Police misconduct records are either secret or difficult to access in a majority of states – 35 of them plus Washington, D.C. But the breeze of openness is blowing. Seven big states have opened records in recent years – California, New York, Illinois, Colorado, Massachusetts, Oregon and Maryland. Now 15 states have laws that allow these records…
Joseph Pulitzer was one of America’s great newspaper publishers, but few people today know much about him. When we first decided to make a documentary about the 19th century publisher and American media icon – Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People (which aired on PBS in April, 2019), we were faced with a daunting task.…
The story of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is embodied in the ideals of the man who founded it in 1878, said Richard H. Weiss, a former editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Weiss introduced a new documentary on Joseph Pulitzer on June 6 at the St. Louis Jewish Film Festival. Known as the “Pulitzer Platform,”…
The Pulitzer and Polk committees had little choice, as most commentators say. They felt that they had to give their 2013 prizes for public service to the publications and reporters who broke one of the biggest stories of the year, the broad surveillance operations of the National Security Agency. But their decisions deserve second thoughts. Consequences figure in the committees’ thinking, and the disclosures have brought beneficial consequences by most estimates. President Obama has reacted by ordering a restructuring of the surveillance systems to limit reported abuses. And the press and public have learned much about what the U.S. government has been doing in secret. But some other consequences have been clearly harmful. Among them is the outrage in Germany, a prime ally and trading partner of the United States, over the N.S.A.’s gathering of electronic data from its ordinary citizens and spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel. She said angrily that “snooping among friends, that just doesn’t work.”