Media

There are racists living in America. This is not news. And yet, when Nina Davuluri, an Indian American, was crowned Miss America on September 15, it sparked a flurry of angry tweets by unhappy racists, causing several reputable news outlets to take note. Online publications from BuzzFeed to Jezebel.com--among many others--reprinted some of the most vitriolic and offensive tweets verbatim...

Speaking of people on Wall Street saying incredibly stupid things, watch this clip of CNBC's Joe Kernen that Media Matters flagged yesterday: In a discussion with Andrew Ross Sorkin and Becky Quick about the rupee, Kernen faked an Indian accent and asked, "Are they good at 7-Eleven?" Sometimes the mask slips—even on national television. Kernen, who's written a book about...

Bloomberg's Carol Hymowitz profiles a retired Oral-B marketing director who at 77 is working two jobs flipping burgers and handing out samples at Sam's Club. We'll be seeing a lot more of this with the coming wave of Baby Boomer retirees—the first generation hit with the enormous policy failure that is the decline of pensions and the rise of the...

FAIRWAY, KS -- "I was not sent to Washington to shut down the federal government," Sen. Mike Johanns told the Lincoln Journal-Star over the weekend. The Nebraska Republican was lashing out at the GOP-led House, which had voted on Friday to tie the continued funding of the entire federal government to the defunding of the Affordable Care Act--a move that...

by Richard Tofel

In the last three weeks, ProPublica has published what I hope you'll agree are two extraordinary pieces of investigative journalism -- revelations (in partnership with the New York Times and the Guardian) about extensive secret decryption efforts by the NSA and others, and the disturbing tale (in partnership with This American Life) on the dangers of Tylenol and related drugs, including killing more than 150 Americans a year, and how the FDA has bungled and the manufacturer has slowed important warnings about drug safety.

I'm writing now to ask that you join in supporting this kind of critical work.

These projects are emblematic of the sort of journalism that distinguishes ProPublica. It makes a difference in the world, and it illuminates diverse corners of that world -- from assisted living to prosecutorial misconduct, from the abuse of temporary workers to the exploitation of installment loans.

This kind of work is expensive. Our Tylenol stories involved two years of reporting. The NSA decryption story took months to flesh out.

We are committed to more stories like these, but we need your help. Almost all of the money to make them possible comes from donations. If you value this kind of journalism, please donate today.

Thank you.

by Sebastian Rotella

Sept. 24: This story has been updated with developments as the trial opened.

In a historic case with international repercussions, a federal trial begins today in Southern California of a former Guatemalan military officer accused of playing a lead role in the massacre of 250 men, women and children in the village of Dos Erres during Guatemala’s civil war in 1982.

Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes, a former lieutenant in an elite commando unit, faces charges that he concealed his involvement in the massacre from U.S. immigration authorities years later, when he obtained permanent residency and citizenship. Although he cannot be tried in the United States for the killings in Guatemala, U.S. prosecutors must prove his complicity to show that he lied on immigration forms when he said he had not served in the military or committed a crime. If convicted in the trial in federal court in Riverside, he faces a prison sentence of 10 years.

Units in the U.S. Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement specialized in investigating human rights violations have devoted considerable resources to the first U.S. trial related to a Guatemalan war crimes case of this type. The witnesses against Sosa are expected to include as many as four fellow ex-commandos and Ramiro Osorio. Osorio survived the massacre as a five-year-old and was abducted and raised by a commando, Santos Lopez Alonso. Osario now lives in Canada and has testified in other prosecutions in the United States and Guatemala.

Prosecutors had also intended to use the testimony of Oscar Ramírez Castañeda, who survived the massacre at age three and was abducted like Osorio. Ramirez was raised by the family of an officer who led the killer unit. ProPublica told the story of Ramírez, now a Boston restaurant worker and father of four, last year. He and his lawyer had met with investigators and prosecutors in recent months to prepare him as a witness against Sosa.

As the result of a judge’s ruling last week, however, Ramirez will not testify in Riverside after all, according to his lawyer, Scott Greathead. Greathead said Tuesday that prosecutors recently informed him that U.S. District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips had upheld a defense motion seeking to prevent Ramirez’ testimony. Greathead said he did not know the grounds for the ruling. Because Ramirez was too young to remember the massacre, he would not be able to provide eyewitness testimony.

Sosa, a 55-year old karate instructor, denies guilt. In an interview with ProPublica last year, he said that he did not take part in the attack on Dos Erres on Dec. 7, 1982, a hellish day of rape, murder and destruction. Sosa said he was working on a civil affairs project 100 miles away. He accused prosecutors and human rights activists in Guatemala, where he faces criminal charges, of framing him. His lawyer has argued in court filings that Sosa did not knowingly lie on federal immigration forms because the questions were vague and he had reasons to believe his wartime actions were covered by Guatemalan amnesty laws.

The Dos Erres case has become emblematic of the fight for justice in Guatemala, where the impunity of the past and the impunity of the present intertwine. Many military officers implicated in atrocities in the civil war, which claimed more than 200,000 lives before ending in the mid-1990s, have eluded punishment because of the protection of corrupt security forces and powerful criminal mafias.

During the past two years, Guatemalan prosecutors succeeded in convicting five members of the 20-man elite unit that destroyed Dos Erres. Efraín Ríos Montt, the nation’s former dictator, has also been charged in the case as the mastermind of a military campaign that resulted in hundreds of similar mass killings in rural areas. In a separate prosecution in May, a Guatemalan court found Ríos Montt guilty of genocide, but his conviction was quickly thrown out on procedural grounds. Whether he will be retried remains uncertain.

The U.S. government, which once backed Guatemala’s armed forces as a Cold War bulwark in Central America, has conducted crucial investigations of its own. In addition to tracking down Sosa in Canada in 2011, federal investigators arrested three other commandos from the unit who had migrated to the United States. A former sergeant, Gilberto Jordan, admitted to his role in the massacre and pleaded guilty to immigration charges in Florida in 2010; he is serving 10 years in prison. Investigators found another ex-commando living illegally in California and deported him to Guatemala, where he was convicted in the massacre.

And a third former soldier, Santos Lopez Alonso, will testify in Riverside as part of an apparent plea agreement for charges of illegally re-entering the United States after deportation. Alonso will likely provide eyewitness testimony against Sosa, who was the fourth-highest ranking officer in a special strike force comprised of 20 commando instructors, according to Guatemalan court records.

In court testimony in Guatemala and during interviews last year with ProPublica, two other former commandos alleged that Sosa fired his rifle and threw a grenade into a village well that was piled with living and dead victims. U.S. authorities have said that those two veterans, Cesar Franco Ibañez and Fabio Pinzon, who live in an undisclosed country as protected witnesses, also will testify in Sosa’s trial. In addition, the witness list read in court Tuesday include Jordan, the ex-sergeant imprisoned in Florida, suggesting he may have agreed to testify against Sosa as well.

Ramírez, the younger Dos Erres survivor, grew up thinking he was the son of a heroic lieutenant in the Kaibiles, as the Guatemalan commandos are known. Ramirez came to the United States illegally as a young man. Only in 2011 did he learn from Guatemalan prosecutors that the man he believed to be his father had abducted him and led the massacre in which his mother and eight siblings died.

As a result of the investigation, last year Ramírez met his real father, Tranquilino Castañeda, who survived the rampage because he was in another village. Ramírez has been granted political asylum. His father is expected to travel from Guatemala to testify about the DNA tests that proved he and Ramírez are related. Those test results bolstered the evidence against the former commandos.

While Ramírez lived in the shadows as an illegal immigrant, Sosa obtained citizenship in both Canada and the United States thanks to bureaucratic breakdowns and a lack of scrutiny, according to documents and interviews. As the former lieutenant points out, he described his military service in detail — without mentioning Dos Erres — when he requested political asylum in San Francisco in 1985 on the grounds that he feared persecution by the guerrillas and the military in Guatemala. U.S. authorities rejected his application, but he promptly went to Canada and gained political asylum there — an official decision that has been questioned by U.S. and Canadian human rights advocates.

Sosa later moved to New York, married a U.S. citizen and obtained permanent residency in 1998. He told U.S. immigration officials that he had not served in the Guatemalan military, according to prosecutors, and the officials failed to detect his previous account of his combat experience on his asylum application from 1985. That information also slipped by when he obtained citizenship in 2008 in Southern California, where he ran several karate schools, U.S. officials say.

The trial is expected to last two weeks.

Today from noon to 5pm (Eastern time), CJR's United States Project is teaming up with the journalism school at the University of Texas at Austin for an event in Austin titled, "The State of Accountability Journalism in the State of Texas." A livestream of the proceedings will be available below. We'll also be live-tweeting the event here. Tune in to...

In his "Stories I'd like to see" column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com. 1. Default scenarios: With a deadlock over raising the debt ceiling looking more likely than a stalemate over funding the government to avert a shutdown, I've been looking for...

by Minhee Cho

For this week’s podcast, we wanted to give a special tribute to our vice president of communications, Mike Webb, as he leaves ProPublica to start a new chapter in Hawaii.

Mike has been with ProPublica for five years – since our second story – and has played a crucial role in our success, from crafting key media partnerships and launching our first public event to managing our ever-hopeful softball team (go, Impact!). He joins us for one last time in the Storage Closet Studio to talk about his favorite ProPublica investigations and the daily life in the ProPublica Comms Department.

You can listen to this podcast on iTunes and Stitcher. For more on Mike and his adventures post-ProPublica, follow him on Twitter: @gmikewebb.

And, because Mike can’t stop promoting ProPublica, here are links to the investigations he mentions in this episode:

• Tylenol: Use Only as Directed
• Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security
• Dollars for Docs: How Industry Dollars Reach Your Doctors
• Fracking: Gas Drilling’s Environmental Threat
• The Deadly Choices at Memorial
• The Wall Street Money Machine

A couple of weeks ago, Felix Salmon asked: "Can Rupert Murdoch hold on to Kara Swisher?" Well, now we have our answer. He doesn't want to, at least at whatever price she was asking. Last week, Dow Jones, a unit in Murdoch's News Corp.'s empire, said it would not renew its contract with either Swisher or her partner, Walt Mossberg,...

When a Senate committee this month approved the "Free Flow of Information Act of 2013," applause was heard from scores of media shield law supporters, from the Newspaper Association of America to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. To them, the news came as a relief after revelations the feds had secretly seized Associated Press phone records and...

The Wall Street Journal buries the lede in a major way in its Saturday piece on AIG CEO/bombthrower Robert Benmosche that ran on the cover of Marketplace with this anodyne headline: At AIG, Benmosche Steers a Steady Course CEO Stabilizes Insurer, Focuses on Core Mission Up high in the story: Benmosche's assurance that "'too big to fail' has been solved"...

Spend time on Twitter or Reddit, or anywhere on the internet for that matter, and you'll learn lots of new words, or new meanings for older ones. Often, the new words will appear in the printed equivalent of a spittle-infused diatribe, by a party using the words to make a point, or to wound. And the new words will often...

by Amanda Zamora

During the last decade, more than 1,500 Americans have died from accidentally taking too much of an over-the-counter drug renowned for its safety: acetaminophen. Tens of thousands more have been harmed from liver damage associated with the drug.

Meanwhile, federal regulators have known about studies showing the risks associated with acetaminophen for decades. So has McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the Johnson & Johnson unit that built Tylenol into a billion-dollar brand. So how has acetaminophen become America’s most popular pain reliever, despite these risks?

Join ProPublica for a discussion of our investigation into how federal regulators delayed or failed to adopt measures designed to reduce the rising number of deaths and injuries from acetaminophen, and how McNeil, while it undeniably took steps to protect consumers, also fought repeatedly against safety warnings, dosage restrictions and other protective measures.

WHEN: Thursday, Sept. 26, 1 p.m. ET

WHO: ProPublica reporter T. Christian Miller (@txtianmiller) liver disease specialist Dr. William Lee and pharmaceutical marketing expert PeterMax Miller. 

 

by T. Christian Miller and Jeff Gerth

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Americans have a spotty understanding of the risks of Tylenol, a nationwide poll conducted earlier this year shows.

About half said they are not aware of any safety warnings involving the drug. But 80 percent said that overdosing on the medicine could result in serious side effects.

Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said it was safe to mix Tylenol with another medicine that contains acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. This practice is known as “double dipping” and can lead to accidental overdoses.

Taken together, the results suggest a mixed record of success for the labels on Tylenol packages intended to warn consumers about the dangers of the drug. It also suggests that the acetaminophen public awareness campaigns sponsored over the past several years by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the drug industry and McNeil Consumer Healthcare Products, the Johnson & Johnson unit that makes Tylenol have yet to be fully effective.

When taken as recommended, acetaminophen – known in many countries as paracetamol – is generally safe, with few side effects. But at higher amounts, it can damage the liver, sometimes with lethal consequences.

As an investigation by ProPublica reported last week, about 150 people die each year after accidentally ingesting too much acetaminophen, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tens of thousands more are sent to hospitals and emergency rooms for treatment from acetaminophen poisoning, studies show. The FDA now calls acetaminophen toxicity a “persistent, important public health problem.”

The telephone poll of 1,003 adults was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International in February and March, and it has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. It was commissioned by ProPublica and This American Life, which produced a radio story on the risks of acetaminophen. Full results from the survey are here.

Are you aware of any safety warnings regarding Tylenol?

 

 Safe
 Not safe
 Don't know-->Source: Princeton Survey Research Associates International (See result.)

Are there any safety warnings about consuming alcoholic drinks when using Tylenol?

 

 Safe
 Not safe
 Don't know-->Source: Princeton Survey Research Associates International (See result.)

Is it safe to take Nyquil along with the maximum recommended dose of Extra Strength Tylenol?

 

 Safe
 Not safe
 Don't know-->Source: Princeton Survey Research Associates International (See result.)

Fifty-one percent of poll respondents were unaware of any safety warnings associated with Tylenol. However, 68 percent correctly said that liver damage could result from taking too much of the drug, while 55 percent said that an overdose could lead to death.

To gauge whether these responses reflected a real knowledge of the dangers of overdosing, the poll also asked about problems that are not caused by excessive consumption, including heart palpitations, tingling in the fingers and severe brain damage. But large numbers gave the wrong answer. For example, almost half of those surveyed (49 percent) said incorrectly that overdosing could cause heart palpitations, calling into question how much Americans truly understand about the risks of overdosing on acetaminophen.

A little more than half of those surveyed – 54 percent – said they had heard of warnings about mixing Tylenol and alcohol. Studies have shown that alcohol can make the liver more susceptible to damage from the drug. The FDA warns consumers on product labels against taking acetaminophen after three drinks.

Sizeable numbers of Americans also said they believed it was safe to take several different medications containing acetaminophen at once, the poll found.

For instance, 35 percent of respondents said it was safe to combine the maximum recommended dose of Extra Strength Tylenol with NyQuil, a cold remedy that also contains acetaminophen. It is not, according to the FDA.

People who take multiple acetaminophen products may inadvertently exceed the FDA’s maximum recommended daily dose of 4 grams, or eight extra strength acetaminophen pills. The FDA has cited reports of people suffering liver injury after taking between 5 and 7.5 grams per day over several days. ProPublica has created a simple app that allows people to look up how much acetaminophen is in many common drugs.

Regulators worry that people don’t understand that many medicines contain acetaminophen – more than 600 in all, including commonly used prescription drugs such as Vicodin and Percocet.

Michael S. Wolf, a professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, has studied double dipping and says the practice is “a reflection of how horrible our health system is at communicating the active ingredients” in medications.

The FDA has required over-the-counter acetaminophen to carry a warning that the drug can cause “severe liver damage” since 2009. While it mandates that prescription medications containing acetaminophen warn that overdosing can lead to “death,” no such warning is required for over-the-counter acetaminophen. About 60 percent of the drug is sold without a prescription.

The FDA’s Safe Use Initiative provides advice on how to correctly use acetaminophen through pamphlets, a webpage and YouTube videos, the most popular of which has been seen some 19,000 times since it debuted in January 2011.

“Public education and public campaigns are not something that the FDA is well resourced for,” said Dr. Sandra Kweder, an FDA official who helps regulate the drug and appears in the video.

The maker of Tylenol – McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a division of Johnson & Johnson – sponsors its own informational website, Get Relief Responsibly. The company also has created television advertisements, posters for doctors’ offices and a YouTube channel to educate consumers.

“McNeil has been a leader in educating doctors and providing materials about overdose and misuse of medicines containing acetaminophen,” the company said in a statement. It said its “acetaminophen awareness messages have been seen over one billion times.”

The Consumer Healthcare Products Association, an industry group representing McNeil and other acetaminophen makers, has worked in consultation with the government to create the Know Your Dose education campaign.

“We want to be as constructive and helpful as we can, to say, ‘Read and follow the label, taking too much can lead to liver damage, and don’t take two products at the same time,’” said Emily Skor, vice president of communications for the organization.

As Congress starts thinking about renewing and, maybe, reforming copyright law, already there's a debate brewing. One on side of this debate are content industry groups who think that, in the digital age, copyright law should give intellectual property more protection in order to give artists a financial incentive to create. On the other side are internet companies and digital...

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was always destined to fail. It had an enormous task: Tell us what—and who—caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. For that, it was stacked with bipartisan political appointees (rather than say, seasoned prosecutors), assigned a hard deadline of a little more than a year, and handed an appalling $10 million budget. To...

On Wednesday, HuffPost Live aired a segment on a student at the University of Lagos, in Nigeria, who claims to have scientific proof that same-sex marriage is wrong. With the aid of magnets, animal mating, arithmetic, and a string of incoherent babble, Chibuihem Amalaha--a PhD candidate in Chemical Engineering at the University--explained that homosexuality is wrong because "like" cannot attract...

by Michael Grabell

On July 10, my wife gave birth to a seemingly healthy baby boy with slate-blue eyes and peach-fuzz hair. The pregnancy was without complications. The delivery itself lasted all of 12 minutes. After a couple of days at Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut, we were packing up when a pediatric cardiologist came into the room.

We would not be going home, she told us. Our son had a narrowing of the aorta and would have to be transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia, where he would need heart surgery.

It turned out that our son was among the first in Connecticut whose lives may have been saved by a new state law that requires all newborns to be screened for congenital heart defects.

It was just by chance that we were in Connecticut to begin with. We live in New York, where such tests will not be required until next year. But our doctors were affiliated with a hospital just over the border, where the law took effect Jan. 1.

More Resources: Which States Require This Screening?

American Academy of Pediatrics legislation tracker

Newborn Foundation screening progress map

As we later learned, congenital heart problems are the most common type of birth defect in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that about one in 555 newborns have a critical congenital heart defect that usually requires surgery in the first year of life.

Many cases are caught in prenatal ultrasounds or routine newborn exams. But as many as 1,500 babies leave American hospitals each year with undetected critical congenital heart defects, the C.D.C. has estimated.

Typically, these babies turn blue and struggle to breathe within the first few weeks of life. They are taken to hospitals, often in poor condition, making it harder to operate on them. By then, they may have suffered significant damage to the heart or brain. Researchers estimate that dozens of babies die each year because of undiagnosed heart problems.

The new screening is recommended by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Yet more than a dozen states — including populous ones like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, Wisconsin and Washington — do not yet require it.

The patchy adoption of the heart screening, known as the pulse oximetry test, highlights larger questions about public health and why good ideas in medicine take so long to spread and when we should legislate clinical practice.

Newborns are already screened for hearing loss and dozens of disorders using blood drawn from the heel. The heart test is even less invasive: light sensors attached to the hand and foot measure oxygen levels in the baby’s blood. This can cost as little as 52 cents per child.

Our son’s heart defect was a coarctation of the aorta, a narrowing of the body’s largest artery. This made it difficult for blood to reach the lower part of his body, which meant that the left side of his heart had to pump harder.

In the hospital, though, he appeared completely healthy and normal because of an extra vessel that newborns have to help blood flow in utero. But that vessel closes shortly after birth, sometimes revealing hidden heart problems only after parents bring their babies home.

Depending on the heart defect, the onset of symptoms can be sudden.

This is what happened to Samantha Lyn Stone, who was born in Suffern, N.Y., in 2002. A photograph taken the day before she died shows a wide-eyed baby girl lying next to a stuffed giraffe. The next morning, her mother, Patti, told me, she was wiping Samantha’s face when she heard a gurgle from the baby’s chest.

Before her eyes, Samantha was turning blue. Blood began to spill from her mouth. Ms. Stone dialed 911, and minutes later, a doctor who heard the call over a radio was there performing CPR. Samantha went to one hospital and was flown to another.

But the damage was irreparable. Samantha had gone 45 minutes without oxygen: She lapsed into a coma and died six days later.

It wasn’t until several years later that Ms. Stone learned about the pulse oximetry test. “This could have saved my daughter,” she told me. “There is no parent that should ever have to go through what I went through.”

Pulse oximetry is not a costly, exotic procedure. Most hospitals already have oximeters and use them to monitor infants who suffer complications. You can buy one at Walmart for $29.88.

A recent study in New Jersey, the first state to implement the screening, estimated that the test cost $13.50 in equipment costs and nursing time. If hospitals use reusable sensors similar to those found on blood-pressure cuffs, the test could cost roughly fifty cents.

As medical technology advances, few screenings will be so cheap or simple. Recent years have seen controversy over prostate cancer and mammography screenings. Medical ethicists have to weigh the costs of each program and the agony caused by a false positive against the lives saved.

But with pulse oximetry, the false positive rate is less than 0.2 percent — lower than is seen for screenings newborns already get. The follow-up test is usually a noninvasive echocardiogram, or an ultrasound of the heart. A federal advisory committee came down in favor — three years ago.

“There’s really no question, scientifically, this is a good idea,” said Darshak Sanghavi, a pediatric cardiologist and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The issue is, how do we change culture?”

Opposition has taken two forms. One is from doctors who believe policy makers shouldn’t interfere with how medical professionals do their jobs. The other is from smaller hospitals, which worry about access to echocardiograms and the costs of unnecessary transfers.

These concerns can be addressed fairly easily. Nurses in New Jersey and elsewhere have been able to work the test into their normal routines. A rural hospital should already have a protocol to transfer a newborn in serious condition. If Alaska can do it, less remote states can, too.

But this is not simply a rural health care problem. Cardiologists and neonatologists I’ve spoken with said they knew of hospitals in New York City, Boston and metropolitan Atlanta that weren’t screening newborns for heart defects.

“It’s completely the luck of the draw of where you deliver,” said Annamarie Saarinen, who has pushed for the screening since her daughter narrowly avoided leaving the hospital with an undetected heart defect.

Fortunately, our son’s condition was also caught and corrected. The only lasting effects are a three-inch scar on his side and checkups with a cardiologist. He will live a normal life. He will be able to play sports and climb things he’s not supposed to.

Shouldn’t every baby have that chance?

This Andrew Ross Sorkin vignette on "Two Myths and One Reality" five years after the fall of Lehman Brothers is must-see TV. Sorkin looks pained, for once, to be apologizing for Wall Street all the time. If you turn off the sound, it looks like an R&B video produced by Brooks Brothers: But let's leave aside the Times's overly dramatic...