Wednesday, October 21, 2009

May The Angels Be Watching Over You

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Jack Nelson passed away at age 80 Wednesday.
Although my familiarity with Nelson is culled from little more than the discussion of his work in "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation," the man was instrumental in righting some of the wrongs that have occurred at Central State Hospital in the past.
From the Associated Press:

As a reporter with The Atlanta Constitution in 1960, he won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for exposing malpractice and other problems at the 12,000-patient state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Ga.

"Jack was a reporter's reporter," said Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times. "He maintained that the main thing people want from newspapers is facts - facts they didn't know before, and preferably facts that somebody didn't want them to know. Jack was tolerant of opinion writers; he respected analysis writers, and he even admired one or two feature writers. But he believed the only good reason to be a reporter was to reveal hidden facts and bring them to light."

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