Mark Potok, The Year in Hate and Extremism. Southern Poverty Law Center, 17 February 2016. “The number of hate and antigovernment ‘Patriot’ groups grew last year, and terrorist attacks and radical plots proliferated. Charleston. Chattanooga. Colorado Springs. In these towns and dozens of other communities around the nation, 2015 was a year marked by extraordinary violence from domestic extremists — a year of living dangerously. Antigovernment militiamen, white supremacists, abortion foes, domestic Islamist radicals, neo-Nazis and lovers of the Confederate battle flag targeted police, government officials, black churchgoers, Muslims, Jews, schoolchildren, Marines, abortion providers, members of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, and even drug dealers.”
Beware the Fine Print (of arbitration clauses in contracts)
Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff, Beware the Fine Print: Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice. The New York Times, 31 October 2015. Part I of a three-part series on arbitration clauses in contracts. Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery, Beware the Fine Print: In Arbitration, a ‘Privatization of the Justice System.’ The New York Times, 1 November 2015. Part II of this three-part series on arbitration clauses in contracts. Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Beware the Fine Print: In Religious Arbitration, Scripture Is the Rule of Law. The New York Times, 2 November 2015. Part III of this three-part series on arbitration clauses in contracts. This three-part series examines “how clauses buried in tens of millions of contracts have deprived Americans of one of their most fundamental constitutional rights: their day in court.”
Winner of the 2015 George Polk Award for Legal Reporting.
Till death do us part: South Carolina’s murder rate for women is more than double that of the nation
Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes and Natalie Caula Hauff, Till death do us part. Post and Courier, 19 August 2014. “More than 300 women were shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, bludgeoned or burned to death over the past decade by men in South Carolina, dying at a rate of one every 12 days while the state does little to stem the carnage from domestic abuse.” Seven-part series.
Update: Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Betrayed by Silence: A Radio Documentary. How three archbishops hid the truth of clergy sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults
Madeleine Baran, Betrayed by Silence: A Radio Documentary. How three archbishops hid the truth. MPR (Minnesota Public Radio), 14 July 2014. “For decades, the archbishops who led the Catholic archdiocese in the Twin Cities [Minneapolis/St. Paul] maintained that they were doing everything they could to protect children from priests who wanted to rape them. Reporters picked up those assurances and repeated them without question. Police and prosecutors took the assurances at face value. Parents believed the assurances and trusted priests with their children. But the assurances were a lie, and the archbishops knew it. Three of them — John Roach, Harry Flynn…and John Nienstedt — participated in a cover-up that pitted the finances and power of the church against the victims who dared to come forward and tell their stories. [This] radio documentary…draws on dozens of interviews, thousands of never-before-published documents and insider accounts to explain how and why powerful men protected priests who abused children.
Grace in Broken Arrow: A child sex abuse scandal at a Christian school in Oklahoma
Kiera Feldman, Grace in Broken Arrow. This Land Press, 23 May 2012. This is a story about how Grace Fellowship Christian School outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, handled a child sex abuse scandal. Nieman Storyboard: “In wrapping the piece around the larger culture of evangelicalism and consequences of abuse, [Feldman] elevates the story beyond the sensationalism that can sink a sex-scandal story.”
Lives of the Saints: the Mormon Church is struggling with a troubled legacy
Lawrence Wright, Lives of the Saints. The New Yorker, 21 January 2002. “At a time when Mormonism is booming, the Church is struggling with a troubled legacy.”
The Boston Globe Spotlight Investigation: Sexual Abuse by Priests in the Catholic Church, 2002
Members of the Spotlight Team: Walter V. Robinson, Editor. Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Matt Carroll. Other investigative reporters: Stephen Kurkjian, Kevin Cullen, and Thomas Farragher. Religion reporter: Michael Paulson. The Boston Globe Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church. The Boston Globe, 6 January 2002-14 December 2002. The Boston Globe won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service “for its courageous, comprehensive coverage of sexual abuse by priests, an effort that pierced secrecy, stirred local, national and international reaction and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church.” Between January 2002 and March 2003, The Boston Globe published more than 900 news stories about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.
Winner of the 2002 George Polk Award for National Reporting
for exposing the “widespread sexual abuse by priests as well as the questionable way in which Church officials handled the matter.”
Winner of the 2002 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism.
Winner of the 2003 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting.
Update: The film ‘Spotlight’ won the Oscar for best picture on 28 February 2016. A. O. Scott’s review in The New York Times was published on 5 November 2015: Review: In ‘Spotlight,’ The Boston Globe Digs Up the Catholic Church’s Dirt.