The Los Angeles Press Club announced the finalists for the 14th National A&E Journalism Awards on Wednesday, and ScheerPost’s staff are thrilled to announce they are in the running for four prizes. The list includes work by ScheerPost’s editor in chief Robert Scheer, columnist Chris Hedges, podcast executive producer Joshua Scheer, and contributing editor Natasha Hakimi Zapata.
“Scheer Intelligence,” the weekly award-winning podcast hosted by journalist Robert Scheer and produced by Joshua Scheer which won an NAEJ award last year, has been nominated again for two National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards. The KCRW-hosted show features thoughtful, provocative conversations with “American Originals”—people who, through a lifetime of public engagement, offer unique, often surprising perspectives on the day’s most important issues.
Robert Scheer has been nominated for his work as host of “Scheer Intelligence,” which, since 2015, has produced more than 250 episodes, all available to NPR stations across the country with transcripts on ScheerPost.
An illuminating “Scheer Intelligence” interview with director Matt Tyrnauer on his recent Showtime documentary television series, “The Reagans,” has been nominated in the Radio/Podcasts category under “One-on-One Interview, TV Personalities.” In “How Reagan paved the way for Trump,” which originally aired on KCRW on December 18, 2020, the documentarian and host discuss why the two former Republican presidents’ roles as performers are far from the only links to be made between them.
Chris Hedges, whose work originally appears on ScheerPost on a regular basis, has been nominated for his book reviews, including “‘Out of Mesopotamia’ Is a Great War Novel,” a review of Iranian author Salar Abdoh’s novel which, Hedges writes, “captures how combat has a Peter Pan quality, allowing fighters, as well as war correspondents, to escape from the drudgery of daily life and never grow up,” as well as “Battling White Supremacy in the Ring,” on “The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering, and the Political Economy of Boxing” by Gerald Horne.
Contributing editor Natasha Hakimi Zapata has also been nominated for her Los Angeles Review of Books work under the Book Critic category. Her book reviews include “Antidotes to Brexit, COVID-19, and Other Afflictions in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet,” which won third place in the Southern California Journalism Awards last year under the Book Review category, as well as “Family Separation by Any Other Name: On Patricia Engel’s “Infinite Country’,” in which Hakimi Zapata explores this country’s long bipartisan legacy of tearing families apart.
The winners of the L.A. Press Club’s 14th annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards will be presented during a ceremony on February 5.