Polk Award Winners: Michael Grabell and Bernice Yeung

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Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Michael Grabell and Bernice Yeung are investigative reporters at ProPublica. They won the George Polk Award for Health Reporting for their coverage of the meatpacking industry's response to the pandemic, including their feature "The Battle for Waterloo." This is the final part of our week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:55.4	Oh, now it's good. Hey, too, Rob. Nice to hear your voice, too. Huddle without the hassle. In Slack.
1:09.3	Hey, it's Max. And this is the last in our weeklong series of conversations with this year's
1:16.2	Polk Award winners. I love these interviews. It's fun to do something different and to go really
1:22.2	deep on one story. And for this fifth and final episode, I talked to Bernice Young and Michael
1:29.0	Graybell, their two reporters at ProPublica, and then on the Polk Award for Health Reporting for
1:34.2	a series of investigations they did into the meat packing industry and how the meat packing
1:39.5	industry handled COVID-19. Michael has been reporting on the meat packing industry for years,
1:44.9	but over the course of 2020, the two of them teamed up and did a whole series of different kinds
1:49.8	of pieces, really trying to take stock of the impact that COVID outbreaks in the meat packing
1:55.0	industry had had across the country. At one point in July of 2020, 8% of all infections in the
2:02.7	United States could be traced to meat packing plants. It's just staggering. So they did this work
2:07.7	all year, but this conversation we focused on a piece they put out at the end of the year in December
2:12.9	about one plant in Waterloo, Iowa, which was the site of the nation's largest known workplace
2:19.8	outbreak of any kind. And the piece that they did is just it's incredible. It's really sort of two
2:25.8	stories in one. The story of this outbreak, which were basically lots of people in the town,
2:33.5	including the mayor and the sheriff were pushing Tyson and pushing the governor of Iowa to do
	...

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