I’ve been an investigative reporter most of my career, and I feel lucky because long ago, when I was starting out, I didn’t take the advice of one of my elders. It was in my first few weeks as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. One of the copy editors pulled up a chair next to my desk and began to go through a small story I had written. He eliminated a word here, inserted a word there. Nothing major. Then he put the copy down and looked me in the eye and said, “Jimmy—you’re doing good work. But get out while you can.”
But I was hooked. Talking to people. Being around police. Watching firemen brave a big fire. Spending time with bereaved families who’d lost a loved one—all those currents that make us human spoke to me. I knew what I wanted to do.
I learned a lot of the basics in that first job, but I learned nothing about investigative reporting. Why? Because the paper did almost no investigative reporting. And that wasn’t unusual for the time. Often, when an investigative story was proposed, the editor’s first question was: Has a law been broken? If you couldn’t cite something illegal, many editors just weren’t interested.
The definition of investigative reporting began to change during the Vietnam War. The contrast between accounts of the tragic, bloody battles in the field as reported by Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam and the rosy accounts by generals in Washington exposed the fallacies of American policy. We began to see how government was lying to us and wasn’t serving the interests of its citizens. And it was falling to journalists to hold government accountable.
One of the earliest investigations I undertook with Don Barlett—a fellow investigative reporter with whom I worked for more than 40 years—reflected this approach. In 1972, we looked at 1,000 cases of violent crime in Philadelphia to see how justice was being served in our city. The great reporter Phil Meyer, now regarded as the father of data journalism, wrote an incredible computer program that let us analyze this massive amount of information to see exactly how judges and prosecutors were dealing with cases of murder, robbery, rape, and other violent crimes. The resulting series of articles exposed rampant racism and the fickle nature of how many decisions were handed down.
The series won several national awards, but when it came time for the Pulitzer we hit a stone wall. We heard later that one juror had declared that any article that used a computer in telling a story would win a Pulitzer over his dead body.
There are always new issues, new technologies, new challenges. But the bottom line remains: How do we do the work? Investigative reporting—even with a partner—is often solitary work, filled with unexpected failures. Sometimes, when things aren’t going right, investigating a story can feel like trying to push string uphill. But when we share challenging experiences with each other, we realize that whatever we’re going through isn’t unique. What may have stymied us isn’t because of some failing of our own. It’s because this work is just very hard, and it doesn’t move in a straight line.
We began to see how government was lying to us and wasn’t serving the interests of its citizens. And it was falling to journalists to hold government accountable.
We may need each other more than ever in the days ahead. The incessant attacks on the press by Trump and his supporters have unsettled all of us. They have called into question the work we do to a greater degree than anything I can ever remember—questioning the very legitimacy of our profession and its historical, constitutionally enshrined protection.
Investigative reporters are accustomed to making people feel uncomfortable—and to being criticized for what we publish or air. But this is way beyond that. The Washington Post calculated that, during his first term, Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements. My bet is he will easily top that in round two. The question is whether The Washington Post—its newsroom gutted by cuts and its editorial independence hamstrung by its billionaire owner—still has the resources or resolve to hold him to account. Making matters worse, many politicians and government officials are repeating those lies, misleading the public in order to curry favor with Trump and enhance their own power. Stories that in the past would have been dismissed as patently false now get some credence.
Our job of presenting the news is more challenging than ever. But I submit to you that facts—facts—are still important and at the heart of our work. In America: What Went Wrong, our 1992 book, Don and I had numerous examples of how Congress and moneyed interests were harming average Americans. But what got the attention of readers were the specifics, like the paragraph that told how one corporate brigand paid more to take care of his dog than the pension he paid to a 60-year-old factory worker he’d let go after she worked for him for 30 years.
I tell young reporters who are embarking on an investigation to always think of the people. Tell who’s getting hurt. And tell who’s doing the hurting. To this day, the people I remember the most are the ones who got hurt.
People like Ed Bohl. Ed was a mid-level manager in a shoe plant in a little town in Missouri. He’d worked there his whole life, helped introduce the plant to new technologies, was treasured by fellow employees, neighbors, and townspeople for his role in making the profitable little plant such a mainstay and pivotal player in the town. Then one day the plant’s new owners—money boys from New York who’d borrowed a ton to buy the plant’s parent company—shut it down and sold the land to raise cash to cover their big loan. Ed lost his job, health care, and half his pension. He had no bitterness, only a sense of loss and bewilderment that a place—a country, really—where he’d given so much and played by all the established rules could turn on him like that and change his life.
America may be the land of the free, but it’s also the home of the hustler. In business and in politics, the desire to make a fast buck is almost enshrined in our system. Yet, for all the threats leveled against us by the fake-news purveyors, the fire to tell the truth, to unmask the forces that undermine the rule of law and make life harder for average people, is as strong as ever. What we do is fundamental to freedom, both here and elsewhere.
So keep the faith. And do the work.
This account is adapted from the keynote speech given at the Investigative Reporters & Editors 50th-anniversary meeting
James B. Steele, together with his late reporting partner, Donald L. Barlett, has won two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Magazine Awards, and many other honors. His most recent book is America: What Went Wrong? The Crisis Deepens