What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.
The Pulitzer Prizes announced this week recognized some powerful reporting on the misuse of power. The Associated Press won the public service award for “an investigation of severe labor abuses tied to the supply of seafood to American supermarkets and restaurants, reporting that freed 2,000 slaves, brought perpetrators to justice and inspired reforms.” Margie Mason, Robin McDowell, Martha Mendoza, and Esther Htusan contributed to this incredible investigative work; the whole series is available here.
The Washington Post won the Pulitzer’s national reporting category for its “revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be.” The database is available here; reporters who contributed to this work include Kimberly Kindy, Wesley Lowery, Keith L. Alexander, Kimbriell Kelly, Sandhya Somashekhar, Julie Tate, Amy Brittain, Marc Fisher, Scott Higham, Derek Hawkins, and Jennifer Jenkins. In one of the articles for this series, Kindy and Tate explored the common practice of police departments withholding video footage of fatal shootings, using the January 2015 death of Autumn Steele in Burlington, Iowa as the touchpoint.
The Pulitzer for explanatory reporting went to T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project “for a startling examination and exposé of law enforcement’s enduring failures to investigate reports of rape properly and to comprehend the traumatic effects on its victims.” An Unbelievable Story of Rape was a stunning and depressing piece.
Speaking of stunning and depressing, previously unreported abuses of teenagers at the now-closed Midwest Academy boarding school came to light earlier this year. Several former students spoke to Ryan Foley of the Associated Press about being kept in isolation boxes for days or weeks at a time. (Isolation is particularly harmful to developing adolescent brains.) The Des Moines Register’s Lee Rood reported on approximately 80 law enforcement calls to the facility in Keokuk during the last three years the school was open. Abusive practices by staff went back more than a decade, though.
No state agency had ever inspected the Midwest Academy, prompting calls for the Iowa legislature to prevent future problems at unregulated schools. The Iowa Senate unanimously approved a bill setting out certification and inspection standards for boarding schools. House Republicans amended Senate File 2304 before approving it in the lower chamber, making “some exemptions for religious facilities.” The Senate refused to concur in the House amendment, and on a mostly party-line vote, the House rejected the Senate version. The school oversight bill now goes to a conference committee. I hope lawmakers will work out a deal before adjourning, but this legislation is not a must-pass bill like the health and human services budget (currently hung up over disagreements on Medicaid oversight and Planned Parenthood funding).
Alleged verbal abuse by Iowa State University women’s basketball coach Bill Fennelly was among the actions that inspired a discrimination lawsuit by former star player Nikki Moody. The AP’s Luke Meredith and Ryan Foley broke news about that lawsuit on April 18. After the jump I’ve enclosed excerpts from their report and some reaction, but I highly recommend reading the plaintiff’s jaw-dropping twelve-page court filing. Looking through some Cyclone fan board threads about the lawsuit, I was struck by two contradictory lines of argument from the coach’s defenders: Moody is lying, because this or that former player says Fen was always supportive and would never behave that way; or alternatively, Moody is lying, because Fen is tough on all his players, not just the black ones. Cheyenne Shepherd, an unheralded player for ISU during the 1990s, provided strong support for Moody in a guest column for the Des Moines Register about her experience as one of Fennelly’s “non-favorites.” Retired ISU journalism professor Dick Haws discussed the “not-very-well-hidden secret” of how Fennelly berates and humiliates some of his players. Gavin Aronsen asked at Iowa Informer whether the lawsuit is “A Symptom of Broader Diversity Problems at ISU.”
Since Thursday, I’ve been reading reflections on the life and work of Prince. I remembered his exceptional creativity, charisma, and talent as a songwriter (for many other artists as well as for himself), but I didn’t realize how highly regarded he was as a guitarist. His solo during this performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was mesmerizing. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top described Prince’s “sensational” guitar playing in an interview with the Washington Post: “Even today, I’m struggling to try and emulate that guitar introduction to ‘When Doves Cry.’ It’s just a testament to his extraordinary technique.” The whole “Purple Rain” album brings back strong high school memories for me, especially “When Doves Cry.” Prince’s biggest fan in the Iowa blogosphere was John Deeth, easily recognized at political events by his raspberry beret. Deeth reflected on what the music meant to him here.
From an April 18 story by Luke Meredith and Ryan Foley, “Former Iowa St star Nikki Moody sues coach”:
Former Iowa State basketball star Nikki Moody has sued coach Bill Fennelly, the university and the state for racial discrimination and retaliation, saying she was repeatedly called a “thug” and labeled a selfish player despite being the program’s career assists leader.
Fennelly, who has been Iowa State’s coach since 1995, constantly demeaned, berated, harassed and discriminated against Moody during her time with the Cyclones, according to a lawsuit filed in state district court that seeks unspecified damages. […]
Moody, who graduated in 2015 as a four-year starter, said the abuse caused her severe emotional distress and that her complaints to assistant coaches and a senior athletics administrator brought no response.
Moody claims that Fennelly treated white players differently than African-American players and that Fennelly called her a “thug” multiple times throughout her career. Moody said Fennelly told Iowa State’s freshman players that her senior class, made up of Moody and two other African-American players, were “bad influences” and to stay away from them.
From an updated version of the AP report by Meredith and Foley:
Former Iowa State star Lyndsey Fennelly, who is married to Fennelly’s son, a Cyclones assistant coach, told Des Moines radio station KXNO that she had been in touch with over 30 players on Monday ranging from the 1990s to players who just finished their Iowa State careers. Fennelly said the responses, which came from players of all kinds of backgrounds, were almost universally in their former coach’s favor.
“There’s a lot of Iowa State players…and we all have his back. Not we all. Most of us do,” Lyndsey Fennelly said. “There’s two sides of the story — and only [one] side of the story has been told up to this point.”
From Cheyenne Shepherd’s guest column for the Des Moines Register:
The majority of people voicing their opinion on Moody’s lawsuit are fervent supporters of Fennelly. They comment in absolutes; such as, he “never” says anything negative or he “always” has his players’ best interests at heart. I am here to tell you that a team coached by Fennelly cannot be discussed in absolutes. It can only be discussed as a dichotomy: between the favorites and the non-favorites. It is for this reason that I believe Moody, as well as those fans and players who support Fennelly, are all telling the truth.
I was assuredly not a favorite of Fennelly. And he made sure I knew it every day, in every way. I was demeaned, berated, and embarrassed in front of others; he called me names and tried to make me feel worthless (by the grace of God, friends and family he never quite succeeded). I was not alone. There were others: six to be exact, not including one other, who fell from favored status during my senior season. Four of the six non-favorites were black. Two graduated with me and two transferred after the season.
I don’t know if Fennelly is racist in the conventional sense, but I do know if you are not a favorite, he has no compunction about attacking you in racial terms. I witnessed it and others did as well. The truth of the matter is Fennelly will attack a player he doesn’t like on any terms. I do not believe him to be evil, but he can be very cruel. I don’t believe he has any remorse, because he tells himself, and his team, he is doing it to make a player better. Those players that are favorites, take him at his word, because for them it’s true. He only pushes them to be better. However, those of us on the wrong side, the non-favorites, get pushed around simply because he can. He seems to take pleasure in it. I was not made better by Fennelly on the floor or anywhere else.
From another guest column for the Register by Dick Haws:
The not-very-well-hidden secret that has plagued Fennelly for most of his 20-plus years in Ames is that he can turn almost instantly from “Friendly Bill” to “Mean Bill.” When it comes to behavior, with Fred Hoiberg at one end of the coaching spectrum and Bobby Knight at the other, Fennelly is much closer to Knight.
What surprised me about my Register letter [published in the Sunday paper on January 8, 2012] was the response I got. Not a single person defended Fennelly, not on the telephone, via e-mail, letter, or in-person. Instead, many criticized him. A letter from a fan who said he’d held season tickets for years with seats only a few rows behind the ISU bench was representative. He wrote he has “watched with increased disgust and dismay the actions of Coach Fennelly towards any ISU player who dares to make a mistake during the course of a game. … I truly believe his reputation for player treatment is catching up with him. Who would want to play in that environment?” Still others said they spent much of any game with eyes peeled on Fennelly, waiting for his next eruption. […]
Would Fennelly be hired to coach at ISU today? In a word: No.
Is it time for Fennelly to go? In a word: Yes.