October 23, 2003 - Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prizes: Who is Russell Carollo and why does the Peace Corps believe he will provide "a misleading picture" of volunteer safety and security?
Peace Corps Online: Peace Corps News: Special Reports: October 26, 2003: Dayton Daily News reports on Peace Corps Safety and Security: Archive of Primary Source Stories: October 23, 2003 - Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prizes: Who is Russell Carollo and why does the Peace Corps believe he will provide "a misleading picture" of volunteer safety and security?
By Admin1 (admin) (pool-151-196-110-177.balt.east.verizon.net - 151.196.110.177) on Thursday, October 23, 2003 - 1:05 am: Edit Post

Who is Russell Carollo and why does the Peace Corps believe he will provide "a misleading picture" of volunteer safety and security?




Fair and Balanced or a Witch-Hunt against the Peace Corps?

Russell Carollo of the Dayton Daily News has written a seven part series about the Peace Corps that is scheduled to begin on October 26. Why is the Peace Corps so concerned about the story that they took the unprecedented step of issuing a Press Release to the National Peace Corps Association on October 18 that warned that after numerous discussions with him, they believed that his upcoming story "will provide a misleading picture of the Peace Corps and Peace Corps Volunteer service, particularly with respect to safety and security?"

Who is Russell Carollo? What kind of stories does he write? How does he research his stories? Is he credible? Read our special report on Mr. Carollo and make up your mind if RPCVs can expect his story to be "fair and balanced" or a witch-hunt against the Peace Corps. Then come back to our web site next week after you read his story and leave your comments on whether of not his stories provide an accurate and representative view of Peace Corps Volunteers at:

Who is Russell Carollo?*

* This link was active on the date it was posted. PCOL is not responsible for broken links which may have changed.


Who is Russell Carollo?

Who is Russell Carollo?



Russell Carollo has been a project reporter for the Dayton Daily News for eleven years. He has also worked at newspapers in Tacoma and Spokane, Washington and Jackson, Mississippi. He is a native of New Orleans and has a journalism degree from Louisiana State University. In 1998 he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series on military medicine.

In 2000 Mr. Carollo won the thirteenth annual Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the National Defense. The $5,000 award recognizes journalists whose high standards for accuracy and substance help foster a better public understanding of national defense issues. President Ford presented the award at a National Press Club luncheon on June 5, 2000.

How does he research his stories?

Mr. Carollo’s winning series, "Falling from the Sky," examines aviation safety in the military. The judges were impressed with Mr. Carollo’s resourcefulness and the sustained energy that he poured into his investigation. His documentary information included data obtained from more than 150 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. He obtained and analyzed databases and reports from military legal investigations. Much of this data had never before been released, and once obtained, were complex and not easily analyzed. He also interviewed more than 150 people including pilots, mechanics, accident investigators, and relatives of accident victims. The judges all agreed that Mr. Carollo’s series explores an important issue relating to U.S. military readiness – a topic of central concern to defense policy makers for several years. Like many good investigative reports, Mr. Carollo’s series raises a number of troubling and provocative questions. Some of these questions may be answered more completely in the future. But many of them would not have been highlighted as topics for further research and discussion without Mr. Carollo’s groundbreaking work.


Is Russell Carollo a credible reporter?



Caption: Columbia University President George Rupp (right) presents Russell Carollo (left) and Jeff Nesmith with the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

Russell Carollo wins Pulitzer Prize

Russell Carollo wins 1998 Pulitzer Prize for a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs, Five thousand dollars ($5,000). is awarded to Russell Carollo and Jeff Nesmith of the Dayton Daily News for their reporting that disclosed dangerous flaws and mismanagement in the military health care system and prompted reforms.

Russell Carollo, a native of suburban New Orleans, has a journalism degree from Louisiana State University and a history degree from Southeastern Louisiana University. He is a former University of Michigan journalism fellow, and he recently completed a two-week fellowship in Japan awarded by the International Center for Journalists.

He has worked for more than six years as a special projects reporter at the Dayton Daily News. He also has worked for newspapers in Washington state, Mississippi and Louisiana. In addition to his special projects assignments in the United States, Carollo has covered stories in Bosnia and in Zaire.

In the past six years, Carollo has been a Pulitzer finalist twice, and he has won three Investigative Reporters and Editors awards (one a Gold Medal), Harvard University's Goldsmith Award, the White House Correspondents' Association Edgar A. Poe award, the Society of Professional Journalists national award for investigative reporting, a John Hancock award and several state and local journalism awards.


What kind of Stories does Russell Carollo write?



In 1998 Russell Carollo and Jeff Nesmith were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their series on "Mismanagement in the Military Health Care System" that appeared in the Dayton Daily News. Read this excerpt from the series about a physician who worked as a contractor for US Navy who was accused of "gross negligence, repeated acts of negligence and incompetence" involving his care to three patients.

Mismanagement in the Military Health Care System - Questionable Doctors Hired

Mismanagement in the Military Health Care System - Questionable Doctors Hired

* Short on doctors of its own, the military must hire civilian physicians, a practice that can attract doctors with problems

Russell Carollo and Jeff Nesmith

October 5, 1997

Dayton Daily News (OH)

Brian E. Bolin helped his country fight in Operation Desert Storm, trusting the Navy to care for the sick wife he left behind.

Bolin returned safe, with ribbons to pin to his uniform. His wife, Rita, didn't survive the Navy hospital in Oakland, Calif.

For months, doctors working for the Navy treated her for a hormone imbalance, Bolin said. Then Rita Bolin collapsed in a shower - the cancer in her body so advanced that her blood covered a shower stall. She went to a civilian hospital, where her cancer was diagnosed in minutes.

"If it was caught earlier, she'd be alive today," said Bolin, now stationed at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington. "The only thing I could think was: Why didn't they (the military) do this before?"

The doctor in charge of Rita Bolin's care didn't wear a uniform. He was a civilian doctor, one of hundreds the services employ to run emergency rooms, perform surgeries and deliver babies at military hospitals and clinics across the world.

"The reason the military hires them is the military is understaffed. ... They don't have the money to provide the quality of care and level of care they need to provide for all their military personnel and dependents, so they've had to hire outside doctors," said Robert I. Deutscher, a former Army attorney now specializing in suing the military for medical malpractice.

This practice can attract doctors with problems.

"The United States government has always been known to contract not for quality but for price," said John Caldwell, former special assistant U.S. attorney and chief of the western United States torts branch for the Army Claims Service. "With the lowest bidder, you limit yourself to those doctors who cannot practice elsewhere."

Rita Bolin's doctor was James J. Kwee. In seven years, he completed college and medical school at the University of Airlangga in Indonesia, where he earned his first medical license. He came to the United States and completed a residency at Baptist Hospital in Little Rock, Ark., in 1975.

In 1979, the complaints started - and never stopped for more than 15 years.

The first lawsuit in Arkansas came from a woman who claimed she underwent a "complete castration" even though she never gave her consent for the surgery. Three years after that suit was filed, a pregnant woman claimed she went to Kwee's clinic with a high insulin level.

"There were never any tests done during the pregnancy until she went into shock for diabetes," said Janet L. Pulliam, the attorney who represented Ceasar and Dorothy Alexander in a lawsuit against Kwee and other doctors.

Ceasar Alexander, now living with his wife in Nebraska, cried recalling the day 15 years ago when he rushed his wife to the hospital to give birth, only to learn their unborn daughter wouldn't survive.

"I carried that baby from the room down to the morgue and laid it on the table down there," Alexander said. "We wanted a little girl. She was beautiful."

The case was settled for an undisclosed amount.

In all, six lawsuits were filed against Kwee in Little Rock, two by the same woman. All except the Alexanders' were dismissed for various reasons.

In late 1988, Kwee moved to California, where he was sued six more times. One case, settled for $200,000, was filed by the mother of a 32-year-old woman who died.

But lawsuits weren't his only problem in California.

In February 1996, the medical board accused Kwee of "gross negligence, repeated acts of negligence and incompetence" involving his care to three patients.

Two of the patients were young women who died, and the third was a baby born with severe cerebral palsy. While the baby was in the womb, Kwee tried to reposition the head with a vacuum extractor, an action the board called "a significant departure from the standard of care."

Kwee was put on probation for five years, and he was given 15 days to tell his employers about the probation. He also was ordered to get 40 hours of additional training every year during his probation, undergo a clinical examination in obstetrics administered by the California medical board and have another doctor monitor his practice, providing the board with periodic reports on his progress.

Last month, shortly before Kwee was scheduled to undergo a compentency examination as part of his probation, he surrendered his California license. Kwee, who used the name James-Yen T. Kwee on his California license, still holds a valid license from Arkansas.

Kwee now works at the Tuba City Indian Medical Center on the Navajo reservation in Tuba City, Ariz. Like the military, Indian tribes do not require doctors to have malpractice insurance.

Kwee acknowledged he made mistakes but said he has also helped many patients.

Dressed in a wrinkled white shirt and what appeared to be a pair of white painter's pants, Kwee said he has no medical malpractice insurance. Although he could get insurance, he said, the cost would be "very expensive" because of his litigation history.

Deutscher, the attorney representing the Bolins, blamed the military medical system more than Kwee. The initial tests requested by Kwee were never done, he said, and the military never properly notified Rita Bolin of the abnormal results of subsequent tests.

The Bolins sued the U.S. government and the company that employed Kwee. The government settled for $100,000, and the company that employed Kwee contributed an additional $15,000.

Brian Bolin remains in the Navy, but he said he goes to civilian clinics.

"I don't use military (medical) facilities any more."

Copyright, 1997, Cox Ohio Publishing. All rights reserved.

Why is the Peace Corps so concerned about Russell Carollo's story?



July 5, 2003 - PCOL Exclusive: A Volunteer's Courage

You'll have to ask Peace Corps/Washington why they took the unprecedented step of issuing a Press Release on October 18 that warned that after numerous discussions with reporter Russell Carollo, they believe that his upcoming story in the Dayton Daily News "will provide a misleading picture of the Peace Corps and Peace Corps Volunteer service, particularly with respect to safety and security:"
Quote:

Based on numerous discussions with the reporter, we believe the upcoming series about Peace Corps by Russell Carollo, which is scheduled to run October 26th, will provide a misleading picture of the Peace Corps and Peace Corps Volunteer service, particularly with respect to safety and security. For example, Mr. Carollo indicated he would print that assaults and rapes have substantially increased in recent years. However, the facts are that Peace Corps data shows a significant decrease in the rate of major sexual assault events over the past six years as this type of assault event is down by more than 30 percent since 1997. As NPCA members know, Peace Corps has placed and continues to place its highest priority on the safety and security of Volunteers. Every Peace Corps director beginning with Sargent Shriver has maintained this focus and added training, procedures, and systems as region and world circumstances change. Utilizing this focus, and through its reporting and tracking systems, Peace Corps has achieved great successes in recent years in reducing major assault incidents and rapes. Unfortunately, we believe that this fact will not be represented in the article. We also understand that this story will argue that the world is too dangerous a place for Peace Corps Volunteers and will include selected and not representational anecdotes and incidents spanning the past 30 plus years. We also have great concerns about the intentions of the reporter, who stated to Kevin Quigley, among others, after Kevin informed Mr. Carollo of the many positive attributes of the Peace Corps, that many others have said the same thing. Mr. Carollo further stated that Peace Corps is an agency that has had nothing but good stories written about it over the past 40 years. He then said he was not interested in these positive remarks; he was interested in the problems.

Come back to this web site on Sunday, read the story, and leave your comments on whether it provides a fair and balanced view of the experience of volunteers who have served in the Peace Corps over the past 40 years.

In the meantime, take a look at the story "Peace Corps Online" published earlier this year about the Health Care that Returned Volunteers receive in the United States for illnesses and injuries that occur during their service overseas and our recommendation that the Peace Corps find out how widespread this problem is and appoint a working group to study the problem and issue recommendations for solving it. Read the story that received over eighty posts and comments from RPCVs about a problem that the Peace Corps still has not addressed at:

July 5, 2003 - PCOL Exclusive: A Volunteer's Courage



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This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Journalism; Safety and Security of Volunteers

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By Anonymous (adsl-64-167-171-218.dsl.sndg02.pacbell.net - 64.167.171.218) on Friday, April 11, 2008 - 2:07 am: Edit Post

During my Peace Corps service over the past 2 years (2006-2008) I can mention numerous rapes that occured, volunteers being robbed, and volunteers being attacked. I was personally robbed several times, and took every safety and security precaution that I was told to, as well as common sense. I could say so much more, but will stop here.

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