for putting AP out front on one of the most contentious and closely watched stories leading up to the midterms – the details of President Donald Trump's plan to automatically deny asylum to migrants caught crossing into the country illegally. https://bit.ly/2EUFYVf
Because it’s the first presidential primary on the calendar, there’s no margin for error.Read more
AP took the small moment of former President Trump’s mug shot and put it in the context of American history, pondering how single images can and have shaped America’s view of itself.Read more
scored a significant scoop and offered the AP’s audience unprecedented insight into the Fulton County special grand jury that considered whether former President Donald Trump illegally meddled in Georgia’s 2020 election through sophisticated open records reporting and strong source cultivation.Read more.
teamed up in two locations along the U.S.-Mexico border leading up to the expected expiration of a Trump-era asylum ban as unusually large numbers of migrants gathered to enter the United States. When the Supreme Court temporarily kept Title 42 in place at the 11th hour, Dell’Orto had already published a story on the critical and demanding role that faith-based groups have played receiving hundreds of thousands of migrants in recent months. One team based in the El Paso, Texas, area; while a second focused on the crossing to San Diego. Both AP teams hired photo and video journalists to produce stories throughout the week that mixed fast-moving policy developments with empathetic accounts of what migrants were dealing with.Read more.
Former President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 presidential election and his efforts to spread the false claim that widespread voter fraud cost him a second term raised a critical question: How much voter fraud occurred in the six crucial battleground states disputed by Trump?
Turns out, just 473 potential cases in those states. Many of the cases involved Republicans and virtually every case was an individual acting alone rather than coordinated fraud.
AP’s finding was the result of an exhaustive investigation by a team of reporters, data journalists and others, based on detailed fact checks of the vote entries for every county in each of the six states. The investigation also led to an exceptionally rare recorded phone interview with the former president in which he repeated his unfounded conspiracy theories but could find no fault with AP’s reporting.
The story made headlines and was widely cited. For meticulous reporting and analysis that revealed the actual attention-grabbing sliver of voter fraud cases, the team of Christina A. Cassidy, Scott Bauer, Bob Christie, David Eggert, Camille Fassett, Anthony Izaguirre, Shawn Marsh, Anna Nichols, Michelle Price, Ed White and Corey Williams is AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
President Donald Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s president, and the ensuing impeachment investigation, has been the hottest story in Washington for weeks. It’s extremely challenging to find new ways to report on the conversation and gather new details of how a rough transcript of the call was created and handled.
Deb Riechmann managed to do it all, with a deeply reported 1800-word story that laid out everything we know about who was on the call, how such conversations are memorialized and what happens to the rough transcripts once they are created.
For uncovering tantalizing new details about Trump’s fateful phone call with the Ukraine president, AP’s Best of the Week citation goes to White House reporter Deb Riechmann.
for Semansky’s exclusive photos and video of the tanks that President Donald Trump ordered into Washington for his July 4 celebrations. Baldor passed along a tip from a Pentagon source and Semansky found the small rail yard where the armored vehicles were being held, making AP first to confirm the presence of the military equipment in the capital. https://bit.ly/2S5SMLE
for his work to broadcast President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election bid rally live and uninterrupted. Replogle had arranged with local tech organizers to secure a fiber line for AP, an investment that paid off when the satellite pool signal went down, leaving the networks and competitive agencies in the dark. ABC live channel turned to us for the remainder of the rally, and AP’s on-site Global Media Services (GMS) clients had a continuous feed. https://bit.ly/2NrVbSi
for an AP beat on President Donald Trump’s plan to divert Pell college grant funding to NASA’s program to return to the moon. Colvin confirmed the proposed source of funding and AP was alone in reporting that Pell Grant subsidies would be tapped. https://bit.ly/2Hm84XJ
for reporting exclusively that a former British spy told a senior Justice Department official in the summer of 2016 that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald Trump “over a barrel.” https://bit.ly/2wB4Fif
for breaking the news that President-elect Donald Trump had quietly shut down some of his companies in the days after the election, including four that appeared connected to a Saudi Arabia business venture. http://on.wsj.com/2gX6IUP
for their Only on AP story that showed Donald Trump’s choice for Labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, had outsourced jobs as CEO of a fast-food chain, in contrast to the president’s push to keep jobs in the U.S. http://apne.ws/2k4AQBK
for a profile of President Donald Trump’s choice for an important health care post that shed light on the nominee’s business arrangements and possible conflicts of interest while acting as an adviser to then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. http://apne.ws/2l9wuY2
The Republican health care bill landed with projections that millions of people would lose their insurance coverage. Among the key questions: Who would be hurt most by the new plan?
AP data journalist Meghan Hoyer, based in Washington, set out to explore the impact of the GOP plan by gathering and analyzing data from several government and private entities. She found that Americans 55 and older who buy private health insurance will pay more than they do under Obamacare _and many of those who'd be hit hardest live in counties nationwide that gave President Donald Trump his strongest support.
Using those findings, reporters Michael Rubinkam in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Kelli Kennedy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, searched for people — both Trump backers and Hillary Clinton supporters — to discuss how the plan would affect their finances. The work of these three reporters, blending careful data crunching and compelling shoe-leather reporting, earns the Beat of the Week.
for getting exclusive access to Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as he visited a South Sudanese refugee camp and defended foreign aid in the face of President Trump’s proposal to make deep cuts to U.S. humanitarian aid. http://apne.ws/2oVi945
for a widely played second installment of the series, Trump Country. The AP journalists got the people of Androscoggin County, Maine, a community revived by refugees, to open up about the anti-immigrant fervor that helped elect Donald Trump, who carried the county. https://apnews.com/7f2b534b80674596875980b9b6e701c...
for their diverse, visual vignettes package on President Trump’s first 100 days featuring excerpts of letters written to the president by people the reporters had previously interviewed for stories about Trump’s America. http://apne.ws/2qINl6f
for being first to report that three men who were working undercover investigating labor abuses in a factory that made shoes for the Ivanka Trump brand had vanished, and one was arrested. http://apne.ws/2sDWFu7
for two news breaks on the same day regarding special counsel Robert Mueller: He’s taken over a criminal probe involving Paul Manafort, and he may investigate the roles of the attorney general and deputy attorney general in the firing of FBI Director James Comey. http://strib.mn/2qX7XZb