News21

7 posts

Carnegie-Knight News21 is a national reporting initiative, headquartered at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Students selected for the News21 program study a topic in-depth during a virtual spring seminar, followed by a 10-week reporting fellowship during the summer. Students work out of a newsroom at the Cronkite School and travel the country – and sometimes to other countries – to report and produce their projects.

9 min

Feds fail to track success rate of $30 billion GI Bill, jeopardizing the program

The Post-9/11 GI Bill has paid for nearly 1 million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to go to school at a cost about $30 billion since 2009, but the federal government has yet to document how many of those students graduated, much less whether they stayed in school.

ByNews21

August 30, 2013

Aribella Shapiro sits in a church pew and reads the hymnal book

11 min

Women are 17% of recent war vets — triple all previous wars

The fight to feel like a veteran weighs substantially on female soldiers returning from war, though their numbers have been historic, with more than 280,000 returning from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade.

ByNews21

August 29, 2013

8 min

In six-year period, 49,000 vets took their own lives

Veterans are killing themselves at more than double the rate of the civilian population, according to data collected over eight months by News21.

ByNews21

August 28, 2013

Sean Meade seen talking during an interview

12 min

Bonus plan for veteran’s claims workers means complicated cases get backlogged

While veterans waited longer than ever for their wartime disability compensation, the Department of Veterans Affairs gave its workers millions of dollars in bonuses for “excellent” performances that effectively encouraged them to avoid claims that needed extra work to document veterans’ injuries.

ByNews21

August 27, 2013

Soldiers walk down a flight of stairs that was pushed up against the commercial airplane they were riding in

10 min

Government failing 2.6 million war vets

The government that sent them to war has failed on many levels to fulfill its obligations to these veterans as demanded by Congress and promised by both Republican and Democratic administrations.

ByNews21

August 26, 2013

I voted stickers given out to voters on election day

11 min

Claims of voter fraud used to push ID laws prove overstated

Analysis of alleged election-fraud cases since 2000 shows that while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day is virtually non-existent.

ByNews21

August 14, 2012

13 min

Secretaries of state fashion new, activist roles

A number of activist secretaries of state are dramatically changing a once non-partisan job that involves supervising elections.

ByNews21

August 13, 2012