Keith Epstein

Keith Epstein’s series, “Breaking Ranks,” examined the outlandish cost and minimal return to the American taxpayer of a service academy education in a manner the judges found to be compelling, well-documented and illustrated.

BusinessWeek has finally done the story I have been waiting all year to see — an in-depth analysis of insurance company efforts to influence the outcome of health reform … BusinessWeek’s story goes far beyond lists of campaign cash which insurers and other big, important stakeholders have lavished on elected representatives. Instead it gets to the nitty gritty of influence peddling that shows why insurance companies will rule once again.

The series was classic investigative work that took faceless information and personalized it and gave a texture of details. A fascinating and horrifying account of drug experimentation, written crisply and with real compassion for the subjects, who we have to care about. Readers wouldn’t be able to put this down, or soon forget it.

While…news organizations have swarmed into Indiana to glean any detail about [VP candidate Dan] Quayle’s background, The Plain Dealer has broken three stories that have brought the paper international attention. [Bill] Sloat and Washington colleague Keith Epstein have scooped the news hordes. Indiana National Guard units were filled when Quayle joined…[Quayle] entered law school under a program to advance minorities…[He also] inflated his background on his resume.

Keith Epstein’s report…led the Department of Defense to improve its position [on] protection [of] human subjects. At a [conference of research overseers] in 1997, he spoke about how investigative reporters serve a valuable function when…there may be road blocks or danger for the parties involved to directly confront this problem. [Until then] many of us in the biomedical community viewed reporters with a high degree of suspicion.

The Plain Dealer uncovered a number of disturbing cases — very disturbing cases as a matter of fact — where people were unaware they were involved in research. The series raises very serious questions about the adequacy of our current system of protecting human research subjects.

In an impressive feat of anticipatory journalism, Keith Epstein of The Cleveland Plain Dealer used NTSB reports, court records, cockpit recordings, and other sources to examine delays in (improving) airline safety. He showed how minutes before takeoff a flight…had ice on its wings. But there was pressure to take off on time and no regulator absolutely required a final de-icing.