Articles by UCSC alumna Dana Priest named in top 10 for the decade

Merrill College graduate Dana Priest and her Washington Post colleagues exposed deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

A two-part series by Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, a 1981 UC Santa Cruz graduate, on the woeful treatment of wounded war veterans, was named one of the top 10 works of journalism of the decade, 2000-2009.

The selection was made by the faculty of New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute along with a group of outside judges. They selected as ninth on their list Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration at Army's Top Medical Facility, the two-part investigation in February 2007 by Priest and her colleagues Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille. The articles won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Priest and Hull exposed the deplorable conditions, substandard treatment, and abuses of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The articles led to firings, resignations, government investigations and efforts to improve care for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The series also won the prestigious 2008 Selden Ring given by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Priest graduated from Merrill College with a bachelor's degree is politics.

NYU's No. 1 selection was the New York Times and its special section A Nation Challenged on the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.