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The Newspaper Guild-CWA Announces Broun Award Winners
WASHINGTON, D.C.– Two reporters for The Seattle Times, Duff Wilson and David Heath, have been awarded the Heywood Broun Award for a 2001 series detailing how experimental – and often fatal – cancer treatments had been performed at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center without the informed consent of patients. The series also revealed the financial ties some physicians involved in the experiments had with a biomedical company that stood to make millions if the experiments proved successful.
The $5,000 journalism prize is awarded annually by The Newspaper Guild-CWA and this year will be presented at a banquet May 14 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington. Also to be honored are two additional entries: a Washington Post series, "The District's Lost Children," and an ABC 20/20 news program, "Empty Arms." Each will receive an award of "substantial distinction" and a cash prize of $1,000.
The award winners were selected from 188 entries from across the United States and Canada, including 44 broadcast entries.
Wilson's and Heath's series, "Uninformed Consent," survived numerous challenges before seeing print, including a 49-day strike at the Seattle Times that interrupted their work when it was 90 percent complete. The Hutchinson Center bitterly fought the duo's efforts, vowing – despite $142 million a year in taxpayer funding – not to provide the information the reporters sought and subsequently attacking the series as "blatantly false." Yet as the Broun judges noted, thanks to the reporters' exceptionally lucid explanation of complex medical procedures, the Hutchinson Center ultimately was unable to refute their findings.
Those findings were so grim – including the deaths of 80 of 82 patients in the experiment, many of whom stood a good chance of survival with conventional treatment – that the center has adopted stringent new conflict-of-interest rules and is being investigated by several outside agencies. Eleven family members have filed suit in federal court. All in all, the contest judges concluded, "this was a courageous series in the best tradition of Heywood Broun."
The Washington Post series, by Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham, with the assistance of database editor Sarah Cohen, documented the deaths of 229 children over eight years after they were placed in Washington, D.C.'s child protection system. The ABC 20/20 entry, produced and written by Joanna Breen and featuring correspondent Tom Jarriel, reported on the travails of 12 adoptive couples whose Cambodian children were refused admission into the U.S.– until outraged viewers flooded the government with protests, prompting its reversal within 48 hours.
Judging this year's entries were Tom Ferrick, metro columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer; Frank Swoboda, until recently an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post and now president of the Herb Block Foundation; Carl Sessions-Stepp, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and a senior editor at the American Journalism Review; and Jean Thompson, an associate editor at The (Baltimore) Sun. The panel's non-voting chairman was Charles Perlik, president of The Newspaper Guild from 1969 until 1987.
The Broun Award is named after Heywood Broun, a crusading columnist and most prominent founder of the Guild, who believed that individual journalists have the power to cause social change. The award was first presented for work done in 1941 and is given annually in recognition of "individual journalistic achievement by members of the working media, particularly if it helps right a wrong or correct an injustice."
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The $5,000 journalism prize is awarded annually by The Newspaper Guild-CWA and this year will be presented at a banquet May 14 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington. Also to be honored are two additional entries: a Washington Post series, "The District's Lost Children," and an ABC 20/20 news program, "Empty Arms." Each will receive an award of "substantial distinction" and a cash prize of $1,000.
The award winners were selected from 188 entries from across the United States and Canada, including 44 broadcast entries.
Wilson's and Heath's series, "Uninformed Consent," survived numerous challenges before seeing print, including a 49-day strike at the Seattle Times that interrupted their work when it was 90 percent complete. The Hutchinson Center bitterly fought the duo's efforts, vowing – despite $142 million a year in taxpayer funding – not to provide the information the reporters sought and subsequently attacking the series as "blatantly false." Yet as the Broun judges noted, thanks to the reporters' exceptionally lucid explanation of complex medical procedures, the Hutchinson Center ultimately was unable to refute their findings.
Those findings were so grim – including the deaths of 80 of 82 patients in the experiment, many of whom stood a good chance of survival with conventional treatment – that the center has adopted stringent new conflict-of-interest rules and is being investigated by several outside agencies. Eleven family members have filed suit in federal court. All in all, the contest judges concluded, "this was a courageous series in the best tradition of Heywood Broun."
The Washington Post series, by Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham, with the assistance of database editor Sarah Cohen, documented the deaths of 229 children over eight years after they were placed in Washington, D.C.'s child protection system. The ABC 20/20 entry, produced and written by Joanna Breen and featuring correspondent Tom Jarriel, reported on the travails of 12 adoptive couples whose Cambodian children were refused admission into the U.S.– until outraged viewers flooded the government with protests, prompting its reversal within 48 hours.
Judging this year's entries were Tom Ferrick, metro columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer; Frank Swoboda, until recently an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post and now president of the Herb Block Foundation; Carl Sessions-Stepp, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and a senior editor at the American Journalism Review; and Jean Thompson, an associate editor at The (Baltimore) Sun. The panel's non-voting chairman was Charles Perlik, president of The Newspaper Guild from 1969 until 1987.
The Broun Award is named after Heywood Broun, a crusading columnist and most prominent founder of the Guild, who believed that individual journalists have the power to cause social change. The award was first presented for work done in 1941 and is given annually in recognition of "individual journalistic achievement by members of the working media, particularly if it helps right a wrong or correct an injustice."
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