AP wins Pulitzer for fish slavery series

A team of Associated Press reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service based on its international investigation of the fishing industry in Southeast Asia that freed more than 2,000 slaves and traced the seafood they caught to supermarkets and pet food providers across the United States.

The reporting by Esther Htusan, Margie Mason, Robin McDowell and Martha Mendoza also led to the arrests of a dozen people, the seizure of ships worth millions of dollars and the introduction of legislation in the U.S. Congress to create greater transparency from food suppliers.

“The AP journalists accomplished two goals that had eluded others,” AP senior vice president and executive editor Kathleen Carroll wrote in her nomination letter to the Pulitzer judges. “They found captive slaves, countering industry claims that the problems had been solved. And they followed specific loads of slave-caught seafood to supply chains of particular brands and stores, so companies no longer could deny culpability.”

The reporters put themselves at personal risk as they investigated. They were chased by company officials threatening to ram them with their speedboat after fishermen aboard a trawler begged for their help. For four days, they hid in the back of a truck to log the names of ships loaded with tainted seafood, hiding from gunmen from the fish mafia.

The reporters tracked the trucks to cold storage and processing factories and, using customs records and business databases, traced the cargo to U.S. distributors.

Read Talking Biz News’s Q&A with Mason about the stories.

Inside Climate News was also a finalist in the public service category for its  probe into a major oil company’s decades-long misinformation campaign to muddy the debate over climate change.

In addition, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Michael Corkery and Robert Gebeloff of The New York Times were finalists in the investigative reporting category for their inquiry into a corporate strategy to add clauses to millions of contracts, stripping consumers and employees of their rights to challenge unfair business practices in court.

Jonathan D. Rockoff, Joseph Walker, Jeanne Whalen, Peter Loftus and Ed Silverman of The Wall Street Journal were finalists in the explanatory reporting category for their lucid explanation of how pharmaceutical companies employ secretive tactics to raise drug prices relentlessly, at great cost to patients and taxpayers.