Posts tagged Rocky Mountain News
Florida reporters win Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting
Mar 4th
Two Florida reporters have won the 2014 Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Journalism and Mass Communication program and the Denver Press Club.
The $2,000 Nakkula prize goes to reporters Megan O’Matz and database editor John Maines of the South Florida Sun Sentinel for their series, “Cops, Cash, Cocaine.” The piece uncovered a police department’s secret scheme to lure drug dealers to a small town, entangle them in a sting and pocket money from the operation.
The award is named in honor of the late Al Nakkula, a 46-year veteran of the Rocky Mountain News whose tenacity made him a legendary police reporter, according to award organizers. The contest has existed since 1991 and this year drew more than two dozen entries from major publications around the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Seattle Times, the Boston Globe and Newsday.
Five veteran reporters, who worked at the Rocky Mountain News before its closure in 2009, judged the contest. Most of the reporters worked with Nakkula.
“The Sun Sentinel’s report stood out for the sheer doggedness of the reporting and the sheer audacity of the operation the newspaper exposed,” said Nakkula award judge Kevin Vaughan, an investigative reporter for Fox Sports.
Reporters O’Matz and Maines found that the Sunrise, Fla., police department enticed drug buyers to come to town, arrested them, confiscated their cash and cars and kept millions in proceeds. The officers who participated also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime pay.
“ ‘Cops, Cash, Cocaine,’ was one of those stories that allowed Megan O’Matz and John Maines to deploy the skills they have become known for around here: piecing together bits of information, reviewing documents endlessly, talking to sources and checking things out in person. In other words: old-fashioned tenacity,” said Howard Saltz, Sun Sentinel editor.
“The result of their investigation not only revealed something that still boggles the mind when you read it, but served the community by forcing a highly unusual — and arguably dangerous — police operation to shut down,” he said.
O’Matz has received numerous state and national honors for previous work and was a 2006 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.
Series co-reporter Maines has been a database editor for the Sun Sentinel for 16 years. He and a Sun Sentinel colleague won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Second place in this year’s competition was awarded to reporters John Diedrich and Raquel Rutledge of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for their series, “Backfire.”
The judges also sent a special commendation to the staff of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for the depth and breadth of their work in 2013. The staff entered two major reporting projects in the contest.
For more information about the Al Nakkula award visit http://journalism.colorado.edu/al-nakkula-award/. For more information about CU-Boulder’s Journalism and Mass Communication program visit http://journalism.colorado.edu/.
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CU Boulder’s toxic avenger and teacher dead
Sep 20th
By Ron Baird
Adrienne Anderson had been an anti-toxics crusader⎯ helping poor communities and labor unions battle corporate polluters and crooked government agencies⎯for 30+ years.
Her targets included Rockwell International, the former operator of Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and the subject of a federal Grand Jury investigation for environmental crimes at that facility; defense contractor Martin-Marietta, whose rocket fuel was suspected of polluting the groundwater of communities with high rates of cancer in southwest Denver; and ASARCO Metals, which has been accused of environmental violations at 94 sites across the country, including the recent revelation that it had incinerated 5,000 tons of hazardous waste from which it was supposed to be recycling heavy metals.
For more than a decade, the University of Colorado/Boulder Environmental Studies instructor taught her students to use the Open Records and Freedom of Information acts to ferret out and make public those dirty little (and sometimes big) secrets that lie in thousands of pages of public documents that are stacked on shelves, packed in cardboard boxes and file cabinets in government agencies like the Colorado Department of Health and Environment and the EPA.
She managed to survive 11 years mostly due to student support. But it was always a battle.
As a college instructor, Anderson and her students took on about 150 companies, collectively known as the Lowry Coalition, which had dumped unregulated hazardous waste into Lowry Landfill for decades before it was designated a Superfund site and closed. All, including the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, had signed a once-secret agreement with the City of Denver and Waste Management, Inc. to treat groundwater from the landfill and blend it with the effluent from a massive sewage treatment plant operated by the Metro Wastewater Reclamation District. Sludge from the plant is used to fertilize agricultural operations in eastern Colorado and the “treated” water is pumped into the South Platte River.
The political heat was cranked up to “broil” after Anderson discovered a 1991 letter from the Lowry Coalition to the EPA admitting groundwater test wells at the landfill contained high levels of plutonium and americium and pointing out that those radioactive components could only have come from Rocky Flats. After she went public with the information, Metro Wastewater executives engineered a smear campaign against Anderson, who was on the plant’s Board of Directors as a delegate of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, which represented the plant’s workers.
She subsequently filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Metro Wastewater.
Most if not all of Anderson’s accusations were supported by Pulitizer Prize-winning investigative reporter Eileen Welsome in her 2001 series “Dirty Secrets,” published in the Denver weekly newspaper Westword. Welsome reported that Lowry officials have bolstered their case that no nuclear waste is present by sealing up dozens of wells that had tested hot, which made further testing impossible. Then they drilled 35 new test wells outside the area of historic contamination, along with a slew of other Machiavellian sleights of hand.
Anderson’s continued saber rattling on the issue prompted a flurry of derogatory emails from two top officials in the Colorado governor’s office to CU administrators in late 2004 and early 2005.
Under this pressure, the high ratings and student support was not enough to protect her, and the faculty of Environmental Studies voted on Jan. 28, 2005 not to renew Anderson’s contract. They claimed the vote nothing personal; it was simply due to departmental “resource allocation priorities” and a “change of direction.”
Not even the Rocky Mountain News bought that bureaucratic backwash and published an editorial on Feb. 10, 1995, saying, “CU Making the Right Call on Anderson,” describing her as “an instructor whose rhetoric on environmental issues has been almost as reckless as the ranting of Ward Churchill.” Churchill was a CU faculty member who generated considerable controversy by calling some victims of the 9-11 attacks “little Eichmanns.” He, too, was fired from his job.
Anderson’s subsequent appeal of the decision was denied. But this time, it has been the CU faculty members who had come to her aid. They asked members of a prestigious faculty committee representing the four CU campuses to investigate. Their report revealed that the emails had been passed down to the same administrators who denied her appeal.
“If the intent of the emails was to put pressure on the university, the way they were handled ensured that this pressure was felt at all levels,” the report said. The committee recommended rehiring Anderson and funding her course.
Anderson released the report at a press conference on Sept. 17, 2006 organized by the American Association of University Professors.
At that time, English Professor Paul Levitt accused the administration of “abject cowardice” and in danger of becoming “a hand maiden of industry and government.”
Not everyone in high places had a problem with Anderson. David DiNardi, a federal judge assigned to hear Anderson’s whistlebower harassment case against Metro Wastewater, awarded her $450,000 in damages in 2001, as well as taking the somewhat unusual step of ordering Metro Wastewater to place a full page apology to Anderson in the Sunday Denver Post.
The judge noted in his ruling that then-Denver Post Editorial Page Editor Al Knight had become a “third-party agent” in the case by printing Metro’s allegations as facts.
In the decision he wrote, “This entire case is about a dedicated, conscientious and public-spirited citizen who, in following the tradition of Karen Silkwood, Erin Brockovitch… and others, has spent her entire adult life in pursuing union and environmental activities and in attempting to correct perceived wrongs and problems in society.”
Anderson has decided to forgo the final step in the appeal process because the same administrators who had been biased by the emails would be sitting in judgment again. Instead, she’s appealing to the court of public opinion, as she has for the past 30 years.
The judge’s ruling and award was subsequently overturned by the Bush administration’s Labor Department on a technicality. And that decision was upheld by a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals panel on a 2-1 vote. The two judges who upheld the Labor Department’s decision were recent Bush appointees to the court. This association is relevant in that the Bush administration has waged a relentless war on whistleblowers in federal agencies and even censured, harassed and dismissed federal scientists who have reported information that runs counter to his administration’s policies of promoting big business interests over public welfare. Recently, the EPA closed most of its libraries so that citizens like Anderson would not have access to information damaging to his friends and campaign contributors.