Big Oil, Bad Air: Fracking the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas

Jim Morris, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer, Big Oil, Bad Air: Fracking the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas. The Center for Public Integrity, 18 February 2014. This story [was] jointly reported by the Center for Public Integrity, InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel. “[T]he Eagle Ford Shale play [is a] 400-mile-long 50-mile-wide bacchanal of oil and gas extraction [that] stretches from Leon County, Texas, in the northeast to the Mexican border in the southwest. Since 2008, more than 7,000 oil and gas wells have been sunk into the brittle, sedimentary rock. Another 5,500 have been approved by state regulators, making the Eagle Ford one of the most active drilling sites in America. Energy companies, cheered on by state officials, envision thousands more wells scattered across the plains. It is, an industry spokesman says, an ‘absolute game-changer’ for a long-depressed region of about 1.1 million people, some of whom suddenly find themselves with enough money to ensure their grandchildren’s future.”

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Breathless and Burdened: Dying from black lung, buried by law and medicine

Chris Hamby, Breathless and Burdened. The Center for Public Integrity, three-part series, 29 October, 30 October, and 1 November 2013. “This yearlong investigation examines how doctors and lawyers, working at the behest of the coal industry, have helped defeat the benefits claims of miners sick and dying of black lung, even as disease rates are on the rise and an increasing number of miners are turning to a system that was supposed to help alleviate their suffering.” This series won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. One part of the three-part, 25,000-word series was produced in partnership with the ABC News Investigative Unit, whose work included an in-depth Nightline segment.” Updates from The Center for Public Integrity, 30 September 2015: “‘Sweeping reforms’ proposed for black lung benefit program” and “Johns Hopkins terminates black lung program.”

Winner of the 2014 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

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Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. First published in The New York Age, 25 June 1892. From The Anti Lynching Pamphlets of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1920 by Patricia A. Schechter: “In order to launch resistance to lynching, [Ida B. Wells] had to prove that lynching’s primary victims, African American men, were people worthy of sympathy and citizens deserving protection. At the same time, she needed to present herself — an educated, middle-class Southern woman of mixed racial ancestry — as a credible dispenser of truth, a “representative” public figure able to command social and amoral authority. The context of racism and sexism in which she functioned made both tasks difficult. Wells-Barnett described lynching as an expression of conflict over rights, physical integrity, human dignity, and social power and the movement to end it was similarly fraught and contentious.”

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