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Deseret News Washington
correspondent Lee Davidson was honored last week with two national awards for
his investigative series on Cold War testing.
Davidson, a 13-year Deseret
News veteran, received honorable mention during the Raymond Clapper White
House Correspondents award ceremonies at the White House on Saturday. Tuesday,
he garnered honorable mention - or second place - in the 1994 Heywood Broun
Award competition. The Newspaper Guild presents the annual Broun Award. Three
winners were cited, but more than 125 entries were received.
Davidson, a Kearns native,
said the 1994 series came out of an earlier series of informal news reports
he'd done on Utah being a government target for chemical, biological,
radiological and atomic arms testing. The final piece, which ran in December,
was a comprehensive list of the secret tests.
Davidson, who has spent the
past six years corresponding in Washington, D.C., said he spent "the better
part of last year" working on the series. Public debate on rumors of Utah's
contaminated public lands and residents' predisposition to "exotic diseases"
fueled the reports, Davidson added.
Kudos for his work are
"nice," he said, but Davidson pointed out that the awards are good recognition
for the Deseret News.
"We're a very small paper.
The award winners are all from the big papers," Davidson said, noting first
place winners The Boston Glob and the Dallas Morning News.
With a Utah media
contingent consisting of the Deseret News and KSL-TV in Washington, Davidson
said there's not a lot of competition for spot news stories. Because of this,
he says, he "gets to play" with long investigative pieces.
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Three Deseret News reporters have received national honors in contests sponsored by the
National Press Club.
Political Editor Bob Bernick Jr., Washington correspondent Lee Davidson and reporter
Chip Parkinson shared an honorable mention in the club's Washington Correspondence Award
competition for helping expose the financial morass of Joe Waldholtz and Rep. Enid Greene,
R-Utah.
Davidson also won a separate honorable mention in the Club's Robin Goldstein Award for
Regional Reporters in Washington competition for a portfolio showing his range of work
during the year.
The awards will be formally presented July 17 at a club luncheon by ABC News
correspondent Cokie Roberts and National Press Club President Sonja Hillgren.
The honorable mention - essentially a second-place - for Washington Correspondence was
given for stories questioning Waldholtz's wealth that built pressure on him until he
disappeared for six days, and for continuing stories that helped reveal he was not a
millionaire and had committed fraud.
Waldholtz pleaded guilty earlier this month to campaign, tax and bank fraud charges.
Greene, his ex-wife, chose not to seek re-election amid questions about how much she knew
of Waldholtz's actions - and a grand jury continues to look at that.
Davidson won a separate honorable mention in the Goldstein contest for Washington
correspondents of regional newspapers for a portfolio of eight examples of his work.
That included stories on Waldholtz; a probe that revealed secret testing at sea by
Dugway Proving Ground, which may have caused widespread cancer among participating
sailors; a computer-assisted study on whom Utah's largest political donors are; coverage
of base closure controversy; and a feature that revealed old, little-known battles about
how Utah was named and created.
Davidson has twice won first place in the Goldstein contest for regional reporters - in
1990 and 1991 - and also won an honorable mention in 1993. He also won first place in the
Washington Correspondence Award in 1992.
The Deseret News also won both awards the first time each was offered. Former
correspondent Gordon Eliot White won the first Washington Correspondence Award in 1979 for
revealing high cancer rates downwind in Utah from nuclear tests, and Davidson won the
first two Goldstein awards in 1990 and 1991.
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