“Kathryn Joyce wins the May Sidney Award for “A Search for Answers. A Search for Blame,” an in-depth examination of how right wing activists pushed a false narrative about school discipline to a grieving community in the wake of the Parkland school shooting.
After the Parkland shooting, conservative pundits tried to blame the massacre of 17 students on something called PROMISE, Broward County’s innovative program to keep kids out of the school-to-prison pipeline. They claimed that the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, had been spared arrest under the program, and that had he been arrested, he wouldn’t have been able to buy a gun. This argument became the pretext for an all-out war on PROMISE and the officials who championed it.”