A panel of experts discuss the complexities of investigative journalism from a reporter's perspective. They discuss the challenges of going in-depth on a story, and explore the new opportunities that online media presents.
The journalists include: Susanne Rust (Knight Fellow), Tom Blanton (National Security Archive), David Barstow (New York Times), Ricardo Sandoval Palos (Center for Public Integrity), and Rebecca Peterson (60 Minutes). The panel is moderated by Lowell Bergman and IRP Fellow Ryan Gabrielson.
Bio
David T. Barstow
David T. Barstow has been an investigative reporter for The New York Times since May 2002. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for "Message Machine," two articles that exposed a covert Pentagon campaign to use retired military officers, working as analysts for television and radio networks, to reiterate administration "talking points" about the war on terror.
Mr. Barstow also received the SPJ's (Society for Professional Journalism) 2008 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Washington Correspondence for the series, as well as the George Polk National Reporting award.
Richard Behar
Business reporter Richard Behar has garnered more than 20 major journalism awards over a career spanning 25 years. He was called one of the most dogged of our watchdogs by the late Jack Anderson, a founding father of modern investigative reporting. From 1982-2004, Behar worked on the staffs of Forbes, Time and Fortune magazines. He has also done assignments for the BBC, CNN, FoxNews.com and PBS.
In 2005, Behar launched Project Klebnikov, a global media alliance committed to shedding light on the Moscow murder of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov and to furthering investigative work.
Lowell Bergman
Lowell Bergman is the Reva and David Logan Distinguished Professor of Investigative Reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and director of the Investigative Reporting Program. He is also a producer/correspondent for the PBS documentary series Frontline. Bergman’s career spans nearly four decades, most notably as a producer, a reporter and then the director of investigative reporting at ABC News, and as CBS News as a producer for60 Minutes. The story of his investigation into the tobacco industry was chronicled in the Academy Award–nominated film The Insider. From 1999 to 2008, Bergman was an investigative correspondent for The New York Times. Creating collaborative investigative projects using broadcast, print and the Web became his specialty. Bergman has received honors for both print and broadcasting, including the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, awarded to The New York Times in 2004 for “A Dangerous Business” which detailed a record of worker safety violations coupled with the systematic violation of environmental laws in the cast-iron sewer and water pipe industry. That story is the only winner of the Pulitzer Prize to also be acknowledged with every major award in broadcasting. The recipient of numerous Emmys, Bergman has also been honored with five Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver and Golden Baton awards, three Peabodys, a Polk Award, a Sidney Hillman Award for Labor Reporting, a Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism, the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism, a Mirror Award from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award for Career Achievement from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Thomas S. Blanton
Thomas S. Blanton is Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington D.C. The Archive won U.S. journalism's George Polk Award in April 2000 for "piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth, and informing us all."
The Los Angeles Times (16 January 2001) described the Archive as "the world's largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents." Blanton served as the Archive's first Director of Planning & Research beginning in 1986, became Deputy Director in 1989, and Executive Director in 1992. He filed his first Freedom of Information Act request in 1976 as a weekly newspaper reporter in Minnesota; and among many hundreds subsequently, he filed the FOIA request and subsequent lawsuit (with Public Citizen Litigation Group) that forced the release of Oliver North's Iran-contra diaries in 1990.
His books include White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages the Reagan-Bush White House Tried to Destroy (New York: The New Press, 1995, 254 pp. + computer disk), which The New York Times described as "a stream of insights into past American policy, spiced with depictions of White House officials in poses they would never adopt for a formal portrait." He co-authored The Chronology (New York: Warner Books, 1987, 687 pp.) on the Iran-contra affair, and served as a contributing author to three editions of the ACLU's authoritative guide, Litigation Under the Federal Open Government Laws, and to the Brookings Institution study Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940.
Ryan Gabrielson
Ryan Gabrielson is an investigative reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, his reporting for the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Az. exposed that immigration enforcement by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office undermined criminal investigations and emergency response; scholarship charities that were committing tax fraud; and widespread academic and financial malfeasance at the nation's largest community college district.
Gabrielson's work has received numerous national and state honors, including a Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award. He began his career at The Monitor in McAllen, Texas.
Ricardo Sandoval Palos
Sandoval Palos was named project manager at The Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in February, 2010. Before joining The Center, he was assistant city editor at the Sacramento Bee, where he supervised environment, science, and regional development coverage. He was also the paper's weekend city editor.
At The Bee his team covered stories such as the H1N1 flu outbreak in California, the causes of several incidents of food-borne illness, the daunting task of overhauling the region's transportation infrastructure, and the impact of climate change in particular its effect on the critical water supplies from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Before joining The Bee, Sandoval Palos was a Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City, for the Dallas Morning News and Knight Ridder Newspapers. In Mexico he wrote about drug trafficking and the serial murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. In Venezuela he reported on the rise and fall and rebound of Hugo Chavez and in Colombia he covered failed peace talks between the government and FARC rebels. Sandoval Palos' career has spanned three decades and includes award-winning coverage of the savings and loan scandal and the deregulation of public utility companies.
He was born in Mexico and raised in San Diego, California. He's a graduate of Humboldt State University in Northern California.
Rebecca Peterson
Rebecca Peterson is an associate producer for 60 Minutes. She has also worked on Face to Face With Connie Chung.
Susanne Rust
Rust was born and raised in Briarcliff Manor, New York. She received her bachelor's degree from Barnard College. After doing field research in biological anthropology and working as a fisheries biologist, she began her journalism career in 2003 as a science reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, covering the endangered mountain gorillas in Uganda, civil engineering in Rwanda, and sustainable agriculture in Costa Rica.
In 2009, she and a colleague were Pulitzer finalists for investigative reporting, "for their powerful revelations that the government was failing to protect the public from dangerous chemicals in everyday products, such as some 'microwave-safe' containers, stirring action by Congress and federal agencies." Their investigation of the chemical industry and its influence on U.S. regulations and policies also earned the team a George Polk award, a John B. Oakes award for distinguished environmental reporting, a Scripps Howard National Journalism award, and a Grantham award of special merit. In 2008, the team won a Sigma Delta Chi, an award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, as well as an honorable mention from the Barlett and Steele award. The team was also featured on the Bill Moyer's Journal show, Expose.
Collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through media such as pamphlets, newsletters, newspapers, magazines, radio, film, television, and books. The term was originally applied to the reportage of current events in printed form, specifically newspapers, but in the late 20th century it came to include electronic media as well. It is sometimes used to refer to writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation. Colleges and universities confer degrees in journalism and sponsor research in related fields such as media studies and journalism ethics.
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