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.
President Trump’s Self Enrichment
Through painstaking reporting, The New York Times exposed the level to which President Trump has used the office of the President to enrich himself and his friends, to degrees never before seen in the U.S. Presidency.
The Times broke open the connection between an agreement to allow valuable U.S-developed computer chips to be exported to the United Arab Emirates and a U.A.E. business deal using the Trump family’s crypto firm, giving it a revenue stream that could be worth tens of millions of dollars annually. Through FEC filings, interviews, and other reporting The Times also built a database of 346 donors who gave significantly to the President’s personal priorities, including his inaugural committee, the White House ballroom project, his family’s crypto firm, and numerous other Trump-supported groups and projects. The team then investigated each of these donors to understand how they may have benefited from the President or his administration, creating a web of payments and favors all made clear to the public for the first time.
As a result of the reporting, several members of Congress have introduced legislation to curtail these kinds of self-enriching efforts, and numerous officials and watchdog groups have called for investigations and ethics inquiries.
Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century
Laura Beers, a British history professor at American University, critically examines Orwell’s enduring relevance through issues like populism, tyranny, and inequality, while challenging the obsession with his famed works, Animal Farm and 1984. She dissects Orwell’s critique of capitalism’s social prejudices and inequality, highlighting his democratic socialism and defense of individual liberty. Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War convinced him that violence sometimes has a role in social change but argued that equality ultimately rests on acts aimed at creating social unity. Beers’ analysis seeks to clarify Orwell’s writings in the context of modern events, providing insights that policymakers and political activists would be wise to heed.
Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It
Adam Berinsky, an MIT political scientist, tackles the challenge of political rumors – the factually incorrect claims, such as Obama’s birth abroad, that come to be widely believed. He explores why such rumors persist, who believes them, and how to combat them, using original survey and experimental data. He identifies conspiratorial thinking and strong partisan loyalties as key factors in the dissemination of such claims while suggesting remedial efforts should target not only diehard believers but also those who might be tempted to accept them. Emphasizing public vulnerability to misinformation, Berinsky calls for attention to both the message and the messenger, advocating for credible sources to debunk falsehoods.
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.
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.
Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms.
Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall
Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of digital data harvested from the Chinese Internet and leaks from China’s Propaganda Department, this book sheds light on how and when censorship influences the Chinese public.
The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
Hindman explains why the internet is not the postindustrial technology that has been sold to the public, how it has become mathematically impossible for grad students in a garage to beat Google, and why net neutrality alone is no guarantee of an open internet. He also explains why the challenges for local digital news outlets and other small players are worse than they appear and demonstrates what it really takes to grow a digital audience and stay alive in today’s online economy.
Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism
Hamilton chronicles a record of investigative journalism’s real-world impact, showing how a single dollar invested in a story can generate hundreds of dollars in social benefits.
