Moody College announces winners of 2024 Dan Rather Medals

Moody College of Communication’s School of Journalism and Media has announced the winners of this year’s Dan Rather Medals for News and Guts, which are awarded to journalists who go the extra mile to hold people and institutions accountable.

The professional prize has been awarded to a team of reporters from Bloomberg News that includes Michael Riley, David Kocieniewski, Monte Reel, Jessica Brice, Eric Fan, Michael Smith, Natalie Obiko Pearson, Chris Cannon and Henry Baker for “How the US drives gun exports and fuels violence around the world,” a series that revealed the role Republican and Democratic administrations played in boosting the export of U.S.-made guns.

The student prize included first, second and third place winners.

Theo Baker, a reporter at The Stanford Daily, won first place for a series of articles about former Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned after an investigation found that he oversaw labs that manipulated research data. 

A team from The Daily Northwestern that included Nicole Markus, Alyce Brown, Cole Reynolds and Divya Bhardwaj won second prize for its coverage of hazing accusations against the football team that included reports of sexual misconduct.

The third place prize went to the University of North Carolina Daily Tar Heel editorial staff for its Aug. 30 front page after a faculty member was killed in a shooting on campus. 

The Bloomberg team will split a $5,000 prize. Baker is also being awarded $5,000. The Northwestern team will split a $2,000 prize and the Daily Tar Heel a $1,000 prize.

“These stories exemplify the best of American journalism. Each piece highlights true shoe-leather reporting,” Rather said. “These journalists are unafraid to ask tough questions and are a credit to the craft. They were persistent, dedicated and uncovered the truth without fear or favor. A tip of the Stetson to the editorial teams behind these projects for recognizing the power and potential of the efforts of this year’s winners.”

Bloomberg’s articles from last year used on-the-ground reporting on three continents and analyzed two decades of U.S. export data.

Kocieniewski, Riley and Fan produced an investigative profile of Sig Sauer Inc., showing how the manufacturer sold hundreds of thousands of guns in Thailand over the last six years, fueling gun violence. 

Reel documented how the U.S. government is undermining its own policies. After the Commerce Department assumed oversight of civilian gun exports, the value of guns sold to Guatemala soared while murders rose after 11 years of decline. The National Security Council determined that such violence was a major contributor to illegal immigration to the U.S.

Brice and Smith took readers inside the Commerce Department’s work with the National Shooting Sports Foundation. In the first year of the partnership, department officials steered 370 buyers to the group's premier trade show; by January 2023, that number reached more than 3,200.

A week after Bloomberg reporters revealed the depth of the department’s support for the gun industry, the Biden administration halted exports of most U.S.-made firearms for 90 days. It also said it would review such support to ensure its backing doesn’t undermine U.S. policy interests.

“The entire team at Bloomberg is honored to win the Dan Rather Medal,” Riley said. “We’d like to thank both The University of Texas and the Moody College of Communication for recognizing the value and impact of our work, which forced the Biden administration to rethink the federal government's support for the gun industry's exports.”

Baker’s stories for The Stanford Daily revealed that Tessier-Lavigne’s labs had falsified research, including manipulating images and potentially research data. The articles resulted in Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation last year. Baker’s reporting made the national news, and he has already won a special Polk Award for his work.

“The impact of Theo Baker’s investigation and subsequent follow-ups transcends mere collegiate work — it stands alongside some of the most significant journalistic endeavors of the year,” one judge wrote of the articles. “The exposé not only illuminated the shoddy practices of the Stanford president but also laid bare shocking ethical lapses. The fallout was inevitable.”

Baker said it means the world to him to receive the medal and to have the support of people he looks up to and admires.

“Student journalists are buffeted on all sides — by administrations, outsiders, and at-times hostile communities,” he said. “Facing everything from legal intimidation to death threats, the work I’ve done over the past year has proven intense; I couldn’t do what I do without the backing of people who put their own names out there to say this journalism is important.”

The Daily Northwestern team’s coverage revealed that football players had carried out hazing rituals, including allegations of coerced sexual acts. The reporters were able to get multiple players to go into detail about the traumatic events, the judges said, which is difficult considering the nature of the events.

“These are people we go to school with, that we see walking about on a daily basis, and we never want to think there is anything horrible happening to our peers,” Markus said. “It’s been rewarding to see the story is making an impact, and hopefully this is preventing this from happening again.”

The third place collegiate prize went to Caitlyn Yaede, Carson Elm-Picard and Emmy Martin of The Daily Tar Heel for a front page that featured the raw text messages that students sent and received as they hid in lockdown during a fatal shooting on campus. A professor at UNC was shot and killed in his office, and a graduate student who worked with him was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting.

“Our newspaper’s front page reflected UNC students' fear and panic during the active shooter situation,” Daily Tar Heel editor-in-chief Emmy Martin said. “As we typed out those messages on the front page, it was heart-wrenching. They told the uncensored story of that day. And we knew we had to publish it.”

The Dan Rather Medals for News and Guts were created by The University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication, with Rather’s guidance, in 2020 to honor courageous journalism and to encourage reporters to pursue necessary stories.

Collegiate and professional winners were selected from a competitive pools of entries. Judges represented higher education and professional news media.

Rather started working as a journalist in his native Texas in 1950 and was the “CBS Evening News” anchor from 1981 to 2005. He has been a staunch supporter of the School of Journalism and Media at UT Austin and is a permanent member of Moody College’s Advisory Council.