CNS | Philip Merrill College of Journalism

CNS Record 2000

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Annapolis bureau reporter Sean Mussenden and D.C. bureau reporter Mark K. Matthews broke national news when their reporting showed that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration erroneously reported the number of deaths linked to faulty Firestone tires. They found that the two Maryland fatalities on the list were actually dead pets, not people. NHTSA admitted its mistake and revised its report, earning Mussenden and Matthews a regional Mark of Excellence first place for spot-news reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Reporters from both CNS bureaus collaborated with Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau to contact hundreds of the nation's presidential electors after the contested 2000 election. They found electors, suddenly thrust in the spotlight, who stridently defended their candidates but had some questions about the Electoral College. The story ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer and other papers.

Chris Frates pored through legislative records to report that only 32 of the state's 188 legislators had filed conflict-of-interest statements in 2000, and that 33 lawmakers had never filed a report, despite ongoing ethics scandals in the capital. For his painstaking work on "Poor Disclosure," Frates was named a finalist in the Investigative Reporters and Editors national Investigative Reporting Awards for students in 2000.

Kathryn Wenner broke the news in spring 2000 that the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant was the first plant in the nation to be relicensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Sandy Alexander crunched Census numbers to show how the state population will age, county by county, how few Marylanders were preparing for expected longer lives, and what policy problems that presents.

Ananda Shorey reported on a Maryland program that uses acupuncture in prisons to treat inmates for their addictions, one of the first such programs in the nation. Her writing in the spring 2000 bureau won 14th place nationally in the 2000-2001 Hearst feature-writing competition.

Kent German showed that the MARC commuter system was among the worst in the country for on-time performance and that the Army was forced to clean up a portion of the Aberdeen Proving Ground where it had been testing artillery shells tipped with depleted uranium.

Erin Medea reported that little Talbot County on the Eastern Shore had one of the highest rates of parricide in the nation, after 1996 and 1997 incidents in which Easton kids killed both parents.

Nicole Morgan analyzed federal contracting numbers to show that $7 billion of the state's $11.7 billion in federal contracts in 1999 were clustered in 10 ZIP codes, most in the Washington suburbs.

Kathryn Wenner analyzed 15 years of state hunting data to show for the first time that the most-common accident was not gun- or alcohol-related but due to hunters falling out of tree stands. She also broke the news that the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant was the first plant in the nation to be relicensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Rachel Mansour wrote about the lack of dental care on Maryland's Eastern Shore, a predicament that too often left children with long trips to Baltimore for oral surgery that would have been unnecessary with proper dental care.

Leah Carlson's education coverage found a proposal to initiate prayer in Maryland public schools, backed by testimony from the son of famous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, and traced the rise and fall of charter school legislation.

Lolly Bowean's stories on geriatric prisoners took readers inside the Maryland House of Corrections in Jessup for a visit to "the old man's dorm," pointing up the inevitable outcomes of mandatory sentences and truth-in-sentencing laws. She also turned in a first-rate look at high infant mortality rates in seemingly prosperous Maryland.

Debra Hoffman took a closer look at proposals to regulate the common health industry practice of reusing "single-use" medical devices, finding no harm from this practice and reporting that the medical device with the most reported problems was the lowly no-tech cotton swab.

John Croft reported on House Speaker Casper Taylor's efforts to bring state-subsidized air service to his Western Maryland district, at the expense of limo operators there, and on how Maryland's housing boom is spelling trouble for small, general aviation airports.