MADISON – Four entries were selected as finalists for the 2022 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics, UW-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics announced this week.
Winners of the Shadid Award receive a $1,000 prize and will be invited to accept the award and discuss their reporting at an awards ceremony in New York on May 17.
Recent winners of the award include an Associated Press investigation on palm oil labor abuses, a team from ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune that reported on seclusion in Illinois public schools, and the Miami Herald reporters who investigated Jeffrey Epstein.
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The 2022 finalists are:
- Ali Fowle, Drew Ambrose, Aun Qi Koh, Andy Mees, David Boyle, Jenni Henderson, Nick Olle, Liz Gooch and Sharon Roobol, Al Jazeera (101 East). Al Jazeera’s team produced the first longform report about the protests in Myanmar after the military took control in February 2021. According to the nomination, “both pieces of longform television journalism required careful and considered engagement with an array of interviewees and sources with Myanmar.”
- A.J. Lagoe, Brandon Stahl, Steve Eckert, Gary Knox, KARE 11. In their investigative series, “The Gap: Failure to Treat, Failure to Protect,” the KARE 11 team uncovered that criminal suspects deemed too mentally ill to stand trial in Minnesota are often released without adequate treatment due to gaps in state law. According to the nomination, “by shining a light with empathy and objectivity on issues and people too often ignored and holding institutions and those in power to account, KARE’s investigation prompted potentially life-saving reforms.”
- Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, Paul Kiel, Justin Elliott, James Bandler, Patricia Callahan, Robert Faturechi, Ellis Simani, Doris Burke, Agnes Chang and Lucas Waldron, ProPublica. In their reporting on a massive collection of IRS data, “The Secret IRS Files,” ProPublica reporters revealed the systemic unfairness in the tax system. According to the nomination, this series of deeply reported investigations raised “urgent questions at a time when wealth inequality has become a national crisis.”
- Jessica Contrera, Washington Post. In her reporting on child sex trafficking, Contrera chronicled how misunderstandings and mishandlings of this issue do further harm to children. According to the nomination, Contrera navigated a host of ethical considerations in working with children and “committed to making the lives of real children the focus of every story, even as she held accountable the systems meant to support them.”
The Shadid Award, now in its 13th year, recognizes ethical decisions in reporting stories in any medium, including print, broadcast and digital, by journalists working for established news organizations or publishing individually. The award focuses on current journalism and does not include books, documentaries or other long-term projects.
