On Monday, the staff of The Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer for investigative journalism, splitting the prize with The New York Times. The citation accompanying the award, given for the Journal’s project on the Medicare system, noted the paper’s “unprecedented access” to previously undisclosed health care provider data.
That access wasn’t easy to obtain. In fact, the Pulitzer win was a grace note for the Journal’s coverage of Medicare, which was defined early on by a long legal slog for health care records. In 2011, Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones sued to overturn a 1979 injunction that blocked access to information that could show how much money individual doctors received from the Medicare program. The lawsuit followed a Wall Street Journal series, “Secrets of the System” that probed the possibility of fraud and waste as a result of the opaque Medicare practices. The investigation would go on to become a finalist for the Public Service Pulitzer in 2011, but the records remained undisclosed.
It wasn’t until May 2013 that the Journal won the legal tug-of-war over the information after a judge overturned the injunction, calling it “inequitable and detrimental to the public interest.”
And even after the legal decision, there was a months-long period for public comment before the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began releasing the data, ProPublica reporter Charles Ornstein writes.
After the information became public, The Wall Street Journal kept digging. Its investigative series into Medicare, which comprised several articles and a searchable database, was rolled out during 2014 and continued into this year.
For the Journal, the Pulitzer win must have been sweetened by the paper’s years-long drought in the contest’s reporting categories. For years, the Pulitzer board passed over the Journal for prizes in several categories, although the paper did win for commentary and editorial writing in 2013 and 2011, respectively. It was a finalist in various reporting categories 11 times after its 2007 win for public service.
Reached by phone after the Journal’s win Monday, Deputy Editor-in-Ehief Rebecca Blumenstein said the atmosphere in the newsroom was celebratory, in part because of the legal battle.
“Our lawyers fought it,” Blumenstein said. “They fought it long, they fought it hard.”
She added that there was a high degree of difficulty associated with parsing the data and shaping it into understandable stories.
“It took us many months to dig into this data to find the irregularities and the people behind them,” she said. “And this was painstaking work that involved the highest levels of modern data journalism and gumshoe reporting.”
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