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2008 Michael Kelly Award Winner
Loretta Tofani
Salt Lake Tribune
Loretta Tofani had been a foreign correspondent in China in the 1990s, but it was not until she left journalism and started an import business that she got a first-hand look at the working conditions in Chinese factories making products headed for the United States. She saw workers using carcinogens without masks or ventilation equipment and workers losing limbs in old machinery lacking safety guards. Tofani closed her business and began reporting the story. She sent inquiries to several newspapers, but they all turned her down. Undaunted, she kept reporting, traveling to China five times to interview workers, obtain medical records, and dodge state security officials trying to harass her. In the end, she found a home for her work in The Salt Lake Tribune. Her four-part series is a tribute to her persistence, resourcefulness, and moral courage.
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Kelly Kennedy
Army Times
Army Times medical writer Kelly Kennedy chronicled the 15-month tour of duty of an Army battalion that lost 31 soldiers in Iraq, making it the hardest-hit battalion since the Vietnam War. During those 15 months, one soldier threw himself on a grenade to save his friends, a well-liked first sergeant shot himself to death in front of his troops, and a platoon staged a mutiny by refusing to patrol an area they knew was mined because they feared they would lose control and vent their rage on civilians. The father of one soldier e-mailed Kelly to thank her for the four-part series, entitled "Blood Brothers." "I had some idea about how hard life was there in Iraq," the father wrote, "but you made it very personal. I could hardly read on as the tears fell from my eyes. I couldn't see."
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Joshua Kors
The Nation
In a two-part series in The Nation, Joshua Kors revealed how U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq were being denied medical benefits when they returned home because they supposedly had pre-existing personality disorders before they joined the Army. Kors told the story through the experiences of Army Specialist Jon Town, who was knocked unconscious by a rocket in Iraq and suffered severe hearing loss and memory failure. After returning to the States for medical care, Town was diagnosed as having a pre-existing personality disorder, discharged, denied benefits, and ordered to refund the Army part of his signing bonus. Kors's series caused the government to reverse its diagnosis of Town and sparked bipartisan action in Congress to address other cases like Town's that Kors unearthed.
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Tom Vanden Brook, Peter Eisler
and Blake Morrison, USA Today
Why did the military respond so ineffectively to the threat that roadside bombs in Iraq posed to U.S. troops? Why did the Pentagon balk at pleas from officers in the field for safer vehicles? USA Today reporters Tom Vanden Brook, Peter Eisler, and Blake Morrison pursued the answers to those questions in a series of stories called "Troops at Risk." In the process they did more than chronicle failures-they sparked Pentagon action that almost certainly has saved lives. They wrote about a little-used armored vehicle dubbed MRAP and its ability to withstand roadside bombs more effectively than the widely used armored Humvees. Motivated by the USA Today story, Defense Secretary Robert Gates made buying the MRAP the military's top acquisition priority.
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**Click here for 2008 Ceremony Video**
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