NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – Lake County News has been named by the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California chapter as a winner of this year's James Madison Freedom of Information Awards for successfully suing for its right to basic law enforcement information after being blacklisted by the county's sheriff.
Lake County News co-founders Elizabeth Larson and John Jensen will receive the News Media Award for their successful legal fight to force Lake County Sheriff Frank Rivero to end his blacklisting of the publication after a series of hard-hitting, critical articles about his conduct in office.
Larson and Jensen are among honorees this year that include retired San Francisco Chronicle editor Peter Sussman, three high school journalists who honored confidential agreements with sources by beating back a subpoena for their notes, and an investigative journalist who used more than 100,000 pages of documents to report on potential structural problems on the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge.
The 29th annual James Madison Awards will be presented to champions of the First Amendment and freedom of information on Thursday, March 20, at a banquet at the San Francisco City Club.
Jensen and Larson, the husband-and-wife team who founded Lake County News in December 2006, said they are extremely honored to have our efforts to fight for First Amendment rights and access recognized by a group as prestigious as the Society of Professional Journalists.
“Receiving this award means a great deal to us for a variety of reasons. It reinforces the idea that watchdog journalism is important to keeping public officials accountable and to revealing critical facts that the community has a right to know,” they said.
“Another reason we think it matters is that, while a lot of people are paying an inordinate amount of attention to the failure of corporate attempts at local online journalism, this is a key example of what local independent online publishers are doing, and doing well. We know our colleagues nationwide are doing this caliber of work everyday, and are the unsung heroes of modern day journalism,” they added.
Rivero on Thursday continued to deny that Lake County News won the lawsuit against him, attempted to justify his actions by calling the publication biased and alleged the investigation against him for credibility issues that Lake County News uncovered through public records law was “bogus.”
When asked for a comment on the award, Sheriff Rivero said “there was no real victory for Lake County News” and “[i]n my opinion, the judge erred in awarding attorney's fees.”
“I really have to disagree with the sheriff’s comments,” said Paul Nicholas Boylan, attorney for Lake County News. “The judgment and attorney fee award in favor of LCN was a huge victory. The judgment states that the sheriff won’t discriminate against LCN and the court retains jurisdiction to enforce the judgment if the sheriff does it again.
“The judgment not only corrected a serious abuse of power, it also protects against and prevents future abuses. The attorney fee award is just icing on the cake, showing every government official – elected, appointed or hired – that there is a price to be paid if they violate a newspaper’s constitutional rights,” he said.
“That sounds like a fairly big win to me,” Boylan added.
Thomas Peele, investigative reporter and chair of the Nor Cal SPJ Freedom of Information Committee – which conducted an in-depth review of Lake County News' reporting on Rivero – also didn’t agree with Rivero’s assessment.
“The sheriff's actions in blacklisting a news organization were egregious,” Peele said. “The Lake County News didn't back down in the face of his blatant attempts at intimidation. Rather, the news organization held it itself to the highest journalistic standards of a free press, both in its reporting on the sheriff's Brady violations and by going to court and winning its lawsuit. The Freedom of Information committee members are quite proud to give a James Madison Award to the Lake County News.”
Larson first confronted Rivero while he was a candidate for sheriff in 2010 with evidence of his arrest record in Florida, which resulted in a story, which can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1cHvAst .
Not long after Rivero took office in 2011, Larson learned he was under investigation by the District Attorney's Office for changing a story about shooting at an unarmed man in 2008 while working as a deputy.
Larson used the open-records law to expose Rivero’s status as a “Brady” violation risk in March 2012, resulting in an exclusive story: http://bit.ly/AD8RKd .
“Brady” comes from the 1963 US Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland which established that the government must disclose to criminal defendants any evidence that could potentially clear them, including credibility issues of officers involved in their cases.
The result of the “Brady” listing that the District Attorney’s Office eventually gave Rivero is that he cannot testify in court without defendants being informed of his history under that federal legal precedent.
Late in 2012, in retaliation for its coverage, Rivero blacklisted Lake County News from routine media information.
Larson and Jensen, took Rivero to court and in March 2013, with Boylan’s help, they won restoration of access to public media information and the county had to pay $110,000 to cover the pair’s legal fees.
Retired visiting Judge J. Michael Byrne, in making his ruling on the attorney’s fees motion, called Lake County News' suit “absolutely necessary” in order to resolve the First Amendment issues that Rivero’s blacklisting action had created. Byrne also found that the case's outcome was in the interest of open government and transparency.
Jensen's father is Dr. Carl Jensen, founder of Project Censored, professor emeritus of communication studies at Sonoma State University, author of several books on journalism, and a former reporter, editor and publisher. He also sits on the Lake County News Editorial Board.
“Over the years, as founder of Project Censored, I've had the pleasure of honoring investigative journalists. This year I'm especially pleased that the Lake County News is a recipient of the prestigious James Madison Award,” Dr. Jensen said.
Dr. Jensen himself received the James Madison Freedom of Information Award for Career Achievement from the SPJ 's Northern California Chapter in 1996.
Award organizers say they're unaware of any other father and son winners in the event's history.
The James Madison Freedom of Information Award is named for the creative force behind the First Amendment and honors local journalists, organizations, public officials, educators and private citizens who have fought for public access to government meetings and records and promoted the public’s right to know and freedom of expression.
The awards dinner is held annually during the week of Madison’s birthday, which was March 16, 1751.
James Madison, fourth president of the United States, is often called the ‘Father of the Bill of Rights” because he authored the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution as well as contributing to the authorship of the Constitution itself.
Award winners are selected by SPJ NorCal’s Freedom of Information Committee.
The full list of this year's winners follows.
– Peter Sussman, retired editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, known for his tireless pursuit of an end to restrictions on media access to prisoners, his support of the inmate journalists’ rights and for his many other contributions to journalism, has been named winner of the Norwin S. Yoffie Award for Career Achievement Award. The Yoffie Award is named for the late editor of the San Rafael Independent Journal and co-founder of the SPJ NorCal’s Freedom of Information Committee who was a staunch advocate for transparency.
– Rob Gunnison, a former instructor and Director of School Affairs at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism will be honored with the Beverly Kees Educator Award for his years of mentoring aspiring journalists and for the re-establishment of required course work on access to public records. The award is named for a former SPJ NorCal president who was an educator and nationally recognized journalist.
– In a year when whistleblowers have been both applauded and excoriated, Peter Buxton will be honored with the FOI Whistleblower/Source Award for his historic 1972 role in exposing to a reporter the evils of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. From 1932 to 1972 African-American sharecroppers who thought they were getting medical care went untreated for syphilis so the government could study the disease’s progression.
– State Senator Leland Yee of San Francisco will receive the Public Official recognition award for his courage to oppose his own Democratic Party leaders and the governor in 2013 with public criticism of efforts to weaken the California Public Records Act by loosening disclosure requirements for local governments.
– Lake County News and its co-founders Elizabeth Larson and John Jensen will receive the News Media Award, for their successful legal fight to force the county sheriff to end a news blacklist of the paper after a series of hard-hitting, critical articles about his conduct in office.
– Attorney Terry Gross of Gross Belsky Alonso will receive the FOI Legal Counsel Award in recognition of his years of work to expand the rights of online journalists and to protect reporters who were victims of corporate email snooping and to redress the illegal police detention of reporters during protests in Oakland and Berkeley, among many causes.
– Freelance journalist Richard Knee will receive a Distinguished Service Award for 12 years of service on San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, an 11-member body that monitors City Hall’s compliance with open-government laws. He has served two decades on the SPJ NorCal FOI Committee and he helped in a successful ballot-measure campaign to strengthen the Sunshine law in 1998-99.
– Reporter Tom Vacar of KTVU Channel 2 will receive a Journalist Award for his story exposing false claims by BART and BART unions that the California Public Utilities Commission certifies BART train operators. Using the California Public Records Act, Vacar forced the CPUC to disclose it does not certify, review, test or train operators, but is no more than a rubber stamp for BART operator certification.
– The San Quentin News will be honored with a News Media Award for accomplishing extraordinary journalism under extraordinary circumstances. In the only inmate-produced paper in California, and under the scrutiny of prison authorities, the inmate journalists and volunteers covered a prison hunger strike, overcrowding and denial of compassionate release for a dying inmate.
– Samuel Liu, Sabrina Chen and Cristina Curcelli, reporters at The Saratoga Falcon, at Saratoga High School, will receive the Student Journalist-High School Award for their resistance to subpoenas for their notes and for protecting their sources by invoking California’s reporter shield law as they covered cyberbullying claims and the suicide of a classmate.
– Judith Liteky, a former nun, and Theresa Cameranesi, will receive the Citizen Award, for pressing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Defense to win a precedent-setting ruling that the government may not withhold on national security grounds the names and military unit information of graduates and instructors at the former School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
– News Editor Rebecca Bowe and staff writer Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez of the San Francisco Bay Guardian will receive Journalist Awards for extensive use of public records, independent research and interviews to produce a detailed account of financial “gifts” given to some city agencies that are used to curry favor out of the limelight.
– Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer who launched a method of secure communication between journalists and their sources, will be honored posthumously with the Public Service Award. Swartz died in January 2013 at the age of 26, but his work on the journalist-source software “Strongbox” has flourished.
– Senior investigative reporter Charles Piller of the Sacramento Bee will be honored with the Journalist Award for breaking the story that anchor bolts on the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge were corroded and subject to potential failure in an earthquake. His digging led to the revelation that engineers had warned for two years of the danger.
– Columnist and editorial writer Daniel Borenstein of the Bay Area News Group will receive the Editorial & Commentary Award for his strong editorials that helped beat back a legislative attack on California’s Public Records Act. He also produced a string of columns critical of school districts that failed to report suspicious behavior and he challenged the lack of disclosure during BART labor negotiations.