The panel of journalists discuss when the story bites back - the consequences of investigative reporting. Since 2007, the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program has hosted a “by invitation only” symposium each spring in honor of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, which endowed the program. The only symposium of its kind in the country, it routinely brings together a veritable “who’s who” of top journalists, law enforcement and government officials to address the critical issues confronting this specialized field. The symposium also unites media executives involved in both non-profit and commercial outlets, as well as media attorneys, academics, major foundations, and philanthropists who support journalism in the public interest."
Bio
Adela Navarro Bello
Adela Navarro Bello is the general director of the weekly magazine Zeta in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico. She graduated from Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in 1996 where she studied Communication. Created in 1980, Zeta is one of the only publications to regularly run investigations on organized crime, drug trafficking, and corruption in Mexico's northern states, where self-censorship is rampant. The cost of Zeta's coverage of crime along the U.S.-Mexico border has been high: Héctor Félix Miranda, co-founder of the magazine, was killed in 1988, and co-editor Francisco Ortiz Franco was murdered in 2004. In 1997, after an assassination attempt against J. Jesús Blancornelas, the founder and then director of Zeta, in which one of his bodyguards was killed, Mexican authorities provided Navarro with a bulletproof vest and two bodyguards. Before becoming general director, Navarro worked as a writer, columnist, and a member of the editorial board. During more than 20 years of journalistic reporting for SemanarioZETA, she has interviewed Mexico's top political figures including presidents, governors, and party leaders.
Alfredo Corchado
Alfredo Corchado was born in Durango, Mexico, and grew up in California and Texas. He is a 1987 graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso and a 2009 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Corchado has worked for The Dallas Morning News since 1994. As Mexico bureau chief, he covers U.S. policy in Latin America, specializing in Mexico. Corchado has also worked for The Dallas Morning News in Cuba and Washington. Before joining The News, Corchado worked in public radio on the border, the Ogden Standard-Examiner in Utah, El Paso Herald-Post and The Wall Street Journal. His reporting has earned him several awards, including The Maria Moors Cabot award presented by Columbia University and the Elijah Parrish Lovejoy prize for courage presented by Colby College. Corchado is a leading reporter on the drug-related violence that continues to dominate the border region and threaten Mexico's national security and border communities. He is currently a visiting fellow at the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard and is working on his first book Midnight in Mexico.
Jerry Michell
Since 1989, the stories of Jerry Mitchell, investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, have helped put four Klansmen behind bars. They include the assassin of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the man who planted the bomb that killed four girls in a Birmingham church in 1963 and the man who orchestrated the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers, commonly known as the Mississippi Burning case. For his work, Mitchell has received more than 30 national awards, including a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He is currently writing a memoir for Simon & Schuster titled Race Against Time.
Ramita Navai
Ramita Navai is a British-Iranian journalist and a reporter for Channel 4's foreign affairs series, Unreported World. For Unreported World, Ramita has reported from 20 different countries, including Sudan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Nigeria, El Salvador, and an undercover assignment in Zimbabwe. Before working for the series, Ramita was the Tehran correspondent for The Times. She has also worked as a journalist for the United Nations in Pakistan, northern Iraq and Iran.
Brian Ross
As the chief investigative correspondent for ABC News, Brian Ross reports extensively for World News with Diane Sawyer, Nightline, Good Morning America, 20/20 and Primetime, as well as for ABC News Radio and ABCNews.com. Ross joined ABC News in July 1994. Ross's investigative reports have exposed corruption at all levels of government, led to changes in domestic laws and prompted reforms abroad. Over the past few years, his exclusive investigative reports on the Times Square Bomber, Ft. Hood Shooter, the Underwear Bomber and the Printer Bomb plot led the network's coverage. Most recently his 20/20 investigation of sexual abuse of Peace Corps volunteers won the 2012 George Polk Award for television reporting and has led to congressional hearings, and his expose of a "pay-to-play" grading system by the Better Business Bureau has led to major changes within that organization. Ross’ investigative reports have won six duPont awards, five Peabody awards, six Polk awards, five awards from the Overseas Press Club, twelve Emmys and three Edward R. Murrow Awards and many more.
Bernardo Ruiz
Bernardo Ruiz is the Director/Producer of American Experience: Roberto Clemente (PBS, 2008), winner of the ALMA Award for Outstanding Made for Television Documentary. Previously, he was the co-producer of The Sixth Section/La Sexta Sección, an innovative depiction of the transnational organizing efforts of a community of Mexican immigrants in New York. The film won the top short documentary prize at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico, and aired on the public television series P.O.V. in 2003. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship in Film and his work has been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Sundance Documentary Institute, Cinereach and ITVS, among others. In 2007, he founded Quiet Pictures in order to produce aesthetically innovative and socially relevant documentary films for all platforms. Before working in documentary production, he served as Associate Editor of the North American Congress on Latin America's (NACLA) Report on the Americas. His latest film, Reportero, follows a veteran reporter and his colleagues at an embattled news magazine during a wave of violence against journalists in Mexico. It airs on POV in the fall of 2012.
