The Weather Channel has been awarded one of journalism’s most prestigious investigative reporting awards.
The Investigate Reporters and Editors awarded its top investigative reporting prizes to The Weather Channel, Spanish language channel Telemundo and an alt-weekly, Willamette Week. It’s hardly the usual roster of winners of one of journalism’s most coveted awards. Two other top awards went to combined efforts by newspapers and TV stations who pooled resources. Another winner is a non-profit investigative center. National Public Radio, working with a respected publication that covers coal mine safety, also won.
See a complete list of winners and judge’s comments here.
The Weather Channel, Telemundo and the Investigative Fund produced an investigation called “The Real Death Valley.” The documentary looks at Brooks County, Texas, an area 70 miles north of the Rio Grande. There is a border patrol station there that immigrants who are trying to enter America illegally try to avoid. So they travel 40 miles through blistering heat. About every other day, one of the immigrants dies in that one country during the hottest months of the year. And, the investigation found, when they call for help, the help may take hours, if it arrives at all.
“From July 2013 through June 2014, the sheriff’s office received a total of 600 911 calls from approximately 333 groups of migrants. As The Investigative Fund analyzed the data, troubling patterns emerged. For each call, we could see that county dispatchers had recorded the caller’s GPS coordinates and landmarks and passed the information on to the Border Patrol, but in more than half of the cases, there was no record of whether a Border Patrol agent ever responded.
Reporter John Carlos Frey said last year, officials said they found 81 bodies along the trails the immigrants use. The investigation found, “Since 2009, the remains of over four hundred migrants have been recovered in the county.”
The Real Death Valley: Full Length Weather Channel Documentary from Weather Films on Vimeo.
IRE awarded a medal to Willamette Week for investigation of former Oregon First Lady Cylvia Hayes. The IRE judges said,
“This small news organization punched way above its weight, taking on a powerful governor and his fiancée. Reporter Nigel Jaquiss’ reporting exposed the secret deals made by Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s fiancée, Cynthia Hayes, who secured lucrative consulting contracts with special interests seeking to influence the governor.”
In October 2015, the weekly newspaper reported that she plays a role in the administration and keeps a desk in the offices of Gov. John Kitzhaber while also performing paid outside work as a private consultant.
“WW reported that in 2013, Hayes signed private consulting contracts with three advocacy groups that were seeking to influence state and regional policy. Hayes, 47, signed the contracts, worth $85,000, while also interacting with those groups in her role as first lady and as adviser to the governor.”
This is not the WW’s first big award. In 2005, it won a Pulitzer Prize for, as the Prize website put it, reports about “a former governor’s long concealed sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl.”
Tom Renner Award
IRE judges handed the Tom Renner Award for investigative reporting to Gannett’s cross-media project “Fugitives Next Door.” The USA Today version of the investigation reported:
Across the United States, police and prosecutors are allowing tens of thousands of wanted felons — including more than 3,300 people accused of sexual assaults, robberies and homicides — to escape justice merely by crossing a state border.
The IRE judges said:
“Fugitives Next Door” is an ambitious project that reveals a nationwide problem hiding in plain sight – tens of thousands of criminals escaping justice because law enforcement agencies nationwide refused to pursue them. Imaginative, exhaustive reporting that required more than a hundred public records requests, and scraping millions of records online, led to important conclusions law enforcement agencies did not want us to know and strong results that include reforms in several states. Leveraging Gannett’s network of newspapers and TV stations proved critical to ensuring this story had national scope.
The investigation included an interactive database to let readers search their own city to see what the police are doing to track down fugitives.
Other IRE Winners:
Print/Online Large: “Courting Favor,” The New York Times
Print/Online Medium: “VA Scandal,” Arizona Republic
Print/Online Small: “First Lady Inc.,” Willamette Week
Broadcast/Video Large: “The Real Death Valley / Muriendo por Cruzar,” The Investigative Fund, The Weather Channel and Telemundo
Broadcast/Video Medium: “Ticket-Rigging Traffic Enforcement,” KHOU Houston
Broadcast/Video Small: “Louisiana Purchased,” WVUE-TV & NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune
Multiplatform Large: “Firestone and the Warlord,” PBS Frontline, ProPublica and Rain Media
Multiplatform Medium: “Drugging Our Kids,” San Jose Mercury News
Multiplatform Small: “An Impossible Choice,” inewsource
Radio/Audio: “Delinquent Mines,” National Public Radio and Mine Safety and Health News
Student: “Payday Nation,” The Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University (Published by Al Jazeera)
Investigations Triggered by Breaking News: “A Deadly Slope: Examining the Oso, Washington Disaster,” The Seattle Times
Book: “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI,” Betty Medsger
Gannett Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism: “Losing Ground,” ProPublica and The Lens
The IRE Awards will be presented at the IRE convention in Philadelphia June 6 at the 2015 IRE Conference.
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