To political insiders, he was Kashflow, a well-connected consultant with the moxie to bring businessmen and politicians together with the promise of a big score.


While offering those deals, records show, the FBI was paying Willis handsomely.


Records obtained by The Commercial Appeal show agents paid Willis $6,000 a month — $72,000 a year — to help bring bribery charges against former state senator John Ford, Sen. Kathryn Bowers, former senator Roscoe Dixon and others.


Perrusquia, who has been one of the most prominent reporters in Tennessee Waltz coverage this year, said his “lucky stroke” on the Willis story came when he logged onto PACER, the federal court records system, and saw Willis’ name mentioned in connection with another case. “It kind of sounds like they’re talking about this investigation,” Perrusquia thought, before sending an Ole Miss student to check out some courthouse documents for him in the neighboring state. The student struck gold, finding a federal probation report that laid out crucial details of Willis’ work for the FBI.


“I think a lot of reporters had been on PACER, but whatever happened, they hadn’t gone down there and checked out the courthouse,” said Perrusquia, 46, a projects and investigative reporter who has been with the Commercial Appeal for nearly 17 years.


3) Perception vs. reality on global warming


With the United States having spent much of the recent two-week United Nations environmental conference in Montreal opposing attempts to start fresh talks on improving the effectiveness of a 1992 international climate change accord, and with the New York Times reporting (subscription required) in a recent series on the thawing Arctic that many scientists “have concluded that the momentum behind human-caused warming, combined with the region’s tendency to amplify change, has put the familiar Arctic past the point of no return,” Sandi Doughton’s comprehensive examination of global warming in the Seattle Times this fall stood out for its clarity, scope, and timeliness.


In a special report entitled “The truth about global warming,” Doughton set the record straight, showing how there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming but that the message “doesn’t seem to be getting through to the public and policy-makers.” With Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, calling global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people” and a Gallup Poll last June finding that “only about half of Americans believe the effects of global warming have already started,” Doughton reported, many still believe that there is a strong ongoing debate among scientists on the issue. In actuality, there is almost universal scientific agreement, Doughton wrote, pointing to one science historian who analyzed 1,000 research papers on climate change between 1993 and 2003 and found that “Not a single study explicitly rejected the idea that people are warming the planet,” and to another who said the subject was extensively reviewed and debated like no other in the history of science as the consensus built.


Doughton also examined why skeptics, often with funding from coal and oil interests, tend to dominate the discussion — aided by journalists who give them equal coverage even though they are “on the fringe of legitimate science.”


“My goal was sort of to explain to people that fact — that there really isn’t a lot of scientific disagreement on this issue, and that the people who are generally presented as skeptics have some vested interest or some conflict of interest,” said Doughton, 50, who has been at the Times three years, and in journalism for 20. “I got a huge amount of reaction, probably more than I’ve gotten on any story. I’ve probably received hundreds and hundreds of emails and calls.”


An excerpt:


1995 was the hottest year on record until it was eclipsed by 1997 — then 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. Melting ice has driven Alaska Natives from seal-hunting areas used for generations. Glaciers around the globe are shrinking so rapidly many could disappear before the middle of the century.


As one study after another has pointed to carbon dioxide and other man-made emissions as the most plausible explanation, the cautious community of science has embraced an idea initially dismissed as far-fetched. The result is a convergence of opinion rarely seen in a profession where attacking each other’s work is part of the process. Every major scientific body to examine the evidence has come to the same conclusion: The planet is getting hotter; man is to blame; and it’s going to get worse.


2) Telling the soldiers’ stories


Nearly 16,000 American soldiers have now been wounded in Iraq, but few stories detailing how they were injured or their subsequent struggles to rehabilitate themselves have been told. In a gritty October article for the Cleveland Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine, reporter Christopher Evans did just that.


“Wounded Warriors” profiled four local veterans of the Iraq war: Jim Alunni, “a big, burly scooter dude” and firefighter-paramedic who every now and then “runs his hand down the back of his head, and picks out an infinitesimal piece of shrapnel, a tiny forget-me-not from the Iraqi car bomb that almost ate him for lunch”; Jessica Clements, a mortgage loan processor and a “slight, sharp-boned woman with a gorgeous smile” who now has trouble remembering the simplest things, let alone how she received a traumatic brain injury in Iraq; Dana Reagan, a truck driver-dispatcher and a “wiry, rhapsodic raconteur [who] combines facial expressions and hand gestures with breathless sound effects” when he tells war stories; and Vic Lewis, a firefighter-paramedic who calls survivor guilt “the real deal,” wondering why he lived and hoping that he has a purpose, that “Maybe you have to do something before you go to the Great Beyond.”