It’s not enough to be good at what you do. You want to be part of a team that’s winning. And this was like the Red Sox beating the Yankees. Winning those Pulitzers gave them the sense that they themselves were being validated, as well as the paper.
—LOS ANGELES TIMES EDITOR JOHN CARROLL, ON EARNING FIVE 2004 PULITZERS TO THE ONE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Some intrigue in the Pulitzer boardroom spiced up the 2004 public service selection—and brought the New York Times more gold. The Times had nominated the workplace safety reporting of David Barstow and Lowell Bergman in both the investigative reporting and public service categories. But the work—focusing both on company safety lapses and the government’s inability to deal with fatal plant accidents—had not been among the jury’s finalists in public service, Barstow learned through the usually reliable rumor mill. (Not until 2009 did the Pulitzer organization manage to plug the leaking of jury nominations, in part by having jurors sign a pledge of silence.) Barstow held out hope that the Times’s work could still win in investigative reporting, although his reading of one other supposed finalist—the Toledo Blade’s exposure of long-ago Vietnam atrocities committed by a unit called Tiger Force—seemed to suggest tough competition. Barstow was proud of the Times’s work but the Blade’s work had the look of a Pulitzer winner too. He held his breath.
In the days leading up to the Pulitzer announcement, Barstow got the classic bad news/good news treatment from the rumor mill. The Pulitzer board had picked the
Blade’s Tiger Force stories for investigative reporting. But his and Bergman’s stories had been moved by the board back to the public service category, where they had won. One finalist was the
Providence Journal for its series focusing on the causes of the Station nightclub fire, which had killed one hundred rock concert attendees in West Warwick, Rhode Island. Another was the Louisville
Courier-Journal for stories on the delays in Kentucky’s criminal justice system.
1What had happened was this: during the jury deliberations, the investigative reporting and public service panels had decided between the two of them to nominate the Barstow-Bergman
Times entry in investigative reporting and not public service. But as the Pulitzer board pondered the six finalists spread across investigative reporting and public service, it saw the workplace safety story as a better fit for the gold medal than anything on the jury’s public service list.
2Most board members had already read the
Times’s workplace reports—a “familiarity” edge the
Times gets in most years—and they had left a strong impression. The board then reviewed the investigative reporting jury’s report. “Thanks to the indefatigable investigative reporting of the
New York Times, the American public now knows that too many employers force countless workers to toil in conditions so unsafe that many consider themselves fortunate to survive the workweek,” the panel wrote. “The
Times investigation has led to widespread cries for reform; a searching government investigation of its own conduct; and has already resulted directly in several criminal indictments.”
3 That recommendation gave it the ring of a public service winner.
The joy was keen in Times Square. Without this prize, the newspaper would have been shut out of Pulitzers for the first time since 2000. And as a gold medal, it was special too. The Times’s fifth, it tied the paper with the Post-Dispatch for the most ever won by a single news organization. (The Times—which had won medals in 1918, 1944, 1972, and 2002—had collected by far the most overall Pulitzer awards: ninety through 2003.)
The
Times’s first three-part project, a January report called “Dangerous Business,” had begun with a tip received by investigative reporter Lowell Bergman. The tip had a 9/11 connection. Bergman, the former CBS
Sixty Minutes producer/reporter who had joined the
Times as an investigative reporter in 1999 and was jointly serving as a producer and correspondent for Public Broadcasting System’s
Frontline program, had been grounded on a flight just after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. While waiting for flights to resume, he got to talking with a federal Justice Department source who was looking into the death of a worker at a Texas company called Tyler Pipe. A question the source asked Bergman piqued his interest: “Did you know it’s only a misdemeanor to kill a worker?” The Tyler worker, Rolan Hoskin, had been crushed to death on an unprotected conveyor belt. Eventually Bergman was teamed to do the three-part investigation of Tyler with Barstow, who also had come to the
Times in 1999 and had joined its investigative desk in 2002.
At first Barstow saw the Tyler Pipe story, with the death of a single worker, as having small dimensions—at least relative to what he had been covering. “I’d spent months and months dealing with widows and widowers and confronting mass death,” he says. Not only had he reported regularly from Ground Zero and reported and written a number of the “Portraits of Grief” vignettes, but he had also developed a specialty: investigating payments flowing to the 9/11 victims. “I was charting all kinds of screw-ups and inequities and other problems that plagued the entire messy process,” he says.
One early interview about the workplace situation in Tyler with an old-timer who had forty years as an iron pourer changed everything. “It was a real lightbulb moment,” says Barstow. The man, with his forearms covered with scars, told of the pressure Tyler had been under since Birmingham-based McWane Incorporated bought the plant in 1995. The company had laid off half the work force, including maintenance employees and, critically, extra “relief” workers for men on the line in the 130-degree summer heat in the plant.
“You have to have breaks if you’re going to keep the line going,” Barstow says. “You need to stay hydrated, with lots of fluid, and that means lots of bathroom breaks.” But with new managers cutting back on replacement workers, there were fewer breaks. “Workers couldn’t leave or they’d be disciplined,” the reporter says. “Many workers had no choice but to pee in their pants.” Such a predicament for the husky iron workers dramatized the situation for Barstow. Some employees would not be quoted for the record because talking about having to urinate while on the plant floor, for example, was humiliating. Still, the number of such off-the-record reports suggested this was happening with some frequency.
If that image drove his initial interest in the story, the broader implications of the McWane/Tyler case soon gripped him as well. Barstow and Bergman’s reporting was backed by their computer-assisted analysis of the more than 200,000 on-the-job deaths reported over the twenty-nine years between 1972 and 2001. Only 151 of those deaths had been referred for prosecution of a company, and a mere eight cases had resulted in prison sentences over that long span. When a sentence was imposed, the longest was six months.
Barstow saw a strong international economic angle behind the numbers. American businesses were being pressured to adopt minimal safety levels as a cost-cutting technique to stay competitive in the new global environment. If they didn’t cut costs enough, they lost out in the marketplace. If they trimmed safety measures, and workers died, the price was not as severe. Regulators at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were soft, and companies had the upper hand. In the first series, McWane’s safety violations were compared to those of other big pipe companies, showing it to have a significantly worse record.
One morning, “probably in the shower,” Barstow says, he came up with a line to describe the scene that the series was painting: “part Dickens and part Darwin.” Along with the story of Rolan Hoskin’s death, that became the opening of the first story on January 8. “In writing that lead, I was trying to get at it as vividly and powerfully as I could,” he says. He notes that the reporters and their editor, Paul Fishleder, agreed to start the series with an anecdotal account. In Barstow’s experience writing multiparters, such an organizational approach seemed inverted. “An overview usually comes first, with the series then broken down into parts. But in this case I was worried about connecting with the readers,” he says. “So Day One was just the story of what happened when McWane took over this plant. Day Two we stepped back and looked at who owns the plant. Day Three was what does the government do about it.” It was not doing much, the third story maintained, with OSHA records supporting that conclusion. Fishleder, as the primary editor, became the sounding board as Barstow shaped the series and each story in it.
Along with Fishleder, Barstow credits executive editor Howell Raines and deputy managing editor Andrew Rosenthal for early support of the story idea. The editing—and self-editing—challenges were enormous. Barstow estimates his rough draft of the first article alone at 35,000 words. He cut it first to 15,000 and then whittled it into a more polished 7,000. “This means that an awful lot of great material ends up on the cutting room floor. Believe me, every word in the final piece was scrutinized for whether it absolutely had to be in the story.” The old lesson still holds: “Make the point, make it with power and precision, and then move on. Don’t make the reader read one word more than necessary.”
A television documentary version of the three-part report was to appear on Public Broadcasting System’s Frontline program. Barstow found some advantages to having the filming entourage around him for some of his interviews. “A big project is like running a small business, with the photographer and all the others on the team. These can be great for extending the reach of your eyes and ears,” he says. “You grab resources from wherever you can.” He had been apprehensive about the TV element at first because of bad earlier experiences. “But the partnership on ‘Dangerous Business’ worked really well. It did give more firepower, crucial on a story with so many tentacles,” he says. Along with those additional staffers available for research, though, was a negative. Television’s needs “slowed us down because we often had to ‘redo’ interviews for the benefit of the cameras—that is, go back with a camera crew after I had already interviewed someone for the newspaper,” according to Barstow. “It also added greatly to the administrative burdens of the story: more meetings, more coordination required to sync up the stories.” The TV–print connection reflects the future of investigative reporting, he says. “It will be multiplatform, multimedia, with TV, print and web integrated for the biggest possible bang.” And this project showed how the two forms could actually benefit from each other. (The Pulitzer board says that only the print version was reviewed during the jury and board deliberations. Still, some board members suspect that such joint entries may one day earn their own category.)
Needed: A Second Series
When the three parts ran in the
Times in January, and even later when reforms were proposed, and indictments were sought against some McWane managers, Barstow found his feelings were mixed. While very pleased with the series, he says, “I worried that some folks might walk away assuming McWane was some sort of anomaly.” The question of why workplace deaths usually go uninvestigated—and how outrageous that is—needed more attention. That unanswered question paved the way for months more of work and eventually the second series in the Pulitzer package, “When Workers Die.”
The regulators were at the center of the second series, which Barstow handled as the lone reporter, with research assistance from Robin Stein. One focus was on the paradox represented by the law that created OSHA. The law established that an employer’s worst offense would be to cause a fatality by willfully violating safety rules. Yet the Times’s analysis of the data—“almost certainly the first systematic examination of these worst workplace deaths,” the paper said in its Pulitzer nomination letter—found that OSHA doesn’t even ask prosecutors to consider filing charges in 93 percent of cases.
This series began with a graphically portrayed accident too, following Barstow’s sense that a strong connection with the reader was needed to tell the story. The first installment was headlined “A Trench Caves In; A Young Worker Is Dead. Is It a Crime?” It began:
CINCINNATI—As the autopsy confirmed, death did not come right away for Patrick M. Walters. On June 14, 2002, while working on a sewer pipe in a trench 10 feet deep, he was buried alive under a rush of collapsing muck and mud. A husky plumber’s apprentice, barely 22 years old, Mr. Walters clawed for the surface. Sludge filled his throat. Thousands of pounds of dirt pressed on his chest, squeezing and squeezing until he could not draw another breath.
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The story went on to point out that Walters had spoken often to his family about being buried alive. That was because his company, a small, family-owned outfit called Moeves Plumbing, frequently sent him into deep trenches without safety equipment. Local OSHA officials were upset too because Moeves had been implicated in a “nearly identical” worker death thirteen years earlier. The Times article compared those two cases and pointed out the lack of OSHA action to correct the unsafe conditions.
The second story, headlined “U.S. Rarely Seeks Charges for Deaths in Workplace,” offered stark statistics showing how few prosecutions resulted from fatalities caused by workplace safety violations. Charts and graphs showed how the various states stacked up in enforcement, and one particular passage stood out: “For those 2,197 deaths [in U.S. workplaces between 1990 and 2002] employers faced $106 million in civil OSHA fines and jail sentences totaling less than 30 years, The Times found. Twenty of those years were from one case, a chicken-plant fire in North Carolina that killed 25 workers in 1991.” By contrast, one company, WorldCom, recently paid $750 million in civil fines for misleading investors. The Environmental Protection Agency in 2001 alone obtained prison sentences totaling 256 years.
The third installment aimed for one bright spot in an otherwise bleak picture, as news organizations often seek to do. It involved the approach of one state that has taken on the duty of fighting for victims when workers are killed on the job. The headline: “California Leads Prosecution of Employers in Job Deaths.”
The Times’s entry got the typical polish that the paper applies when it submits for the Pulitzers. The submission was a seventy-six-page, eleven-inch by fifteen-inch spiral-bound book. It presented not only the original articles and editorials supporting them but also readers’ opinions and letters from officials heralding the two series, along with descriptions of the Times’s online multimedia presentation with Barstow’s audio commentary and a description of the Frontline/New York Times report.
2004—The
New York Times for the work of David Barstow and Lowell Bergman that relentlessly examined death and injury among American workers and exposed employers who break basic safety rules. (Moved by the Board from the Investigative Reporting category, where it was also entered.)
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A Medical Center’s Maladies
While the
New York Times won the 2004 gold medal, the
Los Angeles Times’s overall performance that year was at least as noteworthy. Its staffers won a total of five Pulitzers, including prizes for teamwork in breaking news and national reporting. Remarkably,
Los Angeles Times people had been finalists for four other prizes. Some staffers gloated about the “five-to-one” score over their New York rivals. And a rivalry it most certainly was. For years the West Coast paper had complained that it failed to receive the respect it deserved from the “Eastern press establishment”—particularly at Pulitzer time. Still, New York’s Gray Lady
had won that 2004 gold medal.
Even as editor John Carroll acknowledged the prior year’s bounty, he had his eye on a developing story with public service possibilities for the next year’s prizes: a complex analysis of operational troubles with racial complications at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center on the edge of the Watts section of Los Angeles.
6 When they began studying the Los Angeles County hospital system in 2003 with a broader story in mind,
Times health-care reporters Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein did not think that a look at the King/Drew part of the system had much promise. Their impression was that the story had “been done.” And it had been. Fourteen years before, in a Pulitzer Prize category then called specialized reporting,
Times reporter Claire Spiegel had been a Pulitzer finalist with a powerful three-part series about King/Drew that concentrated on the lack of resources available to the hospital. By then, the medical center had already garnered the unfortunate nickname of Killer King. King/Drew had been created after the 1965 Watts riots with a largely black and Latino medical staff. There were problems, but the community was extremely defensive about King/Drew.
In 2003, John Carroll and managing editor Dean Baquet had backed Weber and Ornstein’s vision of a far-reaching story highlighting patient care comparisons among all the county’s medical facilities. The impetus for that story had been a front-page study the two reporters had done early in the year. It cited a lawsuit in which doctors had pointed to specific cases of patient deaths resulting from long waits for care. The delays in question had not been at King/Drew but at another facility.
Julie Marquis, the deputy Metro editor who had been assigned to manage Weber and Ornstein’s work, says there was another reason to avoid focusing on King/Drew in their new examination of medical care. It was “like shooting fish in a barrel,” she says. “We did not regard that as the most challenging investigative project we could do. One had a sense there was nothing you could do about it. And, of course, there were reasons not to try: a lot of political and racial associations with that hospital that the other county hospitals did not have.”
In early May Weber and Ornstein started gathering data, including malpractice suits against each county hospital. “It became clear really early on that King/Drew’s problems were much greater than those at the other county hospitals—even the ones that were two or three times larger—so both of us went back to John and said we need to focus on King/Drew first,” Ornstein says. At the same time, King/Drew found itself in the news independent of the two reporters’ project. It was learned that two patients had died because nurses had overlooked the readings on the patients’ heart-rate monitors. Then the hospital lost its accreditation to train surgeons because of its problems—“a huge deal for an urban hospital,” adds Weber.
The “Grim March”
An internal hospital faculty meeting at King/Drew, attended by Ornstein and Weber, first brought home the depth of the hospital’s story. As the expected complaints arose about how the medical center was underfunded, the director of the health department—who was white—countered that this was not true. Funding was sufficient, he said. The problem was the staff misspending what it received under the hospital director’s leadership. The hospital director was black. “A faculty member got up in the back of the room and said, ‘The black overseer always whips harder than the white master.’ And everyone in the audience got up and started clapping,” according to Weber. “Charlie and I said to each other, This is more than just about a bad hospital. It has all sorts of other overlay.”
The more they compared King/Drew to the other medical centers, the more they saw how severely out of step it was. Slowly the case for taking a broader health-care approach eroded. King/Drew was just too important a story on its own. “It was initially perceived as a patient care story,” says Marquis. “Strangely enough, after we decided that we began to accumulate a lot of data on how badly run the hospital was, and how it squandered money, and not so much about patient care.” As the reporting continued, though, the theme of poor patient care resurfaced. The story would have a patient care dimension as well.
In October 2003—fourteen months before the series was eventually published—Marquis, Weber, and Ornstein wrote a memo outlining a project they envisioned. The project was between four and six parts and looked at the problems of King/Drew one by one. When Carroll read the memo, he saw the potential for something special. His vision would confront head-on the complexity and the racial sensitivity of the situation. “He wanted to meld together the political, medical, historical, and social aspects of this hospital,” Marquis says. “He was trying to find a way to tell this story without making it seem the standard investigative story on a hospital’s medical foul-ups.”
The Times decided to add to the Weber-Ornstein team, a decision the two reporters supported because “we knew we couldn’t do it all ourselves,” Ornstein says. Marquis and those she reported to—Metro editor Miriam Pawel and managing editor Baquet—called on Mitchell Landsberg, who was fresh from having worked rewrite on the team that had covered the year’s devastating California wildfires. (That coverage would win the 2004 Breaking News Pulitzer.) Steve Hymon, who had moved onto the health-care beat when Ornstein and Weber teamed up to investigate King/Drew in earnest, was also added, along with reporter Daren Briscoe. Briscoe, the lone black team member, was selected in part because of the racial insights he might be able to provide in such a sensitive story. “I’m not sure it was easier for him,” says Weber. “He had a difficult time as an African-American reporter working on the story.” (Briscoe was to leave the paper about midway through the project to go to Newsweek magazine, and the paper decided not to replace him.) Carroll, who checked in from time to time on the team’s progress, was impressed with the team spirit among the reporters. In his experience with staffers pursuing such complex stories, he said, “often there is kind of a grim march to get them done.”
Grim or otherwise, the marches he had helped supervise stretched back to the 1970s, where he honed his editing skills at the
Philadelphia Inquirer with editor Gene Roberts. Carroll had first seen a Pulitzer gold medal project take shape as he worked on a police brutality investigation that won for the
Inquirer in 1978. In a sense, though, he had even grown up with public service journalism. His father, Wallace Carroll, had been a Pulitzer board member in the 1960s and Wallace Carroll’s North Carolina newspaper, the
Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, had won a gold medal in 1971 for its environmental coverage.
7In the years before coming to the
Los Angeles Times, John Carroll had served as an editor with the
Baltimore Sun and with Kentucky’s
Lexington Herald-Leader, where he had become skilled not only at supervising projects but also at doing the final write-through of the stories. As a Pulitzer board member himself from 1994 to 2003, he also had an insider’s sense of what the members might like in a public service candidate.
Working for him at the Los Angeles Times were a number of veteran editors, including managing editor Baquet, who had started his career in New Orleans working for a time at the Times-Picayune. Baquet had covered health-care issues himself for the New York Times and had previously served on a Pulitzer-winning investigative team at the Chicago Tribune. In June, longtime editorial page editor Janet Clayton succeeded Pawel as Metro editor. Both Clayton and Baquet are black. Clayton was particularly attuned to the community aspect of King/Drew from her editorial page experience. “She knows everything about the history of L.A. and all the players in our story,” says Weber. It was not a simple history. The black community took great pride in having King/Drew there, even if, paradoxically, the facility was sometimes feared because of its care deficiencies.
While the reporting and editing teams did not include a physician, reporters constantly sought out doctors to review cases and the medical files, says Weber. To help reporters understand the case that was eventually to become their lead example—involving second-grader Dunia Tasejo, who had died after being hospitalized for injuries from a minor car accident—“we had not only the head of [the pediatric intensive care unit] from Stanford, we had a couple of other doctors look at it to make sure we understood our way through the file.” The reporters’ understanding was that Dunia had died from a mind-boggling progression of hospital mistakes.
The team often had trouble getting the data they needed for their analyses. While some difficulties stemmed from the federal privacy act, which allowed hospitals to deny certain information to reporters, there was a special problem in getting material from King/Drew administrators. “They hated our guts,” says Weber. At the same time, though, the team found other records that it never thought it could get. “We learned there were a lot of public records that we didn’t know were public records,” Weber says. “Who knew that you could get a record of every surgery at the hospital that every doctor had done?” They tracked the records down. Further, workers’ compensation cases became public records if the case had been appealed to the state appeals board. Within those cases, personal medical records and psychologist reports became public too. And even if reporters were not prepared to cite certain records in the series, the documents often corroborated strange accounts that the team’s reporting was turning up—accounts about staff accidents and brawls that ran up costs at King/Drew.
Carroll loved such project management above all his many other Times duties. “I get a greater satisfaction from these gigantic things, and figuring out what they’re trying to say,” he said. “It’s inevitable that people who are writing these stories and gathering vast amounts of information get awfully close to it. And I’ve never seen one of these stories come in a publishable form.” He had learned the rewriting trade in his Inquirer days, working with gifted rewrite man Steve Lovelady, a veteran of page-one editing work at the Wall Street Journal. “Lovelady was unlike anything I’d ever seen in terms of what he understood about the possibilities of creative editing, and not just making sure everything was spelled right,” said Carroll. “He opened my eyes.” In fact, he described his work on the King/Drew series as “the Lovelady job.”
True to the form that Carroll had observed over the years, he saw that even the excellent job of reporting on King/Drew was going to need serious organizational help. “Very often you need to think through fundamental questions like, What is this about?” he said. “You have to do a lot of work to get a reader through a long story.” And the King/Drew epic was developing into a long story. Each of the eventual five parts would fill two or more inside pages, although much of the space reflected lavish use of photographs by Robert Gauthier. “We wanted to make sure the photographer was plugged in fairly early and was a full-fledged member of the team,” says Carroll.
The first installment of “The Troubles at King/Drew” ran on December 5, 2004, under the headline “Deadly Errors and Politics Betray a Hospital’s Promise.” It began with a patient care horror story:
On a warm July afternoon, an impish second-grader named Dunia Tasejo was running home after buying ice cream on her South Los Angeles street when a car sideswiped her. Knocked to the pavement, she screamed for help, blood pouring from her mouth.
Her father bolted from the house to her side. An ambulance rushed her to the nearest hospital: Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.
For Elias and Sulma Tasejo, there was no greater terror than seeing their 9-year-old daughter strapped to a gurney that day in 2000. But once they arrived at King/Drew, fear gave way to relief.
Dunia’s injuries were minor: some scrapes, some bruises and two broken baby teeth. The teeth would have to be pulled.
“They told me to relax,” Sulma recalled. “Everything was fine.”
At least it should have been.
What the Tasejos didn’t know was that King/Drew, a 233-bed public hospital in Willowbrook, just south of Watts, had a long history of harming, or even killing, those it was meant to serve.
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What happened to Dunia, in brief, was a bewildering series of medical errors that eventually cost her her life. First she was accidentally oversedated; then hooked up to a ventilator to deal with the paralysis the oversedating caused; then starved for oxygen by incorrect ventilator settings; then taken off a breathing tube too early; then left unmonitored as her vital signs were worsening and she started calling “Mama.” Eventually declared brain dead, she was removed from life support two days later.
As the Los Angeles Times team had planned through so many rewrites, the first story was used to outline much more than the issues of medical errors and neglect that made King/Drew the state’s top payer per patient of medical malpractice. The piece noted that whole “departments are riddled with incompetence, internal strife and, in some cases, criminality.” Finally the story promised that the series ahead would explain how for years the governing county board of supervisors had “shied away from decisive action in the face of community anger and accusations of racism.”
The other four parts solidly backed up the outline. In an eyebrow-raising passage in the second part of the series published on December 6—a section headlined “Under-funding Is a Myth But the Squandering Is Real”—these paragraphs appeared on the first jump:
Vast sums at King/Drew go to workers injured in encounters with seemingly harmless objects.
Take, for instance, the chair.
Employees have been tumbling from their seats at King/Drew almost since it opened its doors. The hospital’s oldest open workers’ compensation claim involves Franza Zachary, now 71, who sprained her back falling from a chair in October 1975—costing the hospital more than $300,000 so far.
The bills for two other chair-fallers have topped $350,000 each, county records show.
Between April 1994 and April 2004, employees filed 122 chair-fall claims at King/Drew, more than double the number at Harbor-UCLA. And King/Drew has spent $3.2 million—and counting—to pay for them.
The final part “laid bare the racial dynamic between the community and the Board of Supervisors,” according to the Times’s Pulitzer nomination letter. The supervisors, meanwhile, “were left with no choice but to face up to their own failure.”
Editing from the Top
Several team members had been apprehensive at first at the thought of their top editor running the series through his computer. “Demanding is not an adequate word to describe his editing,” says Mitchell Landsberg of John Carroll. Landsberg says others who had been rewritten by Carroll had told the team it was in for a torturous time. “You’re going to have days when you’ll wish you’d never gotten started with this,” Landsberg was told. “But in the end he’ll make sure it’s the best story it could possibly be.” Landsberg, the son of a veteran Associated Press Sacramento reporter and World War II correspondent, says that after reading the final version he realized that “everything they said was true.” One thing that helped, adds Weber, was that the very final draft again became a collaboration. “Actually, he ended up being remarkably approachable about things you didn’t like.”
Based on what he had learned serving on the Pulitzer board, said Carroll, “I think King/Drew was a good candidate for the Public Service category because it not only involved very hard digging and investigative work and very careful accusations drawn against doctors and all sorts of people, but it also involved explaining a very sensitive racial dynamic in local politics that had caused the community to tiptoe around this issue for thirty years. We sort of broke the rules by discussing it very directly and pulling no punches. The political discussion in that story was nuanced, but very hard-hitting.”
The board also had an appreciation for risk taking—something the Times was certainly doing in the King/Drew series. A hostile community of King/Drew supporters, said Carroll, would have objected strongly if they found “any chinks in the story or anything was untrue.” There were risks simply in the writing style too. “Racial stories have to be written in the most precise terms. There’s a tremendous potential for community anger, and picketing, and even community violence,” he said. As he crafted the stories he tried to be aware of “the belief on the part of many that the white establishment is trying to take away this hospital, and has been for years.”
When Times parent Times Mirror Company was acquired by Tribune Company in 2000, there were fears that the prize-winning level of its reporting might be hurt. The 123-year-old paper’s 2004 and 2005 performance—including its fifth gold medal—seemed to illustrate that those fears were exaggerated. But just one year later John Carroll would feel forced to quit rather than comply with new Tribune-ordered staff cuts that the editor saw as damaging to the publication’s journalistic capabilities. (Carroll died in June 2015.) The Los Angeles Times was far from finished in the arena of public service, however, as it would prove with yet another Public Service Gold Medal in 2011.
2005—
Los Angeles Times for its courageous, exhaustively researched series exposing deadly medical problems and racial injustice at a major public hospital.
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