The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general has begun to probe the agency’s response to reports of side effects of pet collars with pesticides that can be released into pets’ fur, more than seven years after EPA began evaluating complaints about the collars. The Seresto collars were the subject of more than 75,000 adverse incidents, including 2,340 pet deaths since it ...
Several years ago, with a grant from the Fund, InvestigateWest uncovered a for-profit global thrift store chain headquartered in Washington State that was using marketing to make itself sound like a nonprofit charity in order to encourage people to donate goods it could sell, while revealing that little of its apparent revenue was reaching charities. After that reporting, the state ...
Documentary filmmaker Erika Cohn, with a grant from the Fund, worked for seven years to tell the story of illegal sterilizations in California prisons and jails. Her film, “Belly of the Beast,” builds on the reporting of Corey G. Johnson, then working for the Center for Investigative Reporting, and focuses on the fight of inmate Kelli Dillon and her lawyer against ...
Heat kills. And in the United States in the past decade, heat has killed nearly 400 workers — mostly people of color — who were employed in often-grueling outdoor work collecting trash, picking crops and constructing buildings. But it took a team of investigative reporters from Columbia Journalism Investigations and National Public Radio, with support from the Fund, to focus ...
A Dallas Morning News investigation, supported with a grant from the Fund, revealed a pattern of allegations of abuse, including flashlight beatings, chokings and racial slurs, against a Dallas police sergeant, but found that the officer was rarely disciplined. Black people and Latinos lodged most of the complaints against Sgt. Roger Rudloff, who is white, the reporters found. It took nearly ...
Under investigation after colleagues complained about unprofessional behavior and allegations from parents that she had wrongly accused them of child abuse, Dr. Barbara Knox left the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in 2019 to take a new position in Alaska. But she soon encountered new accusations of wrongdoing. On January 28, 2022, she announced her resignation ...
Veteran reporter Seth Rosenfeld worked for two years to break through extraordinary secrecy at the California Public Utilities Commission and report on a lack of safety oversight of Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing companies. With a grant from the Fund, Rosenfeld reported for the San Francisco Public Press that the commission withheld safety reports not only from the public but ...
For six months, Rachel Cohen investigated the D.C. charter school lobby, tracing the history of how the charter sector has evolved over the past two decades. Using public records requests, leaked documents, interviews and archival research, Cohen pieced together a story of how federal intervention, an army of lobbyists and D.C. taxpayer dollars have all helped local charters successfully beat ...
Fund for Investigative Journalism Diversity Fellow Romina Ruiz-Goiriena’s report, “Gaming the System,” uncovered a cycle of corruption in the immigration system by detailing how wealthy people navigate around U.S. immigration barriers while the other 90 percent are detained or deported. The four-part investigation, published in the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald, detailed how rich foreign nationals from Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, ...
David Armstrong’s investigation for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution uncovered dangerously high levels of lead in the soil of a westside community in Atlanta and a lack of testing for residents, especially children. The mostly poor, largely African-American community detailed in his report was designated as a “Superfund removal action,” by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), yet residents found little help in ...