Hope Florida was a much-touted program held up as an alternative to welfare by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and founded by his wife, Casey. Then, reporters from the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald found that it had almost no evidence of success, and the program’s charity arm, the Hope Florida Foundation, had received a mysterious $10 million donation from a state settlement and was refusing to turn over its tax records, in violation of IRS rules.
Working against state agencies that refused to publicly release records, they found that the $10 million came from a Medicaid settlement, and the charity was used to divert nearly all of it to a political committee controlled by the governor’s chief of staff. The team also painstakingly tracked billing codes across three state databases to reveal the money was part of a larger campaign to siphon more than $35 million in taxpayer dollars to political activities.
As a result of the reporting, a criminal investigation was opened, and Hope Florida, once a darling of the Governor’s agenda, lost state funding and was not enshrined into state law – a move the DeSantises had pushed for.
Copy. Paste. Legislate.
The winner of the 2020 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting was “Copy. Paste. Legislate” by the staffs of The Arizona Republic, USA TODAY, and the Center for Public Integrity. The collaborative reporting team conducted unprecedented computer analysis of legislation in all 50 states to reveal 10,000 bills that were copied nearly word-for-word from text written by industry groups, lobbyists and political activists, often to benefit big business at consumers’ expense. Two tools built as part of the project are helping citizens and local reporters track these copycat bills in their own communities.
Los Angeles Times exposed how some U.S. Senators’ abuse of special interest groups accrue hundreds of thousands of dollars for family members acting as lobbyists and consultants.
Profiting from Public Service
Gannett New Jersey Newspapers shed light on the abuse of power by some New Jersey Legislators for the benefit of their family and friends.
Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech
Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics
