While Mayor Bloomberg was clearing Zuccotti Park with tear gas and riot police, Congress was sabotaging financial reform by slashing the budget of a key regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Sidney Award-winner Mary Bottari of PR Watch reports:

On Capitol Hill, a similar rout was taking place in the dead of night. In a fast move that deals a serious blow to a key regulator in charge of Wall Street derivatives trading, Obama’s budget request for CFTC was cut by more than a third by GOP legislators eager to kill any oversight of Wall Street.

According to Politico, the administration had sought $308 million for the new fiscal year, but the amount is expected to come in closer to $205 million. [Truthout]

With a smaller budget, the CFTC will be hard pressed to reign in the super-banks that control most of the $600 billion derivatives market, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs. The agency will struggle to keep up with Wall Street, let alone to prevent another financial crisis.

[Photo credit: Leo Reynolds, Creative Commons.]

The categories for the 2012 Hillman Prizes have been revised and updated to fit our rapidly changing media landscape. We have reorganized the categories to recognize new and emerging media.

The Hillman Prizes honor outstanding journalism in service of the common good, as they have done since 1950.

This year’s categories are as follows:

1. Book (bound volumes and ebooks) 

2. Newspaper Journalism (story or series/in print or online) 


3. Magazine Journalism (story or series/in print or online) 


4. Broadcast Journalism (story or series/at least 40 minutes in total length) Open to television, web TV, radio, podcast, and documentary film.



5. Web Journalism (publication/story or series/multimedia media project) Open to blogs, computer-assisted reporting, new investigative tools, mapping, crowd sourcing, and other multimedia media projects. Entries should feature a substantial text component.


6. Photojournalism (for a series of still photos, no single images) Entries in this category must include still photos, either alone, or as part of a multimedia package. For example, the winning entry of the 2011 Hillman Prize for Photojournalism featured still photos and web video.


7. Opinion Journalism (any medium) Includes all types of advocacy, opinion, and analysis, normally short-form and/or frequent, regardless of medium. Open to newspaper and magazine columnists, TV and radio presenters, podcasters, blogs, and bloggers.

Click here for more detailed submission guidelines and our online nomination form

If you have any questions about the new categories or the submission proccess, please contact me at the email address on the sidebar. Postmark deadline is January 31, 2012. Winners will be announced in April.

William K. Rashbaum reports in the New York Times:

The men came in one by one, sat down in the chair in front of the shop’s newest barber, and got their hair cut. They looked like customers at pretty much any other barber shop around the city. They paid, and went on their way.

But they were not like other customers. They were all undercover police officers.

And so was the man cutting their hair.

They were all in the shop, Who’s First Barber Shop II, on East 149th Street in the Hub section of the Bronx, trying to collect evidence during the early stages of what would become a sweeping ticket-fixing investigation, according to court documents, police records and people briefed on the case. The owner, a police officer named Jose Ramos, was believed to be aiding drug dealers.

But few of the undercover officers, it turns out, came back after their haircuts, according to one person with knowledge of the matter, and ended up contributing little to the eventual success of the investigation.

The reason they did not return had nothing to do with crime or criminals. It was simply because they did not like the way their colleague, the undercover barber, cut their hair, according to the person briefed on the case. And that is despite the fact that the Police Department was picking up the tab.

The NYPD paid for an officer to recertify himself as a barber and rent a chair in a barber owned by a fellow officer who was suspected of aiding drug dealers. Fellow officers from the Department of Internal Affairs were supposed to come in for haircuts and buy drugs. No drugs were purchased.

Part of the problem, according to anonymous sources, was that few of the undercover officers were willing to come back for a second haircut.  “The consensus was just that he gave bad haircuts,” one of the people briefed on the matter told the Times, “They just didn’t like his haircuts.”

Somewhere, Frank Serpico is shaking his head in disgust. You’d think undercover officers would be resigned to bad hair in the line of duty, mullets, even.

Or, maybe this is NYPD face-saving and nobody was dealing drugs out of the barber shop. According to the story, the undercover barber didn’t witness any significant criminal activity in the few days he worked in the shop during the summer of 2009.

[Photo credit: Diamondduste, Creative Commons.]

I’m very pleased to announce that Irin Carmon of Salon has won the November Sidney Award for her coverage of a proposed amendment to the Mississippi constitution that would redefine a fertilized egg as a person. Carmon reported that the measure, billed as an anti-abortion initiative, would also ban some forms of birth control, and chart a course to challenge Roe v. Wade.

Mississippians vote today, Tuesday the 8th, on Initiative 26. Other states have voted on so-called “personhood” initiatives, but this is the first time such a measure stands a chance of passing. Both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor have endorsed the measure. Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney said last month that he’d support a hypothetical personhood amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Carmon’s in-depth reporting from Mississippi shaped the national conversation on the Mississippi “personhood” vote. She was one of the first journalists to state plainly that the measure would ban not only abortion but also any form of birth control that destroys a fertilized egg.

Carmon exposed ambivalence and basic factual confusion among leading proponents of Initiative 26. Would the personhood amendment ban the Pill? Nobody would give Carmon a straight answer. The pro-personhood contingent has good reason to equivocate. The birth control pill is, after all, very popular. Then again, for many prospective supporters of ovum “personhood,” banning birth control is a feature, not a bug.

Medical science says that birth control pills work by suppressing ovulation, as evidenced by the fact that women who skip doses, and therefore ovulate on the Pill, can still get pregnant. High-dose birth control for emergency contraception (“the morning after pill”) works exclusively by suppressing ovulation. But there’s no guarantee that legislators interpreting a sweeping “personhood” amendment would be guided by the best science.

Read my interview with Carmon on the making of her prizewinning feature at The Backstory.

[Photo credit: brains the head, Creative Commons.]