Election fueled fine journalism
NEW YORK — The tumultuous presidential campaign of 2016 yielded a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for the Washington Post reporter who not only raised doubts about Donald Trump’s charitable giving but also revealed that the candidate had been recorded crudely bragging about grabbing women.
David A. Fahrenthold won the prize for national reporting, with the judges citing his stories about Trump’s charitable foundation that called into question whether the real estate magnate was as generous as he claimed.
Fahrenthold’s submission also included his story about Trump’s raunchy behindthe-scenes comments during a 2005 taping of “Access Hollywood.”
Winners of American journalism’s most distinguished prizes ranged from partnerships spanning hundreds of reporters to newspapers as small as The Storm Lake Times, a twiceweekly, 3,000-circulation family owned paper in Iowa. The paper’s Art Cullen won the editorial writing award for challenging powerful corporate agricultural interests in the state.
The prize for explanatory reporting went to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald, which amassed a group of more than 400 journalists to examine the leaked “Panama Papers” and expose the way that politicians, criminals and rich people stashed money in offshore accounts.
Eric Eyre of The Charleston Gazette-Mail won the investigative reporting prize for articles showing that drug wholesalers had shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia in just six years, a period when 1,728 people fatally overdosed on the painkillers.
The Pulitzers are awarded at Columbia University. This is the 101st year of the contest, established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Public service award winners receive a gold medal; the other awards carry a prize of $15,000 each.
In troubled times for newspapers, “the work that wins Pulitzer Prizes reminds us that we are not in a period of decline in journalism. Rather, we are in the midst of a revolution,” with new partnerships, technology and media taking the field in new directions, prize administrator Mike Pride said.
ATLANTA — The body of a man who died of leukemia at his parents’ North Carolina home was stranded for two days in an airplane’s cargo hold while Delta Air Lines dealt with massive flight cancellations during recent severe weather.
Family members told WFTV-TV in Nashville that Delta Air Lines mistakenly rerouted the flight carrying Bryant Lee Raburn’s body from Raleigh to Salt Lake City, instead of to his hometown of Nashville. Delta then took two days to reroute his body back to Nashville, arriving just an hour or so before a planned memorial service Sunday evening for family members and friends was to begin.
When family members realized what had happened, they went to work trying to get Raburn’s body back to Nashville, said David Rhodes, Raburn’s stepfather.
“I was stonewalled everywhere I called,” Rhodes said. “Delta told me the soonest he could get here was Sunday night, and I said that was unacceptable.”