AP’s series on slave fishing wins Selden Ring Award

Reporters from the Associated Press have won USC Annenberg’s 2016 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, for a series of stories that showed how seafood sold in U.S. grocery stores and restaurants had been produced by slaves.

Their work prompted reforms and prosecutions – and the release of more than 2,000 people who had been held captive in horrific circumstances.

“Seafood from Slaves,” by Esther Htusan, Margie Mason, Robin McDowell and Martha Mendoza, has shaken up the $7 billion-a-year Thai seafood export industry. The journalists not only tracked down captives and documented their conditions; they followed specific loads of slave-caught seafood to supply chains of particular brands and stores.

The $35,000 annual Selden Ring Award, which has been presented for 27 years by the School of Journalism at USC Annenberg, honors the year’s outstanding work in investigative journalism that led to direct results.

From the judges’ statement:

“Slavery at sea has been the subject of substantial journalism before, but the AP team went to new lengths to expose an abusive system from start to finish. They followed the trail to a tiny island in Indonesia, giving voice to those being held against their will and forced to work for nothing. That led to a follow-up story, documenting the freeing of captives spurred by the original report:

‘At first the men filtered in by twos and threes, hearing whispers of a possible rescue. Then, as the news rippled around island, hundreds of weathered former and current slaves with long, greasy hair and tattoos streamed from their trawlers, down the hills, even out of the jungle, running toward what they had only dreamed of for years: Freedom.’

‘The Burmese men were among hundreds of migrant workers revealed in an Associated Press investigation to have been lured or tricked into leaving their countries and forced into catching fish for consumers around the world, including the United States. In response to the AP’s findings, Indonesian government officials visited the island village of Benjina on Friday and found brutal conditions, down to an ‘enforcer’ paid to beat men up. They offered immediate evacuation.’

The AP team kept going from there. They logged the names of ships carrying seafood caught by slaves and used satellite data to track where they went and which companies sold the cargo. Reporters watched trucks being unloaded, following them to cold storage and processing factories that shipped the seafood abroad. Bit by bit, they put together a list of companies selling cargo caught by slaves and then connected that cargo to U.S. distributors.”