to be interviewed for the podcast.”
“It’s hard to imagine traditional, for-profit media investing the necessary resources and effort that the Public Press did to tell this story,” Roberts said. “That emphasizes how important alternative channels and grants to support investigations are, especially at a time when billionaire newspaper owners are censoring their own editorial pages. It also emphasizes how rarely ‘the full story’ ever gets told before it fades into rumor and oblivion. There is still so much we don’t know about radioactive exposure in San Francisco’s Hunters Point.”
We are honored to receive the Izzy Award, and we remain committed to producing investigative journalism that informs and empowers our community. We continue to report on environmental justice issues in and around the Hunters Point Shipyard, which is one of many heavily polluted Bay Area sites government agencies have been slow to clean up, according to a recent data investigation by Audrey Mei-Yi Brown, who last week discussed the reporting on KALW. Brown continues to report on cutbacks affecting future cleanups.
An awards ceremony will be held at Ithaca College on April 30. Previous winners of the Izzy Award include Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Robert Scheer, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Naomi Klein, Laura Flanders, and Mohammed El-Kurd, as have independent outlets like Mother Jones, Truthout, and Democracy Now! See the complete history of award recipients at parkindymedia.org/izzy-awards.
To explore the “Exposed” series, visit sfpublicpress.org/exposed.
