Storm Lake Times congratulates Register’s Dominick for her Pulitzer Prize.
Our hearty congratulations go out to Andie Dominick of The Des Moines Register for winning the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.
This marks the second straight year that an Iowa newspaper has been picked for this most prestigious national journalism award — we won the Pulitzer last April. We know that Michael Gartner of Des Moines, who won in 1997 for the Ames Tribune, is gratified that The Register was honored.
Dominick won for a series of editorials in 2017 on the Branstad/Reynolds privatization of the state Medicaid system. Nothing could be more important in the Iowa conversation. We followed her work, and the excellent front-line work of Register reporters, in covering what we consider a mental health and fiscal crisis that goes unaddressed. We believe, based on our own estimations confirmed by state budget analysts, that Iowa is $400 million worse off today than it was before Medicaid was taken private. Nursing homes have closed, patients have been denied care and health care providers are waiting forever to get paid. Nothing has been done to fix it, other than to pay insurers more.
We won for a series of editorials on the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit and the nexus of agriculture and the environment in the Raccoon River watershed. Again, no topics could be more important than drinking water, agricultural productivity, public health and climate change. Not much has been done about that since 2016, either.
But something has changed: the conversation in Iowa. Because of newspapers with a point, Gov. Reynolds must explain how Medicaid will be made whole. Iowans deserve an answer as the gubernatorial campaign takes shape. Likewise, the ag community is finally taking surface water pollution seriously. At least we are talking about it and throwing some money at pilot projects.
Those topics simply would not receive the same sort of consideration were it not for serious journalism. You might think that Medicaid can be more efficiently administered by the private sector, but you deserve to know that there are some terrible kinks that refuse to be worked out so far. You can believe that agri-industry cares about stewardship, but it is important to know where the Raccoon’s trouble starts in the drainage tile inundated by increasingly extreme precipitation.
We would not know about the depth of Medicaid’s problems without The Des Moines Register. The state would not have as good of an understanding of the complexities of surface water pollution were it not for the accumulated work of The Storm Lake Times over the past quarter-century.
Iowa journalists are among the very best. That’s what the Pulitzer board is telling us (and that we have an especially vigorous debate in Iowa). And that is something that you can count on — it is happening all over the state in print and online every week. We are proud to stand with Andie Dominick and Michael Gartner in that tradition.
