USA TODAY partnership wins prestigious Goldsmith Prize
USA TODAY, in partnership with two news organizations, has won the 2020 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for its two-year effort to track the scale and impact of copycat legislation – bills written by corporations and special interests – in states across the USA.
Using the equivalent of 150 computers running nonstop for months, USA TODAY, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed for the first time that at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years. More than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.
The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language.
When legislators propose new laws, they don’t always write the bills themselves. Corporations, interest groups and lobbyists often write fill-in-theblank documents and then offer them to state lawmakers. Journalists from the organizations looked for legislation written by special interests and found it in all 50 states.
The project’s data allowed reporters to show how powerful such “model legislation” has become. Model legislation effectively gives corporations or other groups control over the language that ultimately becomes law.
“This was a massive effort that revealed just how much influence corporations hold over our local lawmakers,” said Chris Davis, USA TODAY Network’s vice president of investigations. “We found example after example of how special interests have been manipulating public policy by crafting their own laws and inserting language that lawmakers don’t fully understand.”
The 2019 report uncovered the most frequently copied model bills and how special interests have lobbied to spread them from state to state.
“This fantastic reporting sheds a light for the public and local media on the origins of legislation that gets passed in statehouses across the country,” the judges noted in Monday’s announcement.
“There are few things more important for journalism to monitor than government, and there are few things we fear more than our government being secretly manipulated,” said Greg Burton, executive editor of the Republic.
“With overwhelming evidence and painstaking data analysis, that is exactly what these reporters revealed.”
The “Copy. Paste. Legislate.” investigation drew on resources from across the USA TODAY Network. Critical to the project were developers and IT specialists who created the analysis tool that allowed reporters in dozens of USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the country to identify and report on local copycat legislation and on the state lawmakers who were introducing them.
In 2019, the Republic and USA TODAY joined efforts with the Center for Public Integrity, which had independently launched a similar effort.
“Our award demonstrates that collaborative, ambitious public service reporting plays a vital role,” said Public Integrity’s CEO, Susan Smith Richardson, adding, “we win this at a time when COVID-19 means our newsrooms cannot gather together in celebration, but be sure our victory gives us heart to continue reporting on COVID-19 and other issues of national importance.”
Beyond the findings about the extent of copycat legislation, the series revealed how such bills allow car dealers to avoid consequences for deadly car defects, how “heartbeat” anti-abortion laws emerged from a 10-year campaign to craft the wording and how bills that claim to target terrorist groups continue to be passed even when they don’t have any effect.
The annual Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting honors investigative reporting that best promotes more effective and ethical conduct of government, the making of public policy or the practice of politics. Each finalist or finalist team is awarded $10,000. The top prize is $25,000.
The program is run by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, which is dedicated to “exploring and illuminating the intersection of press, politics and public policy.”
The award ceremony had been scheduled for March 12 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. The winner and finalists instead were announced via video Monday afternoon.
Other finalists for this year’s prize included the reports “The Afghanistan Papers” from The Washington Post; “Lawless” by Kyle Hopkins of the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica; “Hidden Harm” by Christina Jewett of Kaiser Health News; “Silent Killer” from Suzy Khimm and Laura Strickler of NBC News; and “Fleeing Justice” by Shane Dixon Kavanaugh of The Oregonian.