In 2016, Christian talk radio host Eric Metaxas begrudgingly encouraged his listeners to vote for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. By 2020, he pledged his life to fighting the “stolen election” while talking with Trump on the air. Ahead of the midterm elections, Metaxas and many of his fellow talk radio hosts made sure the falsehood of massive 2020 election fraud ...
After being awakened repeatedly in the middle of the night by the Los Angeles Police Department’s helicopters, Capital & Main reporter Angelika Albaladejo set out to learn if the public safety value of these aerial patrols is worth the costs incurred and harms inflicted. With support from the Fund, Albaladejo spent more than six months requesting records from law enforcement ...
Freelance journalist Spenser Mestel, who specializes in election-related reporting, used one of the Fund’s new emergency grants on democracy threats to dig into a well-funded effort to promote online voting. For a story in the Intercept, Mestel looked at a non-profit formed by Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist who promotes online voting around the country. Tusk’s Mobile Voting organization has ...
A year after photographer Jocelyn Knight discovered a toxic dump on private land inside Point Reyes National Seashore, she and reporter Peter Byrne returned to see if it had been cleaned up, as park officials said would happen. They found discarded machines, piles of tires, plastic barrels and other waste. The family that owns the private ranch on the land ...
The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a case challenging a federal law preventing Native families from being separated. Non-Native foster parents who want to adopt Native children brought the case, claiming that the law discriminates against white people. With a grant from the Fund, Rebecca Nagle wrote in The Nation that the case may be part of ...
Many parents in Hawaii who are accused of abusing or neglecting their children qualify for court-appointed attorneys, paid for by the state, but an investigation by John Hill for Civil Beat found that this system often falls short. Hill’s reporting, supported by the Fund, found that parents almost never win on appeal. Parents said their court-appointed lawyers were hard to ...
Texas has the nation’s highest rate of people without health insurance, and grantees Kim Krisberg and David Leffler dug into data undercutting the state’s claims in refusing to expand Medicaid. With a grant from the Fund, the reporters wrote for Public Health Watch (co-published in the Texas Tribune) that Texas rebuffs $5 billion in federal funds every year by not ...
A team of reporters in North Carolina, with one of the Fund’s new emergency grants for stories on threats to democracy, spent several months tracking a new organization that said it was focused on “election integrity” – but actually aims to depress voter turnout. Reporters Jordan Wilkie and Laura Lee found that a network of “election integrity” groups is in ...
Freelance reporter Matt Chapman fought for a year and a half to obtain public records showing how often people in Chicago under house arrest are falsely accused of leaving their homes. Electronic monitoring devices can falsely show that people are not in their homes as required, even though they are. With support from the Fund, Chapman analyzed hundreds of thousands ...
Companies that offer fast loans to people who use titles to their homes as collateral often charge very high interest rates, which many states have barred or capped. Georgia has not passed a cap and also doesn’t track the number of title loans or lenders in the state. But with support from the Fund, a team of reporters from The ...