The Storytellers Project
@thestorytellersproject·2.6K subscribers·173 videos
Joe Sonka on a story that won him a Pulitzer
Posted
July 6, 2021
Views
70
July 6, 2021
70
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
5:23Now PlayingDrunk, bar-crawling Santas were everywhere, but all Joe Sonka was focused on was what the then-Governor of Kentucky was saying about why he pardoned people who’d done terrible things.
It was a cold night in a bar parking lot and Sonka, a reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, was trying to pin down why Gov. Matt Bevins had upended so much on his way out of office. The interview led to the newspaper’s most recent Pulitzer prize, its 11th win and first in the breaking news category.
Sonka saw a pattern of Bevins pardoning and commuting the sentences of hard-core criminals while Bevins was on his way out of office after losing the 2019 election.
“Our reporting highlighted how a governor’s unchecked power to pardon led to a wave of controversial and questionable decisions impacting people in different ways across Kentucky,” Sonka said.
Watch Sonka as he shares his story in "Stories about Stories."
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
