EXCERPT FROM: Journal Sentinel
By Sharif Durhams
Journal Sentinel reporter Raquel Rutledge, whose stories exposed fraud and lawbreaking within Wisconsin's child-care subsidy program, has won a George Polk Award, one of journalism's highest honors.
Rutledge's "Cashing in on Kids," series, an ongoing investigation into the state's Wisconsin Shares system, "led to a government shakeup, criminal probes, indictments and new laws aimed at keeping criminals out of the day care business," the Polk awards committee said in a statement.
"Ms. Rutledge wrote nearly 50 stories about a $350-million system that was designed to assist low-wage working parents, but was, in fact, a hotbed of criminal activity that repeatedly put children in danger."
Rutledge, who won the award in the state reporting category, will be among the recipients honored at the annual George Polk Awards luncheon April 8 at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.
She is one of 13 recipients of the award this year, a group that includes a reporter kidnapped and held by the Taliban for more than seven months as well as the anonymous videographers who taped, then broadcast the horrific images of a young woman dying from a gunshot wound during a post-election protest in Iran.
The George Polk Awards - which memorialize a CBS correspondent slain while covering the civil war in Greece in 1948 - have been administered by Long Island University since 1949.