Pulitzer's Gold

A Century of Public Service Journalism

Roy J. Harris, Jr.

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780231540568
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

The Joseph Pulitzer Gold Medal for meritorious public service is an unparalleled American media honor, awarded to news organizations for collaborative reporting that moves readers, provokes change, and advances the journalistic profession. Updated to reflect new winners of the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism and the many changes in the practice and business of journalism, Pulitzer's Gold goes behind the scenes to explain the mechanics and effects of these groundbreaking works.

The veteran journalist Roy J. Harris Jr. adds fascinating new detail to well-known accounts of the Washington Post investigation into the Watergate affair, the New York Times coverage of the Pentagon Papers, and the Boston Globe revelations of the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse cover-up. He examines recent Pulitzer-winning coverage of government surveillance of U.S. citizens and expands on underexplored stories, from the scandals that took down Boston financial fraud artist Charles Ponzi in 1920 to recent exposés that revealed neglect at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and municipal thievery in Bell, California. This one-hundred-year history of bold journalism follows developments in all types of reporting—environmental, business, disaster coverage, war, and more.

PART I

Gold for a New Century

CHAPTER 1

A MEDAL FOR ALL SEASONS

2013–2014: From Police Speeding to NSA Spying

Put the data you have uncovered to beneficial use.

—ADVICE IN A FORTUNE COOKIE GIVEN TO THE WASHINGTON POST’S BART GELLMAN, OCTOBER 27, 2013

To the investigative reporters Sally Kestin and John Maines, a radar gun seemed a fitting tool for getting the drop on police they suspected of recklessly speeding. An October 2011 video had gone viral on the Internet, showing off-duty Miami officer Fausto Lopez being chased at 120 miles per hour and pulled over at gunpoint by a Florida state trooper. The video—taken from the trooper’s dashboard—gave the reporters an idea for a story for their newspaper, the Fort Lauderdale–based Sun Sentinel, about cops who drive dangerously fast. “We saw this kind of thing all the time, and we thought it was the tip of the iceberg,” says Kestin. “The challenge was proving it.”¹

So at five o’clock in the morning, just before a police shift change, she and Maines stationed themselves on a turnpike overpass, armed with a $120 Bushnell Speedster III radar gun purchased on Amazon.com. A staff videographer filmed the action as Maines beamed the device at onrushing cars below, hoping to catch other off-duty officers in the act. “Bad idea,” Maines says now. “With the radar gun you can’t really tell which car on a busy highway at rush hour is giving you the reading. And you can’t see if it is a cop or not, because all you can see is headlights.” Then a morning rainstorm blew in. The videographer had gear to protect his camera and himself. “We did not. So we got wet.”

The pair’s next effort to document reckless police driving and to precisely measure the excessive speeds turned out to be wildly more successful for them—as well as considerably drier. Getting access to records from the transponders in nearly four thousand police vehicles, they used the data to meticulously calculate speeds at specific times on specific routes, concentrating on nearly 800 cases in which cars reached speeds between 90 and 130 mph. From the spreadsheet they created, interactive charts and maps were drawn up showing cops’ speeding patterns along individual stretches of highway. Crafted to be accessed directly by readers online, the material would accompany the series of articles they began envisioning.

Three months later, the three-part Sun Sentinel “Above the Law” series vividly illustrated how speeding south Florida cops often terrorized the roadways, sometimes causing death and destruction while rarely getting them cited for their offenses. Because of the stories, 163 officers from nine departments would be disciplined by the end of 2012. And Officer Lopez was fired after it was shown he routinely drove faster than 100 mph while off duty. On April 16, 2013, the coverage won the Sun Sentinel the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, with the Pulitzer board noting how the ingenious measurements had been used “to curtail a deadly hazard”: the serious injuries and fatalities that the paper showed had been caused in 320 cop-caused crashes over seven years.

“Big Casino”

The tale of the Sun Sentinel’s recovery from its reporters’ soggy turnpike misadventure to win America’s top journalism honor in 2013 earns the newspaper a place in the proud century-long tradition of the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

But so does the strikingly different case of the public service awards in 2014: rare separate honors for the Washington Post and for the online Guardian-U.S. news site of the British Guardian newspaper. In the glare of global media attention—and bitter controversy—articles in both the Post and the Guardian-U.S. examined the widespread secret surveillance of Americans being conducted by intelligence gatherers at the National Security Agency. Drawing on highly classified documents that the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had stolen and leaked to reporters, the two publications described the domestic spying that had sprung from antiterrorism laws passed after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and Washington’s Pentagon.

The ten decades of Pulitzer Public Service winners represent a truly eclectic body of work, beginning with breakthrough World War I coverage and a 1920 scoop that exposed the Boston confidence man Charles Ponzi and winding in an impressive trail of journalism through American history. From the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the post-World War II era of social change, the Pulitzer trail runs through a golden age in the 1970s that includes coverage of the Pentagon Papers Vietnam archive and the Watergate break-in. In more recent years gold medal winners have exposed major scandals in the Catholic Church and at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, to name only two. Along the way, Public Service Pulitzers also recognized numerous examples of extraordinary local or regional reporting—like the Sun Sentinel’s—giving that type of journalism welcome exposure in the national spotlight. Issues explored ranged from civil rights and women’s rights to the environment to corporate crime. And for nearly all this public service journalism, newsroom teams of reporters and editors played a huge but often unsung role.

Newspaper pioneer Joseph Pulitzer—the benefactor of the prizes and no stranger to controversy himself—took a broad view of public service both in his publishing career and in the award program he established. As detailed in Pulitzer’s will, a “gold medal costing $500” was to be given each year for “the most meritorious and disinterested public service rendered by any American newspaper.” First among the three journalism awards he envisioned, the Public Service Prize alone was for a news organization rather than individuals. (The other two awards, first given out in 1917, honored a reporter and an editorial writer, bringing them prize money of $1,000 and $500, respectively.²)

Today there are fourteen journalism categories covering news and opinion writing, photography, and cartooning. For each, except the Public Service Prize, $10,000 in cash now accompanies the award. Including seven nonjournalism prizes recognizing arts and letters, twenty-one Pulitzers in all are awarded in a typical year, though this varies if more than one prize or no prize is given in a category.³

The Pulitzer Prize board picks the winners. Its nineteen members are a diverse assortment of top-ranking print or online journalists, along with academics from around the nation. Board members meet for two days in April in the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s World Room, named for the long-gone New York newspaper once owned by Joseph Pulitzer. There in the Morningside Heights area of Manhattan the members typically work to choose one of three finalists selected in each category by “nominating juries.” The juries are also diverse and often have past Pulitzer winners in their ranks. They meet for three days, a month before the board’s session.

While much has changed in the Pulitzer selection system in a hundred years, the Public Service Prize remains relatively the same. It still takes the form of the Joseph Pulitzer Gold Medal, just under three inches in diameter, bearing Benjamin Franklin’s profile on one side and a shirtless Franklin-era printer working his press on the reverse. Columbia commissioned the original design from the Massachusetts sculptor Daniel Chester French, later known for his seated Abraham Lincoln statue in the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC.⁴ Though now gold-plated silver instead of solid gold—and valued at about $2,000—the Pulitzer Medal continues to be awarded each year to one news organization, except in the circumstance of dual winners, as in 2014. The lack of prize money hardly tarnishes the medal’s appeal among winning publications.

“That’s Big Casino. It’s the cream of the cream. It’s the one you want to win if you have a choice,” was the way it was put by the Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee Sr., who was associated with arguably the most famous of all journalism Pulitzer Prizes.⁵ That was the public service award won by the Post in 1973, primarily for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting of events after the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters in the Washington office building known as Watergate.

For any organization, winning the Pulitzer Gold Medal is a historic moment. The 2014 medal was the Post’s fifth, tying it with the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—but one behind the six won by the Los Angeles Times. And the online Guardian-U.S. became the first Public Service Prize recipient without a print edition, as well as the first to be affiliated with a publication outside the United States. (The British Guardian newspaper dates back to 1821; it changed its name from the Manchester Guardian in 1959.)⁶

Generally, Pulitzer board members pondering public service candidates look for measurable impact in the community, whether in the publication’s immediate locale or the nation as a whole. Government action in response to news coverage—a law passed or a wrongdoer charged, for example—carries special weight.

In the language of today’s prizes, the Pulitzer medal recognizes winners for meritorious service “through the use of its journalistic resources which, as well as reporting, may include editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics and online material.” And this has focused recently on Internet-based presentation techniques.

Often the award reflects exemplary reporting that comes out of a gripping news event. The medal in 1957 honored Little Rock’s Arkansas Gazette for bringing sanity to the community chaos at a time of court-ordered school desegregation. The 9/11 terrorist attacks provided the backdrop for the winning New York Times coverage, which helped a horrified nation cope. And after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the Gulf Coast, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans and Mississippi’s Sun Herald each won in 2006 for work that helped hold their battered communities together.

Indeed disaster coverage qualifies as a public service genre all its own. In 1948 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch won for an investigation of a fatal coal mine explosion in Centralia, Illinois, that revealed payoffs to state officials and inspection lapses. (The Pulitzer bar is high for catastrophe stories. “You shouldn’t automatically win the prize because a plane hits a building in your town,” says former Pulitzer board member Michael Gartner. “That’s when you’re supposed to do a good job.”)⁷

In terms of overall subject matter, two of every five medals awarded since the Pulitzers began involve exposing some kind of government wrongdoing on the local, state, or national level. One in five has been for exploring human rights abuses or other social ills. And increasingly the Public Service Prize has acknowledged environmental journalism, which accounts for about one of every ten awards.

The style of prizewinning journalism varies widely. Behind some awards are multipart team writing projects like the Sun Sentinel’s. But many other gold medals over the years have recognized a news organization’s incremental coverage of events. The Washington Post’s Watergate reporting, which Bob Woodward now half-jokingly describes as “boring,” is a prime example.⁸ It was built on gradual, relatively small-scale discoveries made over months of investigating. Only taken together did the stories expose the clear involvement of Richard Nixon’s White House in the crime and its cover-up.

News organizations big and little compete against each other for the gold medal. And board members sometimes seem to display a fondness for small-town entries, perhaps because of the sheer gall it takes for tiny newsrooms to challenge authority. The board also appreciates ingenious reporting methodology. As part of an investigation that won for the Wall Street Journal in 2007, a reporting team calculated the infinitesimally low probability that companies were playing by the rules in pricing their executive stock options year after year—revealing how some corporations cheated shareholders and sparking regulatory reforms. The Sun Sentinel’s methodology also intrigued the Pulitzer board, just as it had impressed readers.

SunPass and Shoe Leather

Even as she and her partner were being drenched at that turnpike overpass, Sally Kestin was pondering a much better plan for documenting off-duty police speeding. A veteran of thirteen years as a Sun Sentinel investigative reporter, she had written a year earlier about lax controls on south Florida cops. But the paper’s investigative “I-Team,” as an economy measure, had been in what editor Howard Saltz calls “a state of dormancy”—restricted to helping on other stories rather than launching its own projects.⁹ (The paper’s owner, the Chicago-based Tribune Company, was in the middle of a three-year bankruptcy from which it emerged at the end of 2012.) After his hiring in 2011, Saltz quickly returned the I-Team to full investigative status through a reallocation of duties that did not involve adding staff.

A reader of her earlier police stories suggested to Kestin that electronic transponders, routinely installed in police cars as part of Florida’s SunPass toll-collecting program, could yield raw data—precisely down to a hundredth of a second—showing when each passed through a turnpike toll gate. Gaining access to the toll records, Kestin thought, could be a first step to calculating the frequency of police speeding and would allow Kestin and Maines to calculate speeds based on the distance and time from one toll location to the next.

SunPass officials at first declared the raw data proprietary but quickly relented after the paper argued that police department secrecy was not warranted. Kestin and Maines got more than one million records from 3,915 transponders in the vehicles of a dozen police agencies. To calculate speeds, all that was missing were precise distances between tollgates—distances the state could not provide. Rather than use their own imprecise car odometers, the paper sprang for a $150 Garmin Edge device that was accurate to within a few feet. After a month of tracing routes and creating a master Excel spreadsheet, the reporters saw that the numbers pointed to a clear trend of rampant police speeding, with other official data establishing that much of it was on off-duty time.

Early on, Kestin interviewed former police and state troopers who had been sources for previous stories, asking about the cop culture they lived through. Some sources told the reporters they were on the right track, she says. For one thing, “professional courtesy” was often extended to cops even after serious violations. The two of them, working with the investigative editor John Dahlburg, drew up a plan to broaden the work into a three-part series. They knew they had to work quickly because of the continuing statewide interest in Fausto Lopez’s arrest video. After the first-day overview, they would look at recent victims of the speeding cops, using their anguish to help humanize what might otherwise be just a numbers story. Part three would examine the police officer speeding culture and how it might be changed. The database specialist Dana Williams researched seven years of accident records, establishing that the number of cop-caused accidents had climbed into the hundreds in recent years. For the second installment—eventually titled “Ruined Lives”—eight dramatic cases were identified, including that of a fourteen-year-old girl killed when a Broward County sheriff’s deputy, driving 87 mph on a call to assist with a minor traffic stop, struck a Honda Civic where the girl was a passenger in the back seat.

Part three—headlined “Why? ‘Because We Can’”—detailed the negligible penalties for cops ca...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Reintroduction: Refining Pulitzer’s Gold
• Part I: Gold for a New Century
• Part II: Coming of Age
• Part III: Challenges for a New Era
• Afterword: A New Voice of the South
• Appendix: Pulitzer Gold Nuggets
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index