Amanda Pike, Reveal’s Director of Video and Executive Producer, Sara Just, Executive Producer of the PBS NewsHour, Reveal reporter Jennifer Gollan, Richard Coolidge, Senior Producer of the PBS NewsHour, and Murrey Jacobson, National Affairs Editor at the PBS NewsHour pose at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards in New York City Sept., 21, 2016 after receiving the Emmy for outstanding business and economic reporting in a regularly scheduled newscast for “Deadly Oil Fields.”Credit: Courtesy NATAS
Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting earned two national News & Documentary Emmys on Wednesday.
“The Dead Unknown,” a documentary that was part of a multiplatform project that exposed gaps in the system for matching unidentified bodies with missing people – a problem the Department of Justice has called “the nation’s silent mass disaster” – won for new approaches: current news coverage.
The entry reflected CIR’s continued efforts to experiment with ways to tell deep, impactful stories and included a documentary series; The Lost & The Found, an app that helps people make matches themselves; a “Reveal” radio episode, produced with PRX; and a long-form text piece. On Wednesday, Kentucky authorities announced they had identified Sonja Kaye Blair-Adams, who was killed in 1969 and until then was known as “Mountain Jane Doe.” She was featured in the investigation.
Watch Amanda Pike, Reveal’s Director of Video and Executive Producer, accept the award:
“Deadly Oil Fields” a collaboration with PBS NewsHour that examined how major oil companies avoid accountability for workers’ deaths in North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields, won for outstanding business and economic reporting in a regularly scheduled newscast.
The segment was part of an investigation that uncovered how deeply entrenched corporate practices and weak federal oversight inoculate energy producers against responsibility for workplace accidents. Over the past five years, federal regulators cited just one energy operator for a worker’s death in the Bakken – this is despite the fact that at least 74 people have died in the Bakken oil fields since 2006.
Watch Jennifer Gollan, the Reveal reporter who led the investigation, accept the award:
Reveal was nominated for seven awards in the annual contest, a record number of nominations for CIR.
The nominated work also included “Post Script,” which told the unexpected outcomes of good ideas through a series of video shorts.
Another four nominations honored CIR’s long history of working with media partners.
Among them was a collaboration with PBS NewsHour in the outstanding business reporting, nightly news category: an investigation into the University of Phoenix’s use of illegal marketing tactics on and off military bases to attract students to its for-profit colleges.
A collaboration with Telemundo and MSNBC for a documentary about the Border Patrol’s use of deadly force was nominated in the outstanding investigative journalism, Spanish-language category.
And the FRONTLINE documentary “Rape on the Night Shift” – done in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, KQED and Univision – was nominated for two Emmys: outstanding investigative journalism, long form, and outstanding research.
See the full list of winners here.
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