Houston Press' Spivak recognized for investigative reporting
Banjo Jones notes that Houston Press reporter Todd Spivak was recently recognized by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) for his investigative work on METRO.
Here's the mention from IRE's website:
Todd Spivak of the Houston Press for “Run Over by Metro.” This alternative weekly’s investigation into the Metropolitan Transit Authority in Houston looked at fatalities and serious injuries caused by the public bus system. It found that the agency rejected the safety recommendations of its own investigators, hounded victims to settle accidents and misrepresented its accident statistics.
Spivak's 2006 article is available here. Here's a quick excerpt:
The Houston Press has spent the last four months independently investigating Metro's bus operations. It took an appeal to the Attorney General of Texas's Open Records Division to open up Metro's records. In examining thousands of public documents and interviewing more than a dozen recent survivors of Metro accidents and families whose relatives were killed by Metro buses, the Press found repeated instances of the following:
• Metro rejecting the safety recommendations of its own investigators
• Metro offering bus accident victims much lower amounts to settle cases than what was recommended by its own claims committee
• Metro hounding victims to settle their cases, even approaching them to sign settlement forms as they lay in their hospital beds
• Metro not offering any form of apology to victims even when their bus drivers caused the accidents
• Metro creatively interpreting accident statistics in ways that enable it to misrepresent the actual number of bus crashes occurring each year
• Metro taking no responsibility for accidents incurred by First Transit, a private subcontractor that operates one-sixth of Metro's buses and consistently posts a higher accident rate.
Further to the bolded portion above, it's worth noting again METRO CEO Frank "Procurement Disaster" Wilson's recent assertion that the organization operates "in a completely transparent manner." Right!
Who knows, further scrutiny of METRO could pay more dividends for local journalists, especially given Wilson's past ethical issues and the recent news that METRO will be moving forward with public-private partnerships.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 03/31/07 02:45 PM | Houston Media | Print | Comments (1)
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