ProPublica Media Bias for Past 90 Days

Hours After an Employee Accused Him of Sexual Misconduct, Prominent Alaska Executive Resigns

crime, law and justice

by Kyle Hopkins and Michelle Theriault Boots, Anchorage Daily News ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This story was co-published with the Anchorage Daily News, a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. A week ago, one of Alaska’s most powerful executives abruptly resigned from his job leading the largest tribal health organization in the state. Neither the outgoing president nor the group said why. Earlier in the day, his former assistant had delivered a scathing three-page letter to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium that described a pattern of abusive behavior, harassment and coerced sexual encounters by President Andy Teuber, according to the document, obtained by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. The woman, Savanah Evans, who is 27, delivered her own resignation letter on Feb. 23, describing workplace abuse, harassment and intimidation at the hands of Teuber, who is 52. “Andy unrelentingly coerced, forced, and required sex...
ProPublica     Mar 03, 2021

A Las Vegas Judge Approves $1.4 Million Payment to Wrongfully Convicted Man Who Served More Than Two Decades

1k 🔥       crime, law and justice

by Megan Rose ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. For the first time, Fred Steese walked into a Las Vegas courtroom on Monday without reason for trepidation. He was there to be awarded nearly $1.4 million by the state of Nevada for wrongfully convicting him of murder. “It’s a gigantic day,” Steese said in an interview afterward, noting how odd it felt after decades in which bad things happened to him in courtrooms. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. In 2017, in an article titled “Kafka in Vegas,” ProPublica and Vanity Fair investigated Steese’s case and the serial misconduct of the prosecutors who withheld evidence that proved his alibi. The article described how, even after Steese was proven innocent 17 years after his conviction, the Clark County District Attorney’s Office fought his exoneration. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. In all, Steese spent more than two decades behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit. O...
ProPublica     Mar 02, 2021

Oregon’s Logging Industry Says It Can’t Afford New Taxes. But Prices Have Never Been Higher and Profits Are Soaring.

Real Estate

by Rob Davis, The Oregonian/OregonLive, and Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting and The Oregonian/OregonLive. You can sign up for The Oregonian/OregonLive special projects newsletter and Oregon Public Broadcasting’s newsletter. Oregon Public Broadcasting is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. Thirty years after Oregon lawmakers began giving the state’s timber industry tax cuts that cost rural counties an estimated $3 billion, industry lobbyists warned them not to follow through on efforts to reinstate the tax this year. Legislators are considering whether to add to taxes paid by the logging industry after an investigation published last year by Oregon Public Broadcasting, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica found that timber companies, increasingly dominated by Wall Street real estate trusts and investment funds, benefited from the tax cuts at the expense of rural counties struggling to provide basic government ...
ProPublica     Mar 02, 2021

ProPublica Wins 19 Awards in Society for News Design Competition

Tech

by ProPublica The Society for News Design honored ProPublica with 19 awards in this year’s Best of Digital Design competition. The annual contest recognizes journalistic, visual and technical excellence from news organizations across the United States and around the world. Contest judges awarded ProPublica for outstanding visual storytelling with two Bronze Medals and 17 Awards of Excellence, including awards in overall art direction and four individual portfolios. Here are ProPublica’s winning projects: Hawaii’s Beaches Are Disappearing, ProPublica and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser — Bronze Medal, Story Page Design: Local Issues; Award of Excellence, Line of Coverage: Climate Change (2 awards) We Are Tracking What Happens to Police After They Use Force on Protesters — Bronze Medal, Line of Coverage: Public Service The following projects were recognized with Awards of Excellence: The Black American Amputation Epidemic — Story Page Design: National Convicted Based on Lies — Story Page Design: National Charting the Long-Term Impact of Trump’s Judicial Appointments — Infographics: National New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States — Infographics: Environment ...
ProPublica     Mar 01, 2021

How Inequity Gets Built Into America’s Vaccination System

health

by Maryam Jameel and Caroline Chen ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. It’s a fact that simply being eligible for a vaccine in America doesn’t mean that you can instantly get one. Yet the ability to get to the front of the line isn’t the same for everyone. ProPublica has found that, whether intentionally or not, some vaccine programs have been designed with inherent barriers that disadvantage many people who are most at risk of dying from the disease, exacerbating inequities in access to health care. In many regions of the U.S., it’s much more difficult to schedule a vaccine appointment if you do not have access to the internet. In some areas, drive-through vaccinations are the only option, excluding those who do not have cars or someone who can give them a ride. In other places, people who do not speak English are having trouble getting information from government hotlines and websites. One state is even flat-out refusing to allow undocumented workers with high-risk jobs to get prioritized for vaccination. The vaccine supply is too low to inoculate everyone wh...
ProPublica     Mar 01, 2021

Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company

2k 🔥       Business

Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?
ProPublica     Feb 28, 2021

Lawsuit Reveals New Allegations Against PG&E Contractor Accused of Fraud

crime, law and justice

by Scott Morris, Bay City News Foundation ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with The Bay City News Foundation, which was a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. Utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric accused two of its former employees of accepting bribes to funnel business to a waste-hauling company after the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. One supervisor for PG&E allegedly had his driveway paved on the power company’s dime. A subordinate is accused of having received a bribe in an unorthodox property transfer of a multimillion-dollar house in a wealthy suburb of San Francisco. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. A new court filing by PG&E alleges that in exchange for these kickbacks, the employees provided lucrative clean-up jobs to Hayward-based Bay Area Concrete Recycling. The allegations track closely with the results of an investigation last year by ProPublica and the Bay City News Foundation, which found ...
ProPublica     Feb 26, 2021

The Murder Chicago Didn’t Want to Solve

by Mick Dumke ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The man who called me, a long-retired Chicago police officer, was alternately charming and curt. He insisted he had nothing to do with the murder. “All the things you wrote in your letter to me are not true,” he said, speaking slowly, his voice occasionally shaky. “Everything in there is a fucking lie.” In the letter, I had asked him about a murder I’d been examining: the unsolved killing of a prominent Black politician in Chicago. I had reason to think he knew something about it. On Feb. 26, 1963, Ben Lewis, the first Black elected official from Chicago’s West Side, won what was set to be his second full term on the City Council. Lewis, 53, appeared to be climbing the political ladder. Newspapers were reporting talk — encouraged by the alderman himself — that his next stop would be Congress, a move that would have made him one of the highest-profile Black politicians in the country. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. Two days later, Lewis ...
ProPublica     Feb 25, 2021

ProPublica’s COVID-19 Stories Win Polk Award for Health Reporting

Health

by ProPublica ProPublica won this year’s George Polk Award in Journalism in the health reporting category, honoring the newsroom’s investigative work on the coronavirus pandemic. The award recognized two series — one that illuminated the depths of disproportionate deaths among Black Americans and another that explored how the meatpacking industry ignored pandemic warnings, blindsiding health officials and exposing essential workers and their communities to COVID-19. This marks the ninth Polk Award for ProPublica and the sixth consecutive year in which the newsroom was so honored. Reporting for the series on the coronavirus and racial disparities began early in the pandemic. ProPublica assembled a team to cover what it suspected would be a disproportionate and devastating impact on Black Americans. An article by Akilah Johnson and Talia Buford focused on Milwaukee, one of the few places in the U.S. that was then tracking the racial breakdown of infections, giving the earliest look at an emerging pattern of racial disparities in deaths that would become a profound toll. Four days after this first story was published, President Donald Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci addr...
ProPublica     Feb 24, 2021

Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company’s Business

Business

by Jack Gillum and Justin Elliott ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook’s top executives faced a political dilemma. Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments? Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. It wasn’t a particularly close call for the company’s leadership, newly disclosed emails show. “I am fine with this,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG’s photos and updates about the...
ProPublica     Feb 24, 2021

Lawyers Who Were Ineligible to Handle Serious Criminal Charges Were Given Thousands of These Cases Anyway

crime, law and justice

by Samantha Hogan, The Maine Monitor, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with The Maine Monitor, which was a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. Soon after receiving his license to practice law in Maine in May 2015, Jeremiah McIntosh, 36, began a new career as a small-town lawyer in the northeast corner of the state’s rural Aroostook County. McIntosh advertised online that he had spent almost a dozen years working as a civilian employee for the Defense Department. Now, he quickly fell back into life in his hometown. He volunteered for the town planning board, helped the library register as a nonprofit and opened a rural law office in the small, close-knit community of Washburn, where fewer than 2,000 people live. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. Among McIntosh’s clients were poor residents of the county who had been accused of crimes. Unique among states, Maine has no public defenders. I...
ProPublica     Feb 23, 2021

“Power Companies Get Exactly What They Want”: How Texas Repeatedly Failed to Protect Its Power Grid Against Extreme Weather

11k 🔥      

by Jeremy Schwartz, Kiah Collier and Vianna Davila This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. In January 2014, power plants owned by Texas’ largest electricity producer buckled under frigid temperatures. Its generators failed more than a dozen times in 12 hours, helping to bring the state’s electric grid to the brink of collapse. The incident was the second in three years for North Texas-based Luminant, whose equipment malfunctions during a more severe storm in 2011 resulted in a $750,000 fine from state energy regulators for failing to deliver promised power to the grid. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. In the earlier cold snap, the grid was pushed to the limit and rolling blackouts swept the state, spurring an angry Legislature to order a study of what went wrong. Experts hired by the Texas Public Utility Commission, which oversees the state’s electric and water utilities, concluded that power-generating compa...
ProPublica     Feb 22, 2021

Why We Can’t Make Vaccine Doses Any Faster

by Isaac Arnsdorf and Ryan Gabrielson ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. President Joe Biden has ordered enough vaccines to immunize every American against COVID-19, and his administration says it’s using the full force of the federal government to get the doses by July. There’s a reason he can’t promise them sooner. Vaccine supply chains are extremely specialized and sensitive, relying on expensive machinery, highly trained staff and finicky ingredients. Manufacturers have run into intermittent shortages of key materials, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office; the combination of surging demand and workforce disruptions from the pandemic has caused delays of four to 12 weeks for items that used to ship within a week, much like what happened when consumers were sent scrambling for household staples like flour, chicken wings and toilet paper. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. People often question why the administration can’t use the mighty Defense Production Act — which em...
ProPublica     Feb 19, 2021

Dying on the Waitlist

health

by David Armstrong and Marshall Allen ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. In early December, Miguel Fernandez lay unconscious in the intensive care unit at a Los Angeles area hospital. A mechanical ventilator pumped oxygen into his lungs, which had been ravaged by COVID-19. The 53-year-old was dying. The best, and likely only, chance of Miguel surviving was a therapy called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, better known as ECMO. It would allow his lungs to rest while a machine infused his blood with the oxygen he needed. But PIH Health Whittier Hospital, where he had been admitted, didn’t have any ECMO machines or the highly trained staff needed to run them. Only a handful of hospitals in southern California did, and they were overrun with COVID-19 cases. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. Since the beginning of the pandemic, public health experts had been warning about the need to “bend the curve” — to prevent the number of COVID-19 cases from spiking so hospitals wouldn’t get overwhelm...
ProPublica     Feb 18, 2021

Richard Tofel to Retire as ProPublica President; Board Launches Search for Successor

politics

ProPublica ProPublica announced today that Richard Tofel, its founding general manager and president since 2013, will retire from the company when a successor is in place, and that its Board of Directors has launched a nationwide search to fill the post. Tofel, who was ProPublica’s first employee in 2007, has led the business side of the investigative newsroom since its inception, and is responsible for all of ProPublica’s non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. Blinkhorn LLC has been selected to guide the search, with Ann Blinkhorn as the lead recruiter. Under Tofel’s leadership, ProPublica has grown from an initial staff of fewer than 25 people to a projected staff of 175 by mid-2021, with an initial target annual budget of $10 million growing to nearly $36 million this year. During this period, the company has raised more than $210 million from donors beyond its founding funders, and amassed a cumulative reserve of $36.5 million. ProPublica had more than 43,000 donors in 2020, while recording record traffic to its content, and record revenues. It employs the largest staff in the nation devoted to inve...
ProPublica     Feb 17, 2021

A Federal Appeals Court Has Ruled in Favor of Releasing NYPD Discipline Records

crime, law and justice

by Eric Umansky ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. A federal appeals court on Tuesday affirmed a lower court ruling allowing New York officials to release police discipline records that had been kept secret for decades. In the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd last spring, New York state repealed its controversial 50-a law that had shielded the records from being released. Unions representing New York City’s police officers, firefighters and corrections officers then sued to prevent the disclosures. A federal judge temporarily barred city officials from releasing the records. But ProPublica, which had previously obtained a portion of the information through a public records request and was not a part of the case, published thousands of the records while the case was being considered. “Are you asking to put that particular genie back in the bottle?" U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla asked the unions at a hearing held shortly after ProPublica published the records. The judge then ruled the records should be released, and the New York Civi...
ProPublica     Feb 17, 2021

The IRS Cashed Her Check. Then the Late Notices Started Coming.

economy and finances

by Lydia DePillis ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Kathy Brenneman hears plenty of taxpayer horror stories in her receptionist’s job at a tax preparation service in Waldorf, Maryland. But this past year, the spiraling crisis at the Internal Revenue Service collided with her personal life as well. Brenneman had filed an amendment to her 2018 taxes via snail mail, along with a $108 check to pay the balance due, in early March 2020, when the virus that causes COVID-19 was first spreading across America. A few weeks later, as the nation went into lockdown, Congress tasked the IRS with delivering $270 billion in economic impact payments. As the agency struggled to administer the unprecedented program during a pandemic, Brenneman’s tiny tax payment may have gotten lost in the shuffle. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. Her check was cashed swiftly, but in June, she got an IRS notice that was dated from April saying that she owed them money. “My heart dropped,’ Brenneman said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my...
ProPublica     Feb 16, 2021

Cuomo Still Underreporting the Total Count of COVID Nursing Home Deaths

social issue

by Joe Sexton ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Hundreds of COVID-19 deaths among New York state’s nursing home residents still have not been formally acknowledged by the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, according to the Empire Center, a public policy think tank in Albany. Bill Hammond, an analyst with the Empire Center, said recent state disclosures of all deaths of nursing home residents, whether they perished in their facilities or at local hospitals, to date failed to include more than 650 deaths of people presumed to have died of COVID-19. Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. Hammond said the state referenced the deaths in a footnote to its public data release, saying that it is still seeking to verify the official cause of death in those cases. In Columbia County, for instance, at a nursing home that local health officials said had seen 18 residents die of COVID-19 in local hospitals, the state’s public tally today still just lists nine such deaths. After months of requests from s...
ProPublica     Feb 12, 2021