杰里米·斯卡希尔

Jeremy Scahill (born 1974) is an American activist, author, and investigative journalist. He is a founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007), which won the George Polk Book Award. His book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013) was adapted into a documentary film which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In July 2024, he left The Intercept and, together with Ryan Grim and Nausicaa Renner, founded Drop Site News.

Scahill is a Fellow at the Type Media Center. Scahill learned journalism and started his career on the independently syndicated daily news show Democracy Now!. He publishes a podcast titled Intercepted.

Early life

Scahill was born in Chicago, Illinois, and was raised in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, by "social activist" parents, Lisa and Michael Scahill, both nurses. He graduated from Wauwatosa East High School in 1992.

His father grew up on the South Side of Chicago, son of Irish immigrants in a Catholic family. He had planned to be a seminarian.

Scahill attended a few University of Wisconsin regional campuses and a local technical college before deciding his "time would be better spent by entering the struggle for justice in this country." After dropping out of college, Scahill spent several years on the East Coast working in homeless shelters. He started his career as an unpaid intern at the nonprofit news program Democracy Now! of the Pacifica Radio network. While he was at Democracy Now!, Scahill learned the technical side of radio, and learned "journalism as a trade, rather than an academic study".

Discussing the roots of his activism, Scahill in the Socialist Worker cited influences from Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, and Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker movement, and characterized the US government as a criminal syndicate that metes out punishment to the rest of the world.

He also worked in 2000 as a producer for Michael Moore's TV series The Awful Truth on Bravo.

Journalism career

Scahill became a senior producer and correspondent for Democracy Now! and remains a frequent contributor. Scahill and his Democracy Now! colleague Amy Goodman were co-recipients of the 1998 George Polk Award for their radio documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, which investigated the Chevron Corporation's role in the killing of two Nigerian environmental activists.

In 1998, Scahill traveled to Iraq for Democracy Now! and Pacifica Radio, where he reported on the impact of the economic sanctions on Iraq and the "No-Fly Zone" bombings in Northern and Southern Iraq. An article in AlterNet has described Jeremy Scahill as a "progressive journalist".

In October 2013 Scahill joined with reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to establish an on-line investigative journalism publishing venture funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. The idea for the new media outlet came from Omidyar's "concern about press freedoms in the US and around the world." The Intercept, a publication of First Look Media, went live on February 10, 2014. The short-term goal of the digital magazine is to publish reports about information contained in documents disclosed by Edward Snowden concerning the NSA. According to editors Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill, their "longer-term mission is to provide aggressive and independent adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues, from secrecy, criminal and civil justice abuses and civil liberties violations to media conduct, societal inequality and all forms of financial and political corruption."

On November 30, 2013, Scahill refused to participate in a Stop the War Conference in London unless pro-Assad Syrian nun Mother Agnes was dropped from the symposium. Mother Agnes eventually pulled out. In February 2017, Scahill canceled his appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher after finding out that far-right political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to appear on the same day.

Scahill criticized the US government's decision to charge WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 for his role in the 2010 publication of a trove of Iraq War documents and diplomatic cables. Scahill tweeted: "This is about retaliation for publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes and other crimes by the most powerful nation on Earth. It's a threat to press freedom."

On May 9, 2019, the intelligence analyst Daniel Everette Hale was arrested for leaking classified information to a reporter. The reporter to whom Hale leaked was not explicitly named in the indictment, but the government released a list of exhibits it planned to use at trial that included a picture of Hale meeting publicly with Scahill at an event to promote Scahill's book, texts Hale sent to his friend describing meeting Scahill, and emails between Scahill and Hale months before they moved their communication to Jabber (software that allows encrypted communication).

In July 2024, Scahill left The Intercept, along with Ryan Grim, to co-found Drop Site News.

Works

Kosovo conflict

In 1999, he covered the Kosovo conflict, reporting live from Belgrade and Kosovo itself. In an article in the International Socialist Review, Scahill accused the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) of being complicit in Albanian atrocities against Serbs.