Celebrate watchdog successes

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Summer 2009 by Horvit, Mark

Readers of The IRE Journal know as well as anyone about the tremendous impact of investigative journalism.

Still, every once in awhile, it's nice to be reminded.

I was in Washington, D.C. on a recent Sunday and took my time walking along the row of that day's frontpages that lined the outside of the Newseum. It was inspiring to see the number of papers that featured hardhitting, locally written enterprise stories - and it wasn't just the big metro dailies. From small communities to large, journalists were taking hard looks at school districts, local government, police departments, even local nonprofits. Moving from page to page - one from each of the 50 states - provided a powerful testimonial to the ongoing power of the press, even in tough economic times.

From D.C, I headed to Baltimore for IRE's annual conference, which drew almost 850 journalists from throughout the United States and the world. In dozens of panels during three-and-a-half days, reporters, editors and producers detailed how they had exposed wrongdoing and injustice. Session after session hammered home the huge difference that investigative journalism is making, every day, in communities around the globe.

For more evidence, look no further than the magazine you're reading now.

Our centerpiece in this issue looks at multiple ways that journalists have brought to light problems in the health care industry. Some are projects that were massive in their time and scope; others came from beat reporters who developed tips while covering the daily news.

Much of the best work takes a story in the headlines and looks for the truth behind the hype. A strong example is the investigation into the scope of the deaths caused by the drug-resistant MRSA germ conducted by Michael Berens and Ken Armstrong of The Seattle Times (page 1 7). They dug in and discovered that the true number of deaths caused by the bug in Washington state had never been made public. In fact, in 10 years that number skyrocketed from about 140 to more than 4,700.

Along similar lines, a team of journalists at KMCH in Denver did extensive follow-up reporting following a jet crash and wound up with a special report on problems with the city's ambulance system (page 25). Like many enterprise reporters, they had to fight through long delays and initially ludicrous fee quotes for public records. Unlike too many reporters, they stuck with it and eventually got the records - and the story.

Their work led to immediate improvements in the ambulance system designed to improve response times.

Another recurring theme in the best watchdog journalism centers on the shortcomings of government agencies that are supposed to protect the public. Wendy Saltzman of CBS Atlanta found that some medical facilities that perform mammograms had been cited multiple times by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for problems that could lead to missed diagnoses -and those clinics had been allowed to remain open (page 23). The station published what the agency had not - a list of violations, so that potential patients would have the information they need to make potentially life-and-death decisions about their care.

Like a little outrage in your news? Check out the project that Fred Schulte and James Drew of The Baltimore Sun did that exposed the practice of many nonprofit hospitals, which were suing patients who could barely pay their household bills in an effort to collect for care, even in cases where they'd received millions of dollars to cover the costs of free and unpaid care (page 20). The reporters spent months building a massive database to help document the practice.

Most reporters don't have the time to devote exclusively to project work. As recent Missouri School of Journalism graduate Jessica Nunez points out (Page 1 5), that doesn't mean they can't dig in to produce great work.

She quotes Mariana Alvarado, a reporter for a Spanish-language weekly who co-wrote an award-winning project on the deaths of illegal immigrants that brought about changes in the way Mexico and the United States track such deaths:

"I just started working on this on the side, in my free time," Alvarado says. "By the time three months had gone by, I realized I had enough to do a whole series."

BY MARK HORVIT

IRE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Mark Horvit is executive director of IRE and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. He can be reached at mhorvit@ire.org or 573-882-2042.