Mary Kostakidis Wins CN’s Gary Webb Award

The prominent Australian journalist, in court accused of racial hatred for her reporting critical of Israel’s genocide, has won Consortium News’ 2026 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award, which she was given at a ceremony in Sydney on Sunday.

The following are the remarks by CN Editor Joe Lauria introducing the presentation of the Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award to Mary Kostakidis, a former anchor of the national evening news on Australia’s SBS network. She is being formally accused of anti-semitism for a series of tweets on X. 

Consortium News is an American online publication founded in 1995 by Robert Parry, an investigative reporter for the Associated Press who broke some of the biggest Iran-Contra stories of 1980s. He first reported about Col. Oliver North running the operation from the White House basement. After the AP continually tried spiking Bob’s stories he went to Newsweek, where his stories were suppressed by his editors “for the good of the country.”

Eventually Bob Parry gathered a consortium of mainstream journalists whose stories were being held back for being too critical of U.S. foreign policy and he began Consortium News, which is still made up today – 31 years later – of dissident journalists, intelligence officers and academics – refugees from the mainstream.

One of Bob Parry’s scoops was about the C.I.A. shipping weapons to the contras in Nicaragua and allowing contra cocaine to be shipped back into the United States.

Bob created today’s award in honor of American investigative reporter Gary Webb who in a series of articles in 1996 for his newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, courageously revived interest in this story. It was one of the darkest scandals of the 1980s — the Reagan administration’s tolerance of cocaine trafficking by the C.I.A-organized Nicaraguan Contra rebels who were fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

Though the Contra-Cocaine scandal was originally exposed by Parry and his AP colleague Brian Barger in 1985, major U.S. newspapers accepted the Reagan administration’s denials and treated the story as a “conspiracy theory.”

Bob Parry wrote:

“When Webb revived the story in 1996 for The San Jose Mercury News and described how some of the Contra cocaine fueled the spread of crack across urban America, the major newspapers again rallied to the defense of the Contras and the Reagan administration’s legacy.

The assault on Webb was led by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times – and was so ferocious that Webb’s editors at the Mercury News sacrificed him to protect their own careers. Webb found himself cast out from the profession that he loved.

It didn’t even matter that an internal C.I.A investigation by Inspector General Frederick Hitz confirmed, in 1998, that the C.I.A was aware of the Contra cocaine trafficking but had put its goal of ousting the Sandinistas ahead of any responsibility to expose the Contra criminality.

Because of the false impression that Webb had manufactured a fake story, he remained unemployable in mainstream journalism. In 2004, with his life in tatters and his financial resources spent, Webb took his own life, a tragic casualty in the difficult fight for a truly free press in America, a press that doesn’t just rubber stamp government propaganda and accept official lies as truth.”

Webb’s story is told in the 2014 Hollywood film Kill the Messenger.

To honor Gary, whom Bob advised, Parry established the Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award. Past winners of the award, voted by CN‘s board, include Oliver Stone, Julian Assange and John Pilger.

We will now have three Australian recipients of the award.

For anyone who knows Mary Kostakidis the idea that she is a bigot, or a racist or an anti-Semite is just totally absurd. The idea that she should wind up in a courtroom before a judge on a charge of violating the country’s Racial Discrimination Act is unfathomable. But then we must consider the upside-down period we’re living through.

It couldn’t be more obvious what is going on here. Mary Kostakidis, the former SBS evening news presenter, is opposing a genocide, what any decent person should. But the government that is perpetrating that genocide has activated its “cells” around the world – these cells include powerful governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, influential mainstream media, online influencers and lobbyists – to punish anyone who is trying to stop Israel from committing its crimes.

That includes American university students getting clubbed over the head by riot cops; German anti-genocide protestors beating beaten in the streets of Berlin by police; the Palestine Action group being designated a terrorist organization by the British home secretary — and four of whom were sentenced on Friday to a combined 25 years for “terrorism”; British journalists being interrogated at the U.K. border and threatened with prosecution under the Terrorism Act; and here in Australia the ABC sacking journalists Antoinette Lattouf and the Zionist Federation of Australia‘s action against Mary Kostakidis.

If we didn’t think it could happen here, it is happening here.

Among Israel’s defenders in Australia is the mainstream media, where Mary worked, with papers like The Age and The Herald especially, turning on her, in ways similar to how the U.S. media turned on Webb.

The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is the test here and the outcome of Mary’s case will be of enormous international significance. Thus the interest of U.S.-based Consortium News. There is no comparable case in the U.S. – not yet at least – of a journalist – and a very prominent one at that – being hauled into court accused of racial hatred for taking a principled stand against genocide and the government carrying it out.

There is no doubt that there has been a huge shift in Western public opinion since Oct.7, 2023 about what Israel is doing. Many human rights organizations, even in Israel, Holocaust scholars, U.N. officials and some governments are calling it genocide.

Whether that growing public outcry will be heard in the federal halls of justice in Australia is the question.

What is certain is that Mary Kostakidis is a woman and a journalist of enormous courage to stand up to this injustice and that is why we are honoring her today.

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