Each year the Social Security Administration issues billions of dollars in overpayments to recipients whose income or other qualifying criteria have changed, or as the result of agency miscalculations. Under federal law, the Social Security Administration is required to demand repayment of this money, treating it as debts to the federal government. These “clawbacks” can happen even decades after the initial overpayments occurred and even when they resulted from an agency mistake. In “Overpayment Outrage,” a collaboration that spanned a national nonprofit newsroom (KFF Health News) and Cox Media Group, a network of local TV news stations and their investigative and Washington, D.C. bureaus, the teamdug into the overpayment issue and the impacts of clawbacks on vulnerable people. They found that overpayments happen due to chronic understaffing at SSA, systemic delays in data tracking, and a process that made income changes and eligibility criteria invisible to those who were determining whether to issue a clawback demand. The reporting lays out potential solutions to address the legislative, funding, and process failures that cause this systemic problem. It reveals how Congress has demanded action to reduce excessive Social Security spending without adequately funding the agency that administers it, and examines the layers of complex policy, regulation, and procedural rules that employees and recipients of social security have to navigate to make the system work. The collaborative nature of the project and its publication in both print and TV outlets helped elevate the reach and impacts of the project.
For this impressive untangling of the root causes of problems in the functioning of government and the implementation of public policy, and explaining how this problem both impacted individuals and was not directly caused by them, “Overpayment Outrage” is the winner of the Goldsmith Awards’ inaugural Special Citation for Reporting on Government.
The Goldsmith Special Citation for Reporting on Government is intended to honor explanatory and/or investigative reporting that focuses on the functioning of government and the implementation of public policy. It aims to lift up reporting that illuminates the nitty gritty of governing – the people, systems, structures, and policies that layer together to make a government work, and, when it doesn’t, understanding why. The teams from Cox Media Group and KFF Health News are deserving of this special citation for their reporting on “Overpayment Outrage” because of the lengths they went to understand why failures happened, the impacts those failures have on individuals and communities, and the solutions suggested by their reporting – many of which were already being implemented in the weeks and months after the story came to light.
Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity
Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence
Alone and Exploited
Reporter Hannah Dreier’s investigation into the wide resurgence of child labor in the United States began with a simple question: As more unaccompanied migrant children began crossing the border than ever before, where were they all going? In this 20-month long investigation, Dreier uncovered a culture of careless disregard for child labor laws at construction sites, slaughterhouses and in factories across the country and a “chain of willful ignorance” at every point in the system meant to protect children from exploitation. Dreier earned the trust of hundreds of migrant children, federal contractors, investigators and auditors, government social workers, and sources at the highest levels of the White House and federal agencies to bring the truth to light. The impact of her investigation was swift and prompted immediate reforms across state and federal agencies as well as dozens of major corporations and brands.
Nina Totenberg
Nina Totenberg is NPR’s award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR’s critically acclaimed newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. Totenberg’s coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. She is often featured in documentaries — most recently RBG — that deal with issues before the court. As Newsweek put it, “The mainstays [of NPR] are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the creme de la creme is Nina Totenberg.”
In 1991, her ground-breaking report about University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill’s charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage — anchored by Totenberg — of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Anita Hill’s allegations, and for Totenberg’s reports and exclusive interview with Hill.
That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s retirement.
Totenberg was named Broadcaster of the Year and honored with the 1998 Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation. She is the first radio journalist to receive the award. She is also the recipient of the American Judicature Society’s first-ever award honoring a career body of work in the field of journalism and the law. In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations.
Totenberg has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for continued excellence in legal reporting and has received more than two dozen honorary degrees. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships.
Watch Nina Totenberg’s Goldsmith Career Award fireside chat with Nancy Gibbs starting at minute 39 of the ceremony:
Judy Woodruff
The Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism is given annually for outstanding contributions to the field of journalism, and for work that has enriched our political discourse and our society. This year’s winner is Judy Woodruff, whose groundbreaking career in broadcast journalism spans generations. Best known for her measured, fact-first delivery, she has earned the respect and trust of viewers all over the country.
“Judy has been a fixture on American television screens for nearly half a century,” said Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs. “Always calm, clear-headed and reassuring, she has delivered some of the biggest stories of our lifetimes and has never wavered in her pursuit of the truth.”
Woodruff was the featured speaker at this year’s Goldsmith Awards ceremony, held on March 15, 2023 in Harvard’s Sanders Theater.
Judy Woodruff
Broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff is the Senior Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, after serving for 11 years as its Anchor and Managing Editor. During 2023 and 2024, she is undertaking a reporting project, “America at a Crossroads,” to better understand the country’s political divide. She has covered politics and other news for more than four decades at CNN, NBC, and PBS. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Peabody Journalistic Integrity Award, the Poynter Medal, an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement, and the Radcliffe Medal, she and the late Gwen Ifill were together awarded Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism after Woodruff and Ifill were named co-anchors of the PBS NewsHour in 2013, marking the first time an American national news broadcast would be co-anchored by two women.
For 12 years, Woodruff served as anchor and senior correspondent for CNN, where her duties included anchoring the weekday program, Inside Politics. At PBS from 1983 to 1993, she was the chief Washington correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. From 1984-1990, she also anchored PBS’ award-winning weekly documentary series, Frontline with Judy Woodruff. In 2011, Woodruff was the principal reporter for the PBS documentary Nancy Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. And in 2007, she completed an extensive project for PBS and other news outlets on the views of young Americans called Generation Next: Speak Up. Be Heard. At NBC News, Woodruff was White House correspondent from 1977 to 1982. For one year after that she served as NBC’s Today show chief Washington correspondent. She wrote the book, This is Judy Woodruff at the White House, published in 1982 by Addison-Wesley.
Woodruff was a 2005 Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. She is a founding co-chair of the International Women’s Media Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting and encouraging women in communication industries worldwide. She serves on the boards of trustees of the Freedom Forum and The Duke Endowment.
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World At War
What happens when you’re a foreign correspondent, and see the coming of a war – one that America, and much of Europe stubbornly refuse to see? Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, by Deborah Cohen, Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University, tells the story of four European-based American journalists: the Chicago Sun-Times’ John Gunther, Hearst reporter H.R. Knickerbocker, author and journalist Jimmy Sheehan, and the New York Herald Tribune‘s Dorothy Thompson. Vienna’s Hotel Imperial was their watering hole, but their beat was Berlin, Paris, Rome – anywhere where Europe’s slow descent into madness could be documented. It was the 1920s and 30s, as first Mussolini and then Hitler came to power. The four journalist, rivals yet friends, jockeyed for access to interviews in their effort to tell a complacent world that the peace that followed World War I might not hold. Mussolini was the easy interview to get – Knickerbocker alone met with him four times – while Hitler was elusive. Dorothy Thompson finally managed to interview him, and later became the first American correspondent to get thrown out of Germany. Thompson also wrangled an interview with Leon Trotsky, while finding time along the way to leave her husband and marry the Nobel-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. The book exposes personal and political intrigue, while highlighting the best of foreign reporting. It’s a true page turner, the events and personalities unfolding as if in a novel, although it is, in face, a chronicle of a world sliding towards all-out war.
News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement
The decline of local newspapers is a familiar story. Hundreds of them have shut down, with the loss of thousands of jobs. But News Hole shows that the problem is more than one of locked doors and laid off workers – when a local paper goes, so does the community’s civic health. Lower turnout in local elections, less responsive local officials, less civic engagement, wider polarization, less social trust, weaker community ties, less awareness of what’s going on a City Hall, the school board, and the county commission – in short, when a newspaper goes out of business, the community stops acting like a community. Danny Hayes, Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, and Jennifer L. Lawless, Leone Reaves and George W. Spicer Professor of Politics and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Virginia, aided by dozens of student research assistants, analyzed fifteen years of reporting in more than 200 local newspapers, while also studying election returns, opinion surveys, and other indicators to track community engagement to show that without solid journalism, democracy itself is at risk.
The Backchannel
Reporter Anna Wolfe read a startling statistic published in a 2017 report: Mississippi, the most impoverished state in the nation, was approving just 1.5% of families applying for cash welfare assistance. That statistic sent Wolfe looking for where the state was sending the federal funds, if not to families who needed them. Over the next five years, Wolfe submitted more than 80 public records requests and faced repeated stonewalling from government officials and agencies. Through the challenging reporting process, she discovered that the state was funneling tens of millions-worth of welfare grants through two nonprofits under the guise of former Gov. Phil Bryant’s nebulous anti-poverty program called Families First for Mississippi, which refused to provide direct aid, instead leading needy families down dead ends. After the arrests of state welfare agency and nonprofit officials for embezzlement, Wolfe’s reporting didn’t stop: Through private text messages that officials have concealed from the public, Wolfe uncovered corruption and influence peddling extending all the way to Bryant and former NFL legend Brett Favre. Bryant admitted to many of the report’s findings in a rare on-the-record interview. Multiple defendants have since come forward with allegations against Bryant or have relied on the reporting in court filings that insist Bryant be held accountable. Congressman Bennie Thompson and the NAACP president urged the U.S. Attorney General and Department of Justice to investigate Bryant’s otherwise ignored role in the scandal, and Thompson has vowed to hold congressional hearings. State lawmakers, citing the investigation, held multiple hearings about how the state could better spend its welfare grants. Several legislators filed bills in early 2023 to reform the welfare agency’s management and oversight over federal funds. Meanwhile, federal criminal investigations into the scandal continue.
You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War
Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.
In You Don’t Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker uses these women’s work and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup, the expansion into Cambodia, and the American defeat and its aftermath. Arriving herself in the last years of the war, Becker writes as a historian and a witness of the times.
What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice. Deeply reported and filled with personal letters, interviews, and profound insight, You Don’t Belong Here fills a void in the history of women and of war.
