Dart to the Lowell, Massachusetts, Sun, for beclouded judgment. For its December 27 issue, the paper produced a special commemorative section celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Marty Meehan, its hometown congressman—fifty-six besotted pages of gushing articles about the “life and legacy” of the saintly lawmaker, illustrated with more than five dozen photos and adorned with some sixty congratulatory ads solicited by The Sun from local businesses, organizations, and politicians. With the cost of those ads running between $750 and $6,000 a pop, of which 10 percent went to the Marty Meehan Educational Foundation, critics like Steve Bailey, a columnist for The Boston Globe, saw the shadow of the Staples Center fiasco that seven years ago fell over the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, however, The Sun was beaming all the way to the bank.

Laurel to the Santa Fe Reporter, for correctional journalism. In a long-running series on the state of the health care system in New Mexico prisons, the reporter Dan Frosch amassed more than enough evidence to give a nasty case of the jitters to both Wexford Health Sources, the private for-profit company (and campaign contributor) that’s been in charge of inmate health for the past two years, and to the New Mexico Corrections Department, which, despite Wexford’s checkered record in Wyoming and Florida, gave the company a $27 million contract. Among the particulars: unattended illnesses, unfilled prescriptions, unkept medical appointments, unclean facilities, unavailable supplies, and unconscionable retaliation against employees who complained. Saving money, in short, at far too high a human cost. By December, the paper was reporting that the search was on for a new health care provider: the cruel and unusual punishment was coming to an end.

Dart to the Herald-Sun, in Durham, North Carolina, for maintaining too thick a wall between the...

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