“Seafood from Slaves” by The Associated Press wins USC Annenberg’s 2016 Selden Ring Award

Newswise, February 10, 2016--.Reporters from The Associated Press have won USC Annenberg’s 2016 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, for a series of stories that showed how seafood sold in U.S. grocery stores and restaurants had been produced by slaves.

Their work prompted reforms and prosecutions – and the release of more than 2,000 people who had been held captive in horrific circumstances.

“Seafood from Slaves,” by Esther Htusan, Margie Mason, Robin McDowell and Martha Mendoza, has shaken up the $7 billion-a-year Thai seafood export industry. 

The journalists not only tracked down captives and documented their conditions; they followed specific loads of slave-caught seafood to supply chains of particular brands and stores.

The $35,000 annual Selden Ring Award, which has been presented for 27 years by the School of Journalism at USC Annenberg, honors the year’s outstanding work in investigative journalism that led to direct results.

From the judges’ statement:

“Slavery at sea has been the subject of substantial journalism before, but the AP team went to new lengths to expose an abusive system from start to finish. They followed the trail to a tiny island in Indonesia, giving voice to those being held against their will and forced to work for nothing. That led to a follow-up story, documenting the freeing of captives spurred by the original report:

‘At first the men filtered in by twos and threes, hearing whispers of a possible rescue. Then, as the news rippled around island, hundreds of weathered former and current slaves with long, greasy hair and tattoos streamed from their trawlers, down the hills, even out of the jungle, running toward what they had only dreamed of for years: Freedom.’

‘The Burmese men were among hundreds of migrant workers revealed in an Associated Press investigation to have been lured or tricked into leaving their countries and forced into catching fish for consumers around the world, including the United States. In response to the AP’s findings, Indonesian government officials visited the island village of Benjina on Friday and found brutal conditions, down to an ‘enforcer’ paid to beat men up. They offered immediate evacuation.’

The AP team kept going from there. They logged the names of ships carrying seafood caught by slaves and used satellite data to track where they went and which companies sold the cargo. Reporters watched trucks being unloaded, following them to cold storage and processing factories that shipped the seafood abroad. Bit by bit, they put together a list of companies selling cargo caught by slaves and then connected that cargo to U.S. distributors.”

Mendoza, an AP National Writer who works out of Santa Cruz, Calif., explained the impetus of the project by the team that included McDowell and Htusan in Myanmar and Mason in Indonesia.

“The issue had been bubbling up a little in Southeast Asia, as some slaves escaped – but it hadn’t been getting much attention,” Mendoza said. “We set out to do two things that hadn’t been done before. One was to find people currently working as slaves, to put an end to the suggestions that the problem was behind us. The second thing was to specifically track the supply chain to the major retailers, so they could no longer disassociate themselves from the labor abuse.”

Winning the Selden Ring Award will bring more attention to the issue, Mendoza said. “The enslaved people were risking their lives when they spoke to us. Yet they told their stories with courage and integrity. They deserve the recognition.”

The AP’s entry letter described the lengths reporters went to as they tracked shipments of seafood, after finding slaves in cages on the remote Indonesian island of Benjina:

“On the island, the reporters logged the names of ships loaded with slave-caught seafood, then used satellite data to track them. One ship went to a Thai seaport, and so did our reporters. For four days, they hid in the back of a small truck, scrunched down behind tinted windows because the area was patrolled by gunmen for the fish mafia. 

The reporters watched as the seafood was unloaded into trucks, and they followed the trucks to cold storage and processing factories that then ship the seafood abroad.”

Before publishing the initial report in March 2015, the AP made sure the captives they quoted and photographed would not be punished our killed. They received help from the International Organization for Migration, which arranged for their rescue.

The reporting revealed more slavery in Thailand, where government officials had claimed the problem had been resolved. The team found children and migrants locked in filthy working conditions, peeling shrimp in fetid processing sheds. The investigation linked the sheds to supply chains that reach European and Asian markets and U.S. restaurants and chains including Wal-Mart, Target, Whole Foods and Red Lobster.

The impact of the reporting was swift and extensive. According to the AP, “The United Nations is now investigating labor abuses in supply chains, as are local district attorneys and federal law enforcement agencies. The European Union warned Thailand that it risked an EU seafood import ban if it failed to deal promptly with slavery in the industry. And the U.S. State Department cited the reporting when it kept Thailand on its blacklist for human trafficking.”

U.S. legislation has since been introduced that would require greater transparency from food suppliers.

“The Selden Ring Award underscores the importance of investigative journalism, which is extensive, time-consuming, uncomfortable and challenging,” Mendoza said. “This project really made a difference in people’s lives, and the award recognizes that.”

About the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Located in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is a national leader in education and scholarship in the fields of communication, journalism, public diplomacy and public relations. 

With an enrollment of more than 2,000 students, USC Annenberg offers doctoral, master's and bachelor's degree programs, as well as continuing development programs for working professionals across a broad scope of academic inquiry. The school's comprehensive curriculum emphasizes the core skills of leadership, innovation, service and entrepreneurship and draws upon the resources of a networked university located in the media capital of the world.