Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

In 2021, state and local governments across the United States began receiving billions of dollars from settlements related to the opioid epidemic. The funds, the result of multistate litigation against more than a dozen companies that sold prescription painkillers, were intended to be used for addiction prevention, treatment, and recovery. The agreements outlined permissible uses for the money, which will be paid out annually until at least 2040, and suggested guardrails to ensure it was not misused. 

What has happened with all that cash? Aneri Pattani, a senior correspondent at KFF Health News, has been reporting since 2022 on how it’s not being used quite as intended. “This is one of the biggest money, health, and government accountability stories of our time,” she said. “The addiction-and-overdose crisis has killed and continues to kill millions of people. The amount of money coming is staggering. It’s almost sixty billion dollars over a long time frame, and almost every local government in the country is getting some.” Since 2024, she has worked with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and with Shatterproof, a national nonprofit focused on addiction, to build an annual database documenting expenditures across states. That report, she noted, has become the primary data used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for how opioid settlement money is spent.

Last month, Pattani published the latest piece in her multiyear series investigating the distribution of opioid settlement funds, a collaboration with journalists from three local newsrooms in Louisiana—Drew Hawkins of the Gulf States Newsroom, Katie Fernelius of Verite News, and Alena Maschke of The Current. 

In Louisiana, law enforcement receives 20 percent of the settlement, the largest allocation to local police nationwide, amounting to more than eight million dollars for sheriffs in the past five years. Yet they are not required to report how they use the money. To find out, the reporting team contacted all sixty-four sheriffs in the state over five months, often filing public records requests, and called in experts for a panel review. Together, they compiled the first public accounting of the spending, and found that more than five million dollars, or roughly 66 percent, of the funds were not used appropriately. 

“The fact that we were able to get more information from more parish departments than the actual body that oversees them really speaks to how great of an effort this was,” Hawkins said. “We just wouldn’t leave them alone.” Hawkins, whose coverage area includes Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, told me that KFF Health News has been an invaluable resource in his reporting, allowing “an understanding at a larger scale.” 

KFF Health News, which allows outlets to republish its work for free, has made effective use of the collaborative model. “We let other places republish our content for free. The idea is health policy stories should be as widely accessible as possible,” Pattani told me. “Part of my work on this series is not just to cover it myself, but to also help local reporters cover it.”

Last year, the Baltimore Sun fired Kevin Kallaugher—pen name KAL—a Pulitzer-nominated cartoonist who had worked for the paper for thirty-one years. Then, this summer, Sun readers began to notice the appearance of new cartoons rendered by artificial intelligence; the most recent one depicted a group of smiling people giving the mayor their thumbs-up. (A female figure seemed to be giving one and a half thumbs.) In response, last week, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists published an open letter to The Sun, condemning “the use of AI for its theft from artists, its misuse of our planet’s resources, and its threat to original, creative thought.” Kallaugher chimed in, too, writing on Substack, “As angry as I am, I am also heartened by the outrage shared by cartoon colleagues and cartoon fans from around the globe.”

Love it or hate it, Kallaugher told CJR, “when you have a cartoon that’s signed by a human, people reading it understand they have this relationship with a human, and that engagement means something valuable.” AI-generated cartoons simply borrow from thousands of drawings “to spit out uninteresting, insipid artwork.” 

That may be the point, Kallaugher suggested: in this political climate, “skins are thin and fuses are short.” In June, this column flagged that David Smith—who owns The Sun and serves as executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group—had been making other moves that tilted the paper’s political direction. Madeleine O’Neill, a former Sun reporter who was fired for raising concerns, said, “The people doing this reporting for the Baltimore Sun are not real journalists—and by that, I don’t mean they don’t have the qualifications. I mean they don’t have the appropriate frame of mind for asking these questions.”

The same problem applies to editorial cartoons, whose artfulness requires human thought. “It’s not just about the artwork, right? It’s about clever ideas, the effective use of humor, and satire,” Kallaugher said. “All those things are very complex, and machines haven’t got that yet.”

In recent months, across harrowing stories about Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, the Minnesota Star Tribune, Documented, and many others have all turned to a common source in their coverage. The Deportation Data Project, based out of the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA, has provided an essential journalism service, as the only resource collecting detailed immigration enforcement datasets in one place, enabling reporters to track what’s happening in their communities. 

The project began in the fall of 2014, when Trump’s first presidential campaign began to pick up. The cofounders—a group of academics and lawyers knowledgeable about the Department of Homeland Security, the Freedom of Information Act, and data visualization—decided that “it was going to be really important for people to understand the changes that were to happen in DHS as they were happening,” Graeme Blair, a codirector of the initiative, said, “and not just afterward.”

When Blair and his colleagues set up the platform, they imagined many possible users. “But I think journalists are particularly important because that’s how data is going to be translated and communicated to the public,” he said. Individual stories—about a raid, or a family under threat—can, in some cases, reflect a wider phenomenon. But in the absence of numbers, it can be difficult to “understand whether that person’s story is exceptional or represents a broader pattern.” 

Every day, staff at the Deportation Data Project answer ten to fifteen questions from journalists. They have also built tools that allow anyone to chart the data. While a lot of data reporters have been digging into figures at a national level, Blair and his team “really wanted local journalists covering their particular city and state to be able to do local analyses” of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement is doing in their backyard. “That was just going to be a really effective way,” he said, “of getting this information quickly into people’s hands.”

If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here. To receive this and other CJR newsletters in your inbox, please click here.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.