The Flowing Candy Bees

Kevin Craver is apparenly the Shaw Newspapers Journalist of the Year. Tell me if you see any resemblance.

He won this prestigious honor with Danielle Guerra for covering an improbable cluster of rare brain cancers that occurred near a chemical plant that at various times dumped stuff in the aquifer and in the air. The underlying story is very complex, and they didn’t dumb it down: the cancer cannot be traced to any simple cause, and isn’t simply environmental malfeasance by some chemical plant, but also a failure of local government, and an inability of local officials to wrap their heads around the science involved—and yet, here are two people who were able to wrap their heads around the science and also communicate it to ordinary people. Part of the award is surely due to presentation, because rather than simply reporting on events in plain text they used new media formats to give the victims a presence they otherwise would not have had in spare print.

Kevin is a generally skeptical person, and resourceful, distinct from other jouranlists because he is equipped with the scientific, logical and quantitative machinery needed to question and evaluate factual claims. For example, when the plant in question used air stripping to transfer harmful waste into the air, its managers argued that this wouldn’t hurt the town because the town was south and the wind blew west to east. Kevin turned to nearby O’Hare airport to access their mountains of data on wind speed and direction, allowing him to prove that this was an absurd simplification.

But seriously, he has to lose the sweater. Not that it’s a bad sweater, but the last 10 pictures I took of the dude are in that sweater. He’s starting to come across as a cartoon character.