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How They Did It:
The 1988 duPont-Columbia Winners

Volume VIII, Number 7                                            February 15, 1988

Several of the award winners explained to us how they executed their projects.

Here's some of what they found:

--- 5,000 reports of child abuse had been ignored by HRS. "Investigators never responded to the reports of abuse," said Groves.
--- Children who were abused by their parents and removed from their home, were being re-abused by the state. Children were left to sleep on office floors! The television investigators were tipped to this practice and shot video of the youngsters asleep on the floor.
--- Children were abused in foster care facilities. "The number of kids who died in state foster care is pathetic," he said.
--- Elderly people were trapped in unregulated, uninspected, and abusive nursing homes and group care facilities. It was at a home which had just been given a clean bill of health by the HRS that the news crew found the naked woman strapped to her wheelchair.
--- Conflict of interest: Florida's HRS had recently received a new director who came from Illinois and supposedly had a great reputation. Actually, he was under investigation by the FBI. The agents were looking at millions of dollars of contracts dealing with his best friend. "We also uncovered that his best friend had also moved to Florida! We quickly realized we had a major story," said Groves.

Where to start:

1. Make contacts with the workers in the field.
"The miracle of these agencies is that there are people who work for $10,000 a year who save lives, who love abused children, and who want to help the elderly. They want to make the system better," Groves said.
These people can give you direction and point you to the problem areas. The year before, WPLG had done a series on elder abuse --- children who beat and abuse their parents. During that investigation, they found the state was doing very little to help those victims.
As soon as they launched this project and the word got out to the people they had spoken to in the first series, employees inside of HRS came forward.
"Those sources literally put their jobs on the line to give us information and to help us expose what was going on," he said.

When you do an expanded project with many sources and high impact, utilize those valuable contacts for continuing stories or even a second series. You've made an investment with them, keep generating a useful return.

2. Search the records.
These are public agencies with public records if you know how to go about getting them. Go to state documents, grand jury reports or inspector general reports.
The news team was able to get much information from government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act and Florida's sunshine law.
"We were able to get the documents which showed homes which had been cited hundreds of times for abuse. We chose the one nursing home because sources told us it was the worst one in our area at that time and that nobody was doing anything about it," he explained.

3. Talk to the union that represents the workers.
Groves was able to confirm a great deal of material through the union. After two parts of the series had aired, the president of the union came forward and said workers had been told not to talk or they would be fired.

The station followed up on stories which the series generated.
For example, when there weren't enough foster homes for abused children, the overflow was being put in the state's mental institute for the criminally insane.
"They're still doing it! Those are the kinds of things which tear your heart out," said Grove.

"The police would call us and say, 'Number 36 died. She was a white female... "' said Nancy Shafran, Assistant News Director, WJXT-TV, who produced the series.
"It seemed like this was happening daily!" she said.
They didn't usually even report traffic accidents on the news..
"But, one weekend, six people died. That's when we decided we had to do something about it besides reporting body counts," she said.

The approach was two-fold: First, they wanted to give it an air of humanity. These were people, not numbers.
"Getting the vital stats on 'Number 361 was horrible. These are people who were dying," she stresses.
"Secondly, we needed to raise people's consciousness. We wanted them know that when they got in their cars to go get a jug of milk, they could get killed. They better be careful," she said.

"Our feeling was whether it was drunk driving or something else, the punishment for driving off the side of the road should not be the death penalty," she stresses.

No one in town had looked at this before --- the role of fixed objects along the side of the road. Shafran said guard rails can sometimes do more damage than they do good. If you hit one, it can actually act as a launching board and send a vehicle up and over.

To see a better way of building highways, a news crew visited an area in Washington which is considered to have a state-of-the-art road system.
"When a highway is built, there must be room on either side of the road, so that if someone drives off the side, they don't hit anything," Shafran explained.

The project needed an expert.  The Center for Auto Safety in Washington, DC, provided one.
"We needed someone to tell us what the condition of our roads was. We're not road experts," Shafran said. On the way in from the airport alone, he pointed out dozens of hazards.

The documentary was divided into 6 parts and reported by 6 different staffers:

1. The people.
The victims of the accidents, the police and medical examiner who investigate told what it was like.  Shafran was careful about using too much accident video and about talking to victims' families. She wrote the families asking for pictures to use. When they looked for interviews, they tried to pick families where as much time had passed as possible.

2. Drunk drivers.
They went to a bar and talked to people who were drunk and were getting into their cars to drive home anyway.

3. The legal system.
How to keep bad drivers off the road.

4. Seat belts.
Florida has a mandatory seat belt law, but drivers still don't wear them. Interviews included: motorists who said they didn't want to get their clothes wrinkled; people who survived major accidents and are alive today because they had their seat belts on.

5. Roadside hazards.
Utility poles, guard rails and other objects.

6. Modern roads.
New roads designed for safety.

After  the documentary aired, the local utility began studying the problem and removed some of the deadliest poles.

Shafran believed the role of obstacles along side of the road was a story that could be done in many other cities.
"Pull the last year of traffic accidents.  Look at where people are dying and what killed them. Was it a car hitting car or was it a fixed object along the side of the road?" she said.

Sauget, Illinois, is a town of only about 200 people a few minutes away from St. Louis. It's major attraction --- six all-night nightclubs that as many as 6,000 people patronize each weekend.
Matt Meagher, KMOV's investigative reporter, made a deadly discovery: some of those patrons never made it home alive.
Meagher had been aware of complaints about Sauget for some time -- there had been numerous reports of beatings by nightclub bouncers, while the police stood by and watched.

He received an anonymous tip saying he should check all of the accidents coming out of the nightclub on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
In Illinois, the state keeps computerized records of all accidents by milepost, including time of day, weather conditions, if the person was drinking, and extent of injuries.
"By running a computerized study on the mileposts near the bars, we found out 119 people had been seriously injured within a year in that one-mile stretch of road, and four of them had died!" he said.

To build this story, the news team staked out the bars on four consecutive weekends in an undercover van. 
They got video of the police as they patrolled the nightclub complexes. But, instead of picking up the drunks, they sent them on their way.
"We actually had pictures of the police pushing drunks into cars and aiming them back towards the bridge.  The only reason they were working was to back up the bouncers," Meagher explained.

On the police scanner, you could hear the officers laughing about the situation.
"They were making fun of people who were drunk and stumbling out of the bars. We could see the car swerve off down the road and hear the cops laughing, 'Another happy couple. Hope they make it home!'" Meagher said.

Following the series, the state police put up more roadblocks and sobriety checkpoints on the weekend to try to pick up drunks. However, Meagher said the problem isn't solved yet, and he expects more followups.

Baskin also exposed inept lab testing for drug use. When she sent samples of urine spiked with drugs to local labs, they missed 82% of the substances. See The Rundown 1987,  p. 61.

Broadcast Journalism:
Creating A Culture For Award Winners
Three of the duPont - Columbia awards for 2000 went to stations that devoted time and resources to major investigations.
We spoke with the news directors who helped to create newsrooms where investigative reporting was encouraged and valued.

Invest time and interest to get stories that can't be shot quickly
WABC - TV, New York, won a 1998 duPont-Columbia Award for a documentary about serious overcrowding in New York City schools.

Check the duPont-Columbia Web site for full background.
Here are th entry rules, past winners, and the full explanation of the awards. 
See also: Winners awarded in 2000.