Often relying on public records as much as insider accounts, Dedman has reported and written influential investigative articles on racial discrimination by mortgage lenders and real estate agents,[3][4] racial profiling by police,[5] interrogation of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp,[6] and efforts to understand and prevent school shootings. His work includes one of the early examinations, in 1990, of the cover-up by the Roman Catholic Church of allegations of sexual abuse by a priest.[7][8][9]
The Color of Money
In 1989, Dedman received the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for The Color of Money,[3] his series of articles in 1988 in Bill Kovach's The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on racial discrimination by banks and other mortgage lenders in middle-income black neighborhoods. The first stories in The Color of Money, published May 1–4, 1988, disclosed that Atlanta's banks and savings and loans, although they had made loans for years in even the poorest white neighborhoods of Atlanta, did not lend in middle-class or more affluent black neighborhoods. The focus moved to lenders across the nation with the January 1989 article, "Blacks turned down for home loans from S&Ls twice as often as whites."[10]
As the Pulitzer committee wrote, Dedman's reporting "led to significant reforms."[11]
Prompted by The Color of Money, Congress expanded the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to provide more information to the public on the pattern of activity by all mortgage lenders. The group Investigative Reporters and Editors published a guide for journalists on using HMDA data to analyze lending patterns.[12]
The U.S. Justice Department responded to The Color of Money by focusing greater attention on unequal lending, suing a large savings and loan association in United States v. Decatur Federal Savings & Loan. In the first major case alleging a pattern or practice of racial discrimination in mortgage lending in the United States, the federal government alleged that Decatur Federal applied stricter underwriting standards to African-American applicants than to white applicants and devised ways to avoid dealing with African-Americans. In a consent decree, the bank agreed to pay $1 million to compensate 48 victims of discrimination and to take a series of corrective measures to ensure compliance with federal fair lending laws.[13][14]
Banking regulators increased pressure on lenders to comply with the guidelines of the Community Reinvestment Act, which encourages deposit-holding financial institutions to make loans throughout their service areas. For the first time, regulators in 1989 denied an application for a bank merger on the grounds of poor performance under the Community Reinvestment Act.[15]
Along with responses from lawmakers and regulators, Atlanta's largest banks agreed to lend $65 million at low rates to moderate-income borrowers, particularly on the city's black Southside.[16]
From 2006 to 2014, Dedman was an investigative reporter for NBC News and NBCNews.com, formerly known as msnbc.com, uncovering stories including firefighter deaths from faulty equipment,[18] fraud in Pentagon efforts to identify war dead,[19] widespread failures to inspect highway bridges,[20][21] efforts by U.S. officials to hide the risk of earthquake damage to nuclear power plants,[22] hidden visitor logs at the Obama White House,[23] suppression of Hillary Rodham Clinton's college thesis at the request of the Clinton White House,[24][25] and journalists making campaign contributions.[26]
In 2014 he joined Newsday, the daily newspaper on Long Island, N.Y., as a senior writer, reporting investigative stories in print, online, and on television for Newsday and its sister cable television channel, News 12 Long Island.[27] He was one of the four lead reporters on Newsday's 2019 undercover investigation of racial steering by real estate agents, Long Island Divided. The investigation revealed that Long Island’s dominant residential real estate brokerages help solidify racial segregation. Realtors frequently directed white customers toward white areas, while directing minority buyers toward more integrated neighborhoods. They also avoided doing any business in communities with large minority populations.[28]
Dedman's investigative reporting is analyzed at length in two books: Custodians of Conscience, which examines the techniques and moral implications of investigative reporting,[31] and the textbook The Ethical Journalist: Making Responsible Decisions in the Digital Age..[32]
In addition to serious investigative reporting, Dedman has done quirky stories, including his account in The Washington Post of discovering the 1989 DC Prostitute Expulsion, when police officers attempted to force sex workers to march down 14th Street, past the Washington Monument and across the 14th Street Bridge toward Virginia.[33]
Empty Mansions and Huguette Clark
While working for NBC News as an investigative reporter, Dedman uncovered the case of the reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark. He documented her life in a series of reports on NBCNews.com and The Today Show in 2010-2012.[34] Dedman reported the Clark mystery first in an online slideshow, a series of 47 photos with 2,788 accompanying words in captions. The slideshow attracted more than 75 million page views, more than any story in the website's history.[35]
Dedman and Clark's cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr. (1936–2016), co-wrote the 2013 nonfiction book Empty Mansions about Clark and her father, the Gilded Age industrialist William A. Clark.[36][37]
The film rights to Empty Mansions were optioned by Fremantle, which is developing a TV series with HBO, director Joe Wright, and screenwriter Ido Fluk.[43] The book was optioned earlier by film and television director Ryan Murphy.[44]
Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, racial injustice, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Practitioners sometimes use the terms "watchdog reporting" or "accountability reporting".
The Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting has been awarded since 1953, under one name or another, for a distinguished example of investigative reporting by an individual or team, presented as a single article or series in a U.S. news publication. It is administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) is an American daily newspaper based in metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia. It is the flagship publication of Cox Enterprises. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is the result of the merger between The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution. The two staffs were combined in 1982. Separate publication of the morning Constitution and the afternoon Journal ended in 2001 in favor of a single morning paper under the Journal-Constitution name.
Computer-assisted reporting describes the use of computers to gather and analyze the data necessary to write news stories.
William Andrews Clark Sr. was an American entrepreneur, involved with mining, banking, and railroads, as well as a politician.
Gretchen C. Morgenson is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist notable as longtime writer of the Market Watch column for the Sunday "Money & Business" section of The New York Times. In November, 2017, she moved from the Times to The Wall Street Journal.
Below are the winners of the 1989Pulitzer Prize by category.
Student Life (StudLife) is the independent student-run newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis. It was founded in 1878 and incorporated in 1999. It is published by the Washington University Student Media, Inc. and is not subject to the approval of the University administration, thus making it an independent student voice.
Charles Gasparino is an American journalist, blogger, and occasional radio host. He frequently serves as a panelist on the Fox Business Network program segment The Cost of Freedom and the stocks/business news program Cashin' In.
Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, a 42-acre (170,000 m2) saltwater marsh, is one of the largest wildlife refuges in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. The refuge has a 29-acre (120,000 m2) freshwater/brackish lake, an artificially modified estuary, which drains through East Beach into the Pacific Ocean.
The Worth Bingham Prize, also referred to as the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting, is an annual journalism award which honors: "newspaper or magazine investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served."
George Bliss was an American journalist. He won a 1962 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for the Chicago Tribune and was associated with two others:
Scott Higham is an American investigative journalist and author who documented the corporate and political forces that fueled the opioid epidemic, in addition to conducting other major investigations. He is a five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Pulitzer twice with his colleagues at The Washington Post. After a 24-year career with The Post, he is now producing investigative projects for Bill Whitaker at 60 Minutes. He is also coauthor of two books.
The William A. Clark House, nicknamed "Clark's Folly", was a mansion located at 962 Fifth Avenue on the northeast corner of its intersection with East 77th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. It was demolished in 1927 and replaced with a luxury apartment building.
Huguette Marcelle Clark was an American painter, heiress, and philanthropist, who became well known again late in life as a recluse, living in hospitals for more than 20 years while her various mansions remained unoccupied.
Michael Hudson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative journalist. He is currently head of investigations at the Guardian US.
Leslie Payne was an American journalist. He served as an editor and columnist at Newsday and was a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists. Payne received a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his investigative reporting, and, with daughter Tamara Payne, the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his biography The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X.
The Bellosguardo Foundation is a philanthropic organization and private foundation for the arts located at the oceanside estate in Santa Barbara, California, known as Bellosguardo, one of the empty mansions of the reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark.
Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune is a non-fiction book by the American authors Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., about the heiress Huguette Clark (1906–2011), daughter of the copper baron and United States Senator William A. Clark (1839–1925), one of the wealthiest men in the world at the time. The book chronicles the Clark family's involvement across much of American history, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps during the Montana gold rush.
Pete Carey is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Carey worked at the Mercury News California from 1967 to 2016 as a projects reporter and investigative correspondent, covering the defense industry, the rise of Silicon Valley, the financial affairs of Ferdinand Marcos and other topics.
References
↑ Taylor, Ihsan. "Best Sellers". The New York Times. Retrieved September 5, 2015.
↑ Dedman, Bill; Newell, Paul Clark Jr. (2013). Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune: Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr.: 9780345534521: Amazon.com: Books. Random House Publishing. ISBN978-0345534521.
Previously the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, No Edition Time from 1953–1963 and the Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting from 1964–1984
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
