CPI-NPR collaboration wins Edward R. Murrow Award

Introduction

A 2013 collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and NPR has been honored with a prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award.

The Radio Television Digital News Association announced Wednesday that the project, which examined preventable worker deaths in grain bins, had won the investigative reporting award in the network radio category.

In online and radio stories, the Center’s Jim Morris and NPR’s Howard Berkes focused on a 2010 accident in Mt. Carroll, Ill., in which two workers, ages 14 and 19, suffocated while engaging in an illegal practice known as “walking down the grain.”

Morris and Berkes reported that 26 people died in grain entrapments in 2010, the worst year in decades. And yet, from 1984 to 2013, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cut initial fines for entrapment deaths by nearly 60 percent overall, an analysis by the news organizations found.

The stories were part of “Hard Labor,” an award-winning CPI series on worker health and safety in America.