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Guild Award Honors Crusading Washington Post Reporter
Washington Post reporter Katherine Boo has won the 1999 Heywood Broun Award for distinguished journalism for her investigation into the rapes, physical abuse and forced labor of retarded people, and the collusion of city officials who profited from the situation.
The annual award, which carries a $5,000 prize, is sponsored by The Newspaper Guild-CWA. The contest judges also recognized Ellen E. Schultze of The Wall Street Journal and Jason DeParle of The New York Times.
Boo, a member of TNG-CWA Local 35, began to investigate conditions at Washington D.C.-funded group homes after visiting one on an unrelated story. Her inquiries about the squalid conditions she observed ran into an official wall of silence, ostensibly to protect the clients’ privacy. Boo dug in, researching official records and tracking down family members. The result was a grim series of revelations documenting the exploitation of a helpless population by its avowed protectors. The two-part series, “Invisible Lives,” was published last March.
But it was just the beginning of the tragic story. As Boo chronicled in “Invisible Deaths,” published in December, various city officials were covering up deaths of group home residents who succumbed to abuse and neglect. Her prolonged fight for access to death certificates resulted in city officials destroying some records and doctoring others, leaving Boo with documentation of only 11 deaths in six years—less than 10 percent of the number she eventually unearthed. In nearly half the cases, she found evidence of neglect, delayed treatment or falsified circumstances that contributed to death.
In the wake of Boo’s reporting, the city has closed group homes, fired several top managers and indicted others. The Department of Justice, the FBI and the city’s major crimes unit are investigating. And the care and supervision of the District’s mentally retarded have been turned over to the private, nonprofit Kennedy Institute. All of these actions, the judges said, were directly attributable to Boo’s reporting, saving countless other people from being victimized.
The six-member panel of Broun Award judges noted Boo’s extraordinary perseverance, passion and outrage — qualities the judges said were in the best tradition of Heywood Broun himself.
Two other entries were singled out by the judges for special notice. One comprised a series of articles, published throughout 1999 by reporter Ellen Schultze of The Wall Street Journal, an independent Association of Publishers’ Employees/Local 1096 member. The series probed corporate America’s push to “modernize” pension plans by converting to the so-called “cash-balance” method — meaning sharply reduced benefits for older workers.
Jason DeParle of The New York Times, Local 3, was commended for his ongoing coverage in 1999 of the welfare-to-work movement. He looked at the effects on people moved off the welfare rolls, as well as the impact on their communities and on public attitudes and social policy.
The contest judges, who reviewed 195 entries, were E.J. Dionne, columnist for The Washington Post; John E. Mulligan, Washington bureau chief of the Providence (R.I.) Journal; William Serrin, associate professor of journalism at New York University and former New York Times labor reporter; Alicia C. Shepard, senior writer for American Journalism Review, and Anna Maria Tremonti, Washington-based foreign correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. The chairman of the panel was Phillip Kadis, former director of education for The Newspaper Guild-CWA.
Named after the crusading columnist and most prominent founder of the American Newspaper Guild, the Heywood Broun Award was first presented in 1941 to recognize “individual journalistic achievement by members of the working media, particularly if it helps right a wrong or correct an injustice.”
The annual award, which carries a $5,000 prize, is sponsored by The Newspaper Guild-CWA. The contest judges also recognized Ellen E. Schultze of The Wall Street Journal and Jason DeParle of The New York Times.
Boo, a member of TNG-CWA Local 35, began to investigate conditions at Washington D.C.-funded group homes after visiting one on an unrelated story. Her inquiries about the squalid conditions she observed ran into an official wall of silence, ostensibly to protect the clients’ privacy. Boo dug in, researching official records and tracking down family members. The result was a grim series of revelations documenting the exploitation of a helpless population by its avowed protectors. The two-part series, “Invisible Lives,” was published last March.
But it was just the beginning of the tragic story. As Boo chronicled in “Invisible Deaths,” published in December, various city officials were covering up deaths of group home residents who succumbed to abuse and neglect. Her prolonged fight for access to death certificates resulted in city officials destroying some records and doctoring others, leaving Boo with documentation of only 11 deaths in six years—less than 10 percent of the number she eventually unearthed. In nearly half the cases, she found evidence of neglect, delayed treatment or falsified circumstances that contributed to death.
In the wake of Boo’s reporting, the city has closed group homes, fired several top managers and indicted others. The Department of Justice, the FBI and the city’s major crimes unit are investigating. And the care and supervision of the District’s mentally retarded have been turned over to the private, nonprofit Kennedy Institute. All of these actions, the judges said, were directly attributable to Boo’s reporting, saving countless other people from being victimized.
The six-member panel of Broun Award judges noted Boo’s extraordinary perseverance, passion and outrage — qualities the judges said were in the best tradition of Heywood Broun himself.
Two other entries were singled out by the judges for special notice. One comprised a series of articles, published throughout 1999 by reporter Ellen Schultze of The Wall Street Journal, an independent Association of Publishers’ Employees/Local 1096 member. The series probed corporate America’s push to “modernize” pension plans by converting to the so-called “cash-balance” method — meaning sharply reduced benefits for older workers.
Jason DeParle of The New York Times, Local 3, was commended for his ongoing coverage in 1999 of the welfare-to-work movement. He looked at the effects on people moved off the welfare rolls, as well as the impact on their communities and on public attitudes and social policy.
The contest judges, who reviewed 195 entries, were E.J. Dionne, columnist for The Washington Post; John E. Mulligan, Washington bureau chief of the Providence (R.I.) Journal; William Serrin, associate professor of journalism at New York University and former New York Times labor reporter; Alicia C. Shepard, senior writer for American Journalism Review, and Anna Maria Tremonti, Washington-based foreign correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. The chairman of the panel was Phillip Kadis, former director of education for The Newspaper Guild-CWA.
Named after the crusading columnist and most prominent founder of the American Newspaper Guild, the Heywood Broun Award was first presented in 1941 to recognize “individual journalistic achievement by members of the working media, particularly if it helps right a wrong or correct an injustice.”