Quaker Truth & Integrity Award Terms of Reference
https://quakertruth.org/files/revised_t_i_award_terms_of_reference_14_9_23.docx
Nominations for the second Quaker Truth & Integrity Award have been open as from 1 January 2024. The closing date is 30 April 2024.
Nominations may be sent to https://quakertruth.org/contact-us/ Please add a page or so of background information on the nominee. Anyone wishing to submit a nomination can check beforehand whether background information is already held on the nominee in question (e.g. from a previous year): email jan.arriens@smquakers.org.uk
First Quaker Truth & Integrity Award
The first Quaker Truth & Integrity Award has been announced (see https://www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-events/news/investigative-journalist-carole-cadwalladr-receives-first-quaker-truth-award).
The following is the citation:
Truth and integrity have been at the heart of Quakerism since the mid-17th century.
Out of a deep concern over the decline in standards of truth and integrity in public life, the Quaker Truth & Integrity Group (QTIG) has instituted an annual award recognising an exceptional contribution by a British individual/organisation towards the enhancement of standards of truth and integrity in public life.
QTIG is honoured to announce that the recipient of its first such award is Carole Cadwalladr. As an investigative journalist and author, Carole has with great courage exposed serious instances of malpractice and threats to democracy. In doing so, she has made a major contribution towards the enhancement of truth and integrity in public affairs.
In seeking to promote democracy and the rule of law over and above personal interests, Carole is an exceptionally worthy recipient of the first Quaker Truth & Integrity Award.
Gerald Hewitson
Clerk, Quaker Truth & Integrity Group
22 June 2023
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Background to the Award
The decision to confer the initial Quaker Truth & Integrity Award to Carole Cadwalladr has been based on a number of considerations.
1. With regard to Carole Cadwalladr’s exposure, based on painstaking research, of Cambridge Analytica’s role in influencing and undermining democratic processes, The Guardian wrote in September 2018:
It was the result of a year-long investigation in which Carole Cadwalladr worked with ex-employee turned whistleblower Christopher Wylie to reveal how the data analytics firm that was behind Trump’s 2016 campaign and played a role in Brexit, had used the data harvested from 87 million Facebook users without their consent.
Cadwalladr’s reporting led to the downfall of Cambridge Analytica and a public apology from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who was forced to testify before congress. Facebook has since lost $120 billion from its share price. She won the British Journalism Awards’ Technology Journalism Award in December 2017 and the Orwell Prize for political journalism in June this year for her work “on the impact of big data on the EU Referendum and the 2016 US presidential election”.[i]
‘Cadwalladr’s sheer dedication in exposing a nexus of corruption … resulted in Mark Zuckerberg being called before Congress, and exposing Cambridge Analytica’s role in mass-harvesting data to influence elections (Brexit and Trump), goes far beyond the question of Remain or Leave.’[ii]
2. Carole Cadwalladr also broke the story that the then Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, had been meeting with Russian representatives without any officials.
3. However, it is her pursuit of truth at great personal cost which makes Carole Cadwalladr a particularly worthy recipient of the very first Quaker Truth and Integrity Award. A UNESCO report described the sustained personal abuse she has received thus:
Cadwalladr has been subjected to four years of deeply sexist and misogynistic online violence that takes the form of a constant wave of abuse, with several crests each month. …(it is this) sustained, low-intensity, high-frequency, high-volume nature of the attacks Carole Cadwalladr experiences, not only the content of the abuse, that can be understood to be so cumulatively damaging……This pattern of abuse – building gradually over time - appears designed to destroy the confidence of the target and undermine their credibility without appearing overtly offensive on a tweet-by-tweet basis. This method typically operates via an organised, or semi-organised, network of abusers for greatest effect (the ‘pile-on’, ‘dogpiling’, or ‘brigading’ approach), and can lead to echo chambers of abuse, where the same abusive message is retweeted many times. We see these methods clearly in play in the case of Cadwalladr. Her abusers are frequently interlinked - organisationally, or through association with pro-Brexit rhetoric. We call this networked gaslighting.[iii]
In addition, there is the lengthy libel court case brought by Arron Banks against Carole Cadwalladr personally. As such, she faced personal and financial ruin. Only a crowd-funded campaign enabled her to pay legal fees. The personal, physical, psychological and professional toll of fighting this case has been profound. Carole Cadwalladr’s example graphically demonstrates that truth-telling requires courage.
[i] [i] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/sep/29/cambridge-analytica-cadwalladr-observer-facebook-zuckerberg-wylie
[ii] [ii] https://www.chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/carole-cadwalladr/
[iii] https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/the-chilling_chapter4.pdf