Lee Davidson, Deseret News Washington correspondent, has won second place in one of the country's most prestigious journalism contests, the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award.
During a dinner in Washington, D.C., Saturday night, Davidson was cited for his series of articles about the obstacles that many cancer victims face in trying to collect compensation under a fallout bill passed by Congress. In 1994, Davidson won an honorable mention in the same contest.The awards were presented at the 85th annual dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association. President Clinton attended the dinner but did not present the awards as he did in 1994.
Earlier, the Washington Post had speculated that the president might not attend the ceremony because he did not wish to shake hands with Michael Isikoff of Newsweek Magazine.
Isikoff won the White House Correspondents Association's Edgar A. Poe Award for helping break the Monica Lewinsky story. Isikoff also wrote the book, "Uncovering Clinton, a Reporter's Story."
In his three-part series, published in the Deseret News on March 15-17, 1998, Davidson reported that thousands of people who believe they should qualify for compensation did not get money because of the government's attitude toward enforcing the compensation bill.
Federal officials took a hard-nosed, "letter of the law" approach that eliminated people with the "wrong" kind of cancer or other illness or who lived in an area slightly out of the region cited in the law, he wrote.
Some may have been cut out of the bill because they lived in the right place but at the wrong time or didn't have enough evidence of where they lived or details of their illness or might have been too young or old when they became ill, according to the government.
Fewer than half the number of people who applied for compensation received it, and thousands more did not bother to apply because they knew they would excluded by tight new rules, Davidson wrote.
Congress also kept out of the bill people who lived in many areas where fallout was heavy, simply because compensating them would be too expensive. The same question, how to compensate that many people, continued to hold Congress back from passing corrective legislation, according to Davidson.
Even when victims did receive money, sometimes that too generated problems, as jealous neighbors ridiculed them or recipients felt as if they had accepted blood money.
Davidson's articles sparked congressional hearings chaired by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. Hatch said fixing some of the problems with fallout compensation is among the highest priorities for his Judiciary Committee this year.
First place in the Clapper award went to Bill Lambrecht of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for his articles examining the worldwide use of genetically engineered crops.
Honorable mention went to Greg Hitt and Phil Kuntz of the Wall Street Journal for their article about the influence of political donations on legislators, and to Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times for his series about sexual misconduct in the military.
Raymond Clapper, for whom the award is named, was a Washington correspondent and columnist for the Scripps Howard Newspaper chain. He was killed in an airplane crash while covering the U.S. invasion of the Marshall Islands during World War II.
The award was established in 1944 to recognize a Washington-based newspaper writer whose work "most clearly approximated the ideals of fair and painstaking reporting and good craftsmanship that were characteristic of Raymond Clapper."