political coverage

The New York Times won three awards and Bloomberg News won two. The two news organizations each won for foreign reporting, for separate series illustrating the privileges and connections of China’s ruling class. David Corn of Mother Jones magazine won for political coverage after he uncovered the now-infamous video of Mitt Romney telling donors that there were 47 percent of Americans who were “dependent upon government” and would support the re-election of President Obama “no matter what.”

Other winners included California Watch, CBS News, Frontline, GlobalPost, The Maine Sunday Telegram, McClatchy Newspapers, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The New Yorker and The Washington Post.

“Our winners were outstanding during a year filled with major news events,” said John Darnton, curator of the Polk Awards, which honor work in the tradition of George W. Polk, a CBS correspondent killed while covering the civil war in Greece in 1948.

A team from McClatchy Newspapers won the award for war reporting for a series of articles about the civil war in Syria.

One member of the team, Austin Tice, a freelancer who worked on McClatchy’s behalf documenting the poor tactical performance of the Syrian military, disappeared in Syria on Aug. 13 and remains missing.

David Enders of McClatchy was also recognized for delivering a number of reports that broke new ground in understanding how the Syrian rebel groups were organized and the challenges they face in trying to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Tracey Shelton of GlobalPost, an international news Web site, won for video reporting for her documentation of the human toll of the continuing conflict in Syria. In one dispatch, she showed the aftermath of a helicopter attack and the desperate search for survivors. A 4-year-old boy did survive but his parents, siblings and other relatives were all killed.

Bloomberg News and David Barboza of The New York Times each won an award for foreign reporting.

In a series of articles, Bloomberg examined the wealth accumulated by Bo Xilai, who was the leader of China’s sprawling Chongqing municipality before being ousted in a scandal that erupted over the murder of a British businessman. The series discovered a web of assets stretching from Beijing to the Caribbean worth at least $126 million. The series also revealed how relatives of Xi Jinping enriched themselves.

Mr. Barboza’s three-part report in The Times, “Princelings,” examined the financial interests of high-ranking Chinese officials and their families. The articles showed that relatives of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had accumulated a fortune of $2.7 billion.

The award for television reporting went to journalists from CBS News for their work uncovering human rights abuses in China. The correspondent Holly Williams and the cameraman Andrew Portch were recognized for their coverage of the human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who fled China after years of being under house arrest for his work exposing how some Chinese women were forced to have abortions in order to comply with the country’s one-child policy.

Bloomberg News won the award for national reporting for a series about abuses in the financing of higher education, “Indentured Students.” The correspondents John Hechinger and Janet Lorin revealed how the government hired debt-collection companies that took $1 billion in commissions even while misleading borrowers. The series led to new federal rules on debt collection and reforms at colleges.

Sam Dolnick of The Times won the award for justice reporting for his series detailing widespread abuses at New Jersey’s privatized halfway houses, “Unlocked.” Mr. Dolnick’s 10-month investigation revealed close ties between Gov. Chris Christie and one of the companies that runs the houses. After the articles exposed how the institutions created a parallel correctional system where gang activity was rampant, drug use widespread and security lax, Mr. Christie ordered inspections, fines against some of the operators were levied and 14 reform bills were introduced in the State Legislature.

Gina Barton of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel won for local reporting for her dogged efforts to get to the bottom of how a man died while in the custody of the Milwaukee police. Her reporting forced the medical examiner’s office to change its initial ruling that the death resulted from natural causes, instead ruling it a homicide, and the medical examiner resigned.

Sarah Stillman of The New Yorker won for magazine reporting. Her article, “The Throwaways,” was the result of an eight-month investigation into law enforcement’s unregulated use of young confidential informants in drug cases, and it spurred calls for reform in four states that were highlighted in the article.

The award for state reporting was given to Ryan Gabrielson of California Watch, an investigative reporting organization, for documenting how California’s Office of Protective Services failed to curb abuses at state clinics.

Peter Whoriskey of The Washington Post won the award for medical reporting. His series, “Biased Research, Big Profits,” detailed how the pharmaceutical industry was providing doctors financial incentives that warped the way they practice medicine and endangering patients. After the articles were published, lawmakers called for an investigation into Medicare’s financing of one of the drugs highlighted in the series and one of the pharmaceutical companies featured in an article, Amgen, pleaded guilty to improper marketing practices and paid $762 million to settle civil and criminal charges.

David Barstow of The New York Times and a freelance reporter working on behalf of the newspaper, Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, won the business reporting award for “Wal-Mart Abroad,” which showed how the company’s growth in Mexico was fueled by the payment of bribes that allowed the company to skirt Mexican laws. The series led to investigations by the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Mexican authorities into the company’s business practices.

Colin Woodward of The Maine Sunday Telegram won for education reporting for a report that showed how large for-profit education companies influenced the state’s digital education policies.

The award for documentary television reporting was won by the Frontline correspondent Martin Smith and the producer Michael Kirk for “Money, Power and Wall Street.” The four-part series explored the origins of the global financial crisis and the continuing impact it is having around the world.

Established in 1949, the Polk Awards are administered by Long Island University. Faculty and alumni select winners from entries submitted by journalists, news organizations and a panel of editors, reporters and journalism teachers. The awards will be presented at a luncheon in Manhattan on April 11.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/nyregion/polk-awards-go-to-analysis-of-chinese-leaders-and-syrian-war.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

A labor of six years and 1,047 pages, the book, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer, appeared in 1992 to mixed reviews. Subtitled “The Way to the White House,” it was an intimate, deeply reported chronicle of the 1988 presidential race.

Mr. Cramer, who died on Monday at 62 from complications of lung cancer, never wrote another book about domestic politics. He later turned to a different foundation stone of American identity — baseball — writing a biography of Joe DiMaggio. Afterward, he wrote a study of Mideast politics.

But the fate of “What It Takes” between 1992 and the dawn of the 21st century is telling, for it reveals the sea change that has swept over American politics, and American political coverage, in the interim.

In a 2007 essay about “What It Takes” in The New York Times Book Review, Matt Bai, a writer on national politics for The Times, called it “not just the most ambitious and riveting in a line of great American campaign books, but perhaps the last of them, too.”

Where previous election histories — notably Theodore H. White’s “Making of the President” series — had focused on the process of campaigns, Mr. Cramer trained a magnifying glass on the psyches of the candidates themselves.

“What It Takes” is a hexagonal portrait of the six men at the center of the 1988 race: the Democrats Joseph R. Biden Jr., Michael S. Dukakis, Richard A. Gephardt and Gary Hart, and the Republicans George Bush and Bob Dole.

Through the thousands of hours Mr. Cramer spent with the candidates on airplanes and at whistle stops — as well as countless more hours with their families, friends, former schoolteachers and myriad others — he sought to answer two questions: What kind of people seek the White House, and what does the quest ultimately do to them?

Mr. Cramer’s book is at bottom a psychological study of towering ambition and the toll of public life. Where it succeeded most notably, in the view of many critics, was in its depiction of the candidates not as mere archetypes but as flesh-and-blood human beings.

In a statement on Tuesday, Vice President Biden said: “It is a powerful thing to read a book someone has written about you, and to find both the observations and criticisms so sharp and insightful that you learn something new and meaningful about yourself. That was my experience with Richard.”

What became clear over time was that the kind of closely observed, densely textured profiles around which Mr. Cramer’s book was built would very likely not be seen again. The leisurely access he was afforded by all six campaigns resulted in a group portrait that in today’s climate of unremitting, Internet-driven news cycles and minutely stage-managed news conferences reads like an anthropological study of a fascinating tribe since walled off to outsiders.

Richard Ben Cramer was born in Rochester on June 12, 1950. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s in journalism from Columbia before beginning his career as a reporter on The Baltimore Sun in 1973.

Mr. Cramer was by all accounts larger than life. At The Sun, he ritually began his day with five cups of coffee, purchased en masse from the company cafeteria, lined up on his desk and drunk in quick caffeinated succession.

Later, as a foreign correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer, he once returned to the newsroom from a trip to the Middle East with a goat and a camel in tow, according to a 1992 profile in The Washington Post. Mr. Cramer won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his dispatches from the region.

In the 1980s, after leaving The Inquirer, Mr. Cramer wrote for Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and Esquire. In 1986, for Esquire, he wrote a memorable article about the Red Sox slugger Ted Williams that, as “What It Takes” would do, sought to demythologize an American institution. The article led Mr. Cramer to write two books on Williams.

A version of this obituary appeared in Tuesday’s late editions. Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/us/richard-ben-cramer-writer-on-large-topics-dies-at-62.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Polk Awards Go to Analysis of Chinese Leaders and Syrian War

Richard Ben Cramer, Writer of Big Ambitions, Dies at 62

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