September 17, 2014
Confessions of an Investigative Journalist
Joe Stephens
Staff Writer, Washington Post;
Ferris Professor in Residence, Council of the Humanities, Princeton University
Confessions of an Investigative Journalist
Joe Stephens
Staff Writer, Washington Post;
Ferris Professor in Residence, Council of the Humanities, Princeton University
Minutes of the Second Meeting of the 73rd Year
The 119 members and guests in the Friend Center were called to order at 10:15 a.m. by President Owen Leach. The invocation was led by Don Edwards. James Begin read his minutes of the meeting held on September 10.
Five members introduced guests: Patricia Taylor – Gail Ullman; Bruno Walmsley – Joe Coleman; Pat Butcher – Beverly Ketenis; Michael Roberts – John Cotton; and Harold Borkan – Hazel Stix.
Landon Jones introduced Joe Stephens, staff writer at The Washington Post and currently beginning the first year of a five-year appointment as a Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton. He was born in Appalachia and moved with his family to Cincinnati when his father decided not to work in the coal mines like his father had. Stephens graduated from Miami University in Ohio, the first member of his family to attend college. After working for newspapers in Springfield, Illinois and Kansas City, he joined The Washington Post in 1999. He previously taught a semester of journalism at Princeton in 2012 where entries on “ratemyprofessor.com” gave him straight “A”s for teaching and one chili pepper for “hotness.”
Mr. Stephens began his talk by saying that although his father had only a seventh grade education and probably never read a book, he did devour the afternoon newspaper every day after he returned home from the factory. This made Stephens realize you can get a good education from just a nickel and a news rack.
Judging his ambition of being a poet as impracticable, Stephens used his degree in English to land his first job as “Editor in Chief” of a small weekly newspaper. Actually he was not only the editor but also at times the only employee: he wrote articles, took and developed the photographs, set the type when the typesetter didn’t show up, and took out the trash.
He moved to a daily paper in Springfield, Illinois and found that investigative journalism wasn’t encouraged and social life was difficult because his working day ended at the same time the bars closed. He received a lot of critical mail and even a death threat for his review of a Barry Manilow concert.
He landed a full-time investigative reporting job with the Kansas City Star. Kansas City had a mafia family at that time and among other things he was paid to hang out at strip bars with mobsters. It was then that he learned something that has helped him throughout his career as an investigative reporter: “Think like a crook”. If you can think up a criminal scheme, chances are somebody’s doing it!
His ticket out of Kansas City was an invitation to join the investigative team at The Washington Post set up by Bob Woodward after Watergate. At the Post reporters had the freedom to work on a story for a year or more. Stephens didn’t have a special area of interest so as he put it, “every story was like a master’s degree program in a different subject.”
There’s a lot of debate in journalism circles about what is investigative reporting. One definition Stephens gives his students is a quote from Lord Northcliffe, a British publisher. “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.” He added it’s a little more than that today as it can be something that wouldn’t be known unless a persistent reporter digs it out of a mountain of existing data that nobody’s actively trying to suppress.
A single investigation can take over a year to complete and cost a lot of money. After a decline in monetary support for investigative reporting at The Washington Post, that trend has been reversed by the new owner of the Post, Princeton graduate Jeff Bezos.
Stephens commented that broadcast journalists often brag that they ask the hard questions. He went on to say that asking is easy. What’s hard is digging out the answers to the hard questions. And that’s what investigative journalists do.
Specific projects he worked on included the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret CIA prisons around the world where kidnapped suspects were questioned and often tortured.
Another involved reconstruction projects in Afghanistan that were claimed to exist but either didn’t exist at all or were in terrible condition. Some were built in earthquake prone regions using plans developed for buildings in California. However the first heavy snowfall collapsed the roofs that were designed for the sunny West Coast.
His investigation on illegal contributions to the 1996 Bob Dole presidential campaign resulted in a six-month prison sentence and six million dollar fine for the perpetrator.
The investigation that cost the most money, took the longest time, and covered the widest area of the globe was “The Body Hunters.” It uncovered the fact that the drug company Pfizer was running clinical trials on children in sub-Sahara Africa with drugs that weren’t approved for that use in the U.S. In addition, most parents didn’t understand or give an informed consent for the trial.
During the Q and A Stephens gave a shout-out to The Bergen Record for the initial work in uncovering the facts behind the George Washington Bridge closures a year ago.
Our speaker commented that his talk had been billed as “Confessions of an Investigative Journalist” and his attorney advised him to take the fifth and not confess to anything. In spite of that advice, he did confess to loving his life as an investigative journalist and gave us an entertaining and informative window on his profession.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30 a.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Jock McFarlane
Five members introduced guests: Patricia Taylor – Gail Ullman; Bruno Walmsley – Joe Coleman; Pat Butcher – Beverly Ketenis; Michael Roberts – John Cotton; and Harold Borkan – Hazel Stix.
Landon Jones introduced Joe Stephens, staff writer at The Washington Post and currently beginning the first year of a five-year appointment as a Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton. He was born in Appalachia and moved with his family to Cincinnati when his father decided not to work in the coal mines like his father had. Stephens graduated from Miami University in Ohio, the first member of his family to attend college. After working for newspapers in Springfield, Illinois and Kansas City, he joined The Washington Post in 1999. He previously taught a semester of journalism at Princeton in 2012 where entries on “ratemyprofessor.com” gave him straight “A”s for teaching and one chili pepper for “hotness.”
Mr. Stephens began his talk by saying that although his father had only a seventh grade education and probably never read a book, he did devour the afternoon newspaper every day after he returned home from the factory. This made Stephens realize you can get a good education from just a nickel and a news rack.
Judging his ambition of being a poet as impracticable, Stephens used his degree in English to land his first job as “Editor in Chief” of a small weekly newspaper. Actually he was not only the editor but also at times the only employee: he wrote articles, took and developed the photographs, set the type when the typesetter didn’t show up, and took out the trash.
He moved to a daily paper in Springfield, Illinois and found that investigative journalism wasn’t encouraged and social life was difficult because his working day ended at the same time the bars closed. He received a lot of critical mail and even a death threat for his review of a Barry Manilow concert.
He landed a full-time investigative reporting job with the Kansas City Star. Kansas City had a mafia family at that time and among other things he was paid to hang out at strip bars with mobsters. It was then that he learned something that has helped him throughout his career as an investigative reporter: “Think like a crook”. If you can think up a criminal scheme, chances are somebody’s doing it!
His ticket out of Kansas City was an invitation to join the investigative team at The Washington Post set up by Bob Woodward after Watergate. At the Post reporters had the freedom to work on a story for a year or more. Stephens didn’t have a special area of interest so as he put it, “every story was like a master’s degree program in a different subject.”
There’s a lot of debate in journalism circles about what is investigative reporting. One definition Stephens gives his students is a quote from Lord Northcliffe, a British publisher. “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.” He added it’s a little more than that today as it can be something that wouldn’t be known unless a persistent reporter digs it out of a mountain of existing data that nobody’s actively trying to suppress.
A single investigation can take over a year to complete and cost a lot of money. After a decline in monetary support for investigative reporting at The Washington Post, that trend has been reversed by the new owner of the Post, Princeton graduate Jeff Bezos.
Stephens commented that broadcast journalists often brag that they ask the hard questions. He went on to say that asking is easy. What’s hard is digging out the answers to the hard questions. And that’s what investigative journalists do.
Specific projects he worked on included the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret CIA prisons around the world where kidnapped suspects were questioned and often tortured.
Another involved reconstruction projects in Afghanistan that were claimed to exist but either didn’t exist at all or were in terrible condition. Some were built in earthquake prone regions using plans developed for buildings in California. However the first heavy snowfall collapsed the roofs that were designed for the sunny West Coast.
His investigation on illegal contributions to the 1996 Bob Dole presidential campaign resulted in a six-month prison sentence and six million dollar fine for the perpetrator.
The investigation that cost the most money, took the longest time, and covered the widest area of the globe was “The Body Hunters.” It uncovered the fact that the drug company Pfizer was running clinical trials on children in sub-Sahara Africa with drugs that weren’t approved for that use in the U.S. In addition, most parents didn’t understand or give an informed consent for the trial.
During the Q and A Stephens gave a shout-out to The Bergen Record for the initial work in uncovering the facts behind the George Washington Bridge closures a year ago.
Our speaker commented that his talk had been billed as “Confessions of an Investigative Journalist” and his attorney advised him to take the fifth and not confess to anything. In spite of that advice, he did confess to loving his life as an investigative journalist and gave us an entertaining and informative window on his profession.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30 a.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Jock McFarlane