Film Forum

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is a non-profit organization that protects and defends press freedom in the 21st century. FPF builds secure communications tools, trains reporters on digital security, systematically documents press freedom violations in the United States, and advocates for strong First Amendment rights for all journalists.

Seymour M. Hersh is a reporter. In 1969, he gained worldwide recognition for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. In 2004, Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces in The New Yorker. His journalism has won five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting. Hersh has worked at the AP, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and written eleven books. Photo credit: Mark Mahaney. 

Laura Poitras is an Academy Award® and Pulitzer Prize-winning filmmaker and journalist. Her last film, ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, premiered at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion for best film. The story of groundbreaking artist Nan Goldin, the film was nominated for an Academy Award® and BAFTA, and won an Independent Spirit Award. Poitras’ film CITIZENFOUR won an Academy Award® for Best Documentary, along with awards from BAFTA and DGA. Her journalism exposing the National Security Agency’s global mass surveillance programs received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as the George Polk award for National Security Reporting. Her Academy Award®-nominated film MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY, the first film in her post-9/11 Trilogy, documented the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited her first solo show of film installations, Astro Noise, in 2016. She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. She has also received a Peabody Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, Vital Projects Fund, Cinereach, and others. In 2006, the U.S. government placed her on a terrorist watchlist and afterward detained and interrogated her dozens of times at the U.S. border.

Lauren Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy, a position established to honor and continue the legendary whistleblower’s fight for secrecy reform. She joins FPF after a decade fighting excessive government secrecy with Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, the National Security Archive. There she served as public policy director and helped historians, journalists, and the public win the declassification of historically significant government documents. Lauren holds a master’s in public policy and a master’s in Middle Eastern studies, both from the University of Chicago.

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