ProPublica was honored with the 2024 Selden Ring Award Monday in Wallis Annenberg Hall for their project “Friends of the Court,” which brought to light the unreported gift-giving from billionaire donors to Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
The Ring Foundation has partnered with the USC Annenberg School of Journalism to present the award for 35 years. It is the largest journalism prize in America, granting $50,000 to the recipient journalists or organizations. The award is presented to published investigative journalists whose reporting has brought a notable and tangible impact on local, national and international communities.
USC Annenberg Dean Willow Bay introduced the award and highlighted the 35-year-long partnership with The Ring Foundation, which also established an investigative reporting fellowship program at USC in 2017.
“This remarkable commitment not only ensures that we are continuing to honor and celebrate extraordinary investigative journalism, but it also means that we are able to train the next generation of Selden Ring Award winners,” she said. “I’d like to express our deep gratitude for the partnership.”
Gordon Stables, the director of the school of journalism, introduced the reporters and the panelists and presented the award.
“This is one of the best days of the year,” he said. “This is a day that we get to celebrate journalism that is both remarkable in quality and has demonstrated impact.”
The ceremony included a panel discussion with the reporters who broke the story — Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy and Alex Mierjeski. Kirsten Berg, who was also on the team, was not present.
Through analyzing flight records and poring over thousands of documents and public records — while also scouring the internet for leads — the team found that Justice Thomas had received luxury vacations from billionaire Harlan Crow for decades, raising ethical questions about the Supreme Court justices’ behavior.
After the publication of the story and dozens of members of Congress pushing for ethics reform, the Supreme Court adopted an ethics code for the first time in its history. One of the first codes reads that a justice “should neither knowingly lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance the private interests of the Justice or others nor knowingly convey or permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the Justice.”
“It’s worth noting, if you contrast the judiciary with other branches, all of these rules that you face in the executive branch, all these rules you face in Congress weren’t really created out of the goodness of the affected entities,” Kaplan said. “Most of the ethics rules in the federal government were created in response to Watergate.”
Ring Foundation Fellows and journalism master’s students Accalia Rositani and Raymon Troncoso were part of the panel. They asked the reporters about their process and how ProPublica approached the reporting without access to judiciary records.
“Congress, in its wisdom, exempted both itself and the judiciary from that law [Freedom of Information Act],” Elliot said. “So you can’t just ask for public records; they won’t give them to you. There’s sort of a culture of secrecy at the court itself. We were able to piece a lot of this together by really kind of coming at it from the outset.”
One of the ways they found an outside lead was through an oil painting commissioned by Crow.
“Some billionaires who we’ve tried to report on are incredibly reclusive and have a tight circle around them and basically have impenetrable lives,” Elliot said. “But for whatever reason, [Harlan Crow’s] gifts seem to have this compulsion to document his relationships. So we came across an oil painting he had commissioned that shows him with Justice Thomas and a few other kind of important people at one of his estates in upstate New York and, you know, ended up calling the guy that painted it, and he talked to us and told us about the circumstances.”
During the panel, Kaplan emphasized fairness and accuracy, especially when reporting on individual people.
“We reached out to the Court ahead of time, and we sent an incredibly detailed letter with every single fact we were planning to publish,” Kaplan said. “For all the students here, this is a fundamental process for making sure you’re being fair to the person at the center of your story and then also for just giving as much contextualization as you possibly can.”
Kaplan said that the most concrete impact of the reporting is the adoption of an ethics code.
“This is a step that people have been calling on them to do for well over a decade,” Kaplan said. “It’s significantly less than really, any other government official has, but they do have rules now. And that’s, I think, a sign of how it’s being felt inside the court.”