Dennis Wagner, Deaths at Phoenix VA hospital may be tied to delayed care. The Arizona Republic, 10 April 2014. Winner of the 2014 IRE [Investigative Reporters & Editors] Award for Print/Online–Meduim. “IRE Judges’ comments: While the story of poor care for veterans has been told well by media outlets across the country, reporting by the Arizona Republic propelled this story into a national scandal with sweeping results. The team’s stories revealed that veterans were dying while waiting for basic health care services at the Phoenix VA. Meanwhile, officials were manipulating records to hide the long wait times. Writing more than 100 stories during the year [2014], the reporters told the stories of individual veterans whose pleas for treatment were ignored until it was too late. This skillfully reported series helped lead to national reform, investigations and resignations, including U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki. The project demonstrates the benefits of solid beat reporting and not letting go of a story once the national media jumps in.”
Continue reading...ACLU’s NSA Documents Database
ACLU’s NSA Documents Database. 3 April 2014. “The public debate over our government’s surveillance programs has reached remarkable heights since the first set of NSA disclosures in June 2013 based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Since then, additional disclosures by both the press and government have illuminated our government’s vast and invasive surveillance apparatus. These documents stand as primary source evidence of our government’s interpretation of its authority to engage in sweeping surveillance activities at home and abroad, and how it carries out that surveillance. The ACLU hopes to facilitate this debate by making these documents more easily accessible and understandable…. We will update the database with new documents as they become available to the public.”
Continue reading...Toxic Trail: how a landmark cleanup program leaves its own toxic legacy
Susanne Rust and Matt Drange, Toxic Trail: how a landmark cleanup program leaves its own toxic legacy. This story was a collaboration between The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and The Guardian US, 17 March 2014. “The landmark Superfund program is supposed to clean up the country’s toxic waste. But as one site in Silicon Valley shows, it’s leaving behind its own legacy of environmental problems.”
Continue reading...Innocents Lost: Preserving Families But Losing Children in Florida
Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D.S. Burch, Preserving Families But Losing Children. Miami Herald, 16 March 2014. 12-part series. “After Florida cut down on protections for children in troubled homes, deaths soared. The children died in ways cruel, outlandish, predictable and preventable…. A year-long Miami Herald investigation found that, in the last six years [2008-2013], 477 Florida children have died of abuse or neglect after their families had come to the attention of the Department of Children & Families…. To understand the magnitude of the problem — and possible solutions — the Herald studied every death over a six-year period involving families with child welfare histories. This series is the result of a year’s worth of reporting by the Herald’s Investigation Team, and multiple lawsuits to obtain state death records.” In February 2015 USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism announced that this series won the 2014 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, and in April 2015 the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University announced that this series won the 2014 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism.
Continue reading...The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse
Dan Barry, The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse. The New York Times, 9 March 2014. “Toil, abuse and endurance in the heartland…. For decades [1974-2009], dozens of men with intellectual disabilities belonged to a close-knit Iowa community. They lived in an old schoolhouse, worked in a turkey plant, and frequented the local mini-mart. But [few] knew just what these men endured.”
Continue reading...For teens at Rikers Island, solitary confinement pushes mental limits
Trey Bundy and Daffodil J. Altan, For teens at Rikers Island, solitary confinement pushes mental limits. The Center for Investigative Reporting, 4 March 2014. This story was produced in collaboration with Medium. “Because of its imposing size and notoriety, many people think Rikers is a prison, but it’s not. It’s a city jail, where on any given day about 85 percent of inmates await the resolution of their cases, according to the New York City Board of Correction. Most of the teenagers there are locked up because they can’t afford bail. In New York, anyone who is 16 or older is considered an adult under state criminal law. Rikers, one of the largest jails in the world, has an adolescent population that can rival the biggest adult jail systems in the country: between 400 and 800 a day.”
Continue reading...An Accident Waiting to Happen: derailment of oil trains in Glacier National Park
Elizabeth Royte, An Accident Waiting to Happen. OnEarth, Published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, 20 February 2014. “As oil trains derail across the United States, a windswept—and vulnerable—stretch of Montana’s Glacier National Park underscores the folly of transporting crude by rail.”
Continue reading...Fatal Flaws: Crisis in Auto Safety
Rebecca Ruiz, Danielle Ivory, Hilary Stout, Bill Vlasic, Hiroko Tabuchi, et al., Fatal Flaws: Crisis in Auto Safety. The New York Times, 17 February-30 December 2014. In this multipart, multiplatform series, “The New York Times has exposed missteps and delays by automakers and federal safety regulators in responding to deadly defects in automobiles during what has become a record year for recalls — more than 60 million in the United States in 2014. Overview: Spurred by a decade-old ignition-switch defect in millions of G.M. vehicles, the auto industry this year has issued more recalls involving old models — those made five or more years ago — than ever before. More than 60 million vehicles have been recalled in the United States, affecting the equivalent of one in five vehicles on the road, as automakers clean up years of defects that previously went undetected or ignored.”
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