SUMMARY: A new book called “Our Women on the Ground: Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World” shares the stories of female journalists working in the Middle East. The editor Zahra Hankir, and NPR correspondent Hannah Allam, who wrote one of the chapters, sat down with Amna Nawaz recently to discuss how Arab women reporting in the Middle East are both unusually limited and uniquely empowered.
SUMMARY: Layoffs at established newspaper chains and digital upstarts alike reflect the difficulty of the news business. The closing of local newsrooms can create "news deserts," areas with limited access to news outlets. Judy Woodruff talks to Steve Cavendish editor of the Nashville Banner, and Penny Abernathy chair of journalism and digital media economics at the University of North Carolina.
SUMMARY: Patrick Soon-Shiong, a multi-billionaire surgeon, entrepreneur and part owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, finalized his ownership of the Los Angeles Times [and San Diego Union-Tribune] this week. Judy Woodruff talks with him about how his upbringing in apartheid South Africa drove his love of newspapers and his vision for the future of the organization despite significant past struggles.
SUMMARY: The state of Israel has a history of great violence, visited on it by its enemies and in return by Israel's own intelligence services and military. In "Rise and Kill First," journalist and author Ronen Bergman writes about the nearly century-long campaign of targeted killing. He joins Nick Schifrin to discuss the secret history of these strikes.
SUMMARY: Longstanding rules that prevented an individual or company from owning broadcast stations and newspapers in the same local market have been abandoned by the FCC. The sweeping changes come amid wider transformations in the media and digital landscape, and have raised concerns about their impact. Hari Sreenivasan talks to Keach Hagey of The Wall Street Journal.
SUMMARY: When journalist Anjan Sundaram traveled to Rwanda in 2009, he encountered a repressive government that targeted and imprisoned the journalists he worked with. His experience opened his eyes to the courage needed to report on the stories and people that can easily hide from the world's collective consciousness. Sundaram offers his Brief but Spectacular take on covering the forgotten.
SUMMARY: Leonardo da Vinci's inquisitive spirit defined the quintessential “renaissance man.” The master artist, scientist and inventor is now the subject of a new biography by Walter Isaacson, who has profiled geniuses including Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs. Isaacson and Judy Woodruff discuss what he discovered while chronicling da Vinci's life.
This story was co-published with IRE Journal.
It's a great time to be an investigative journalist. Sure, no President has done more to demonize media than President Trump. But nor has anybody done more to boost our standing than Trump.
Millions of Americans have put their faith in us. A few weeks after the election, a friend of mine, pondering the reality of one-party government in Washington, looked at me soberly and summed up her sentiment: “You are our Congress now.”
What she meant, of course, was that we need to keep doing our job, to ferret out facts and expose wrongdoing. It seemed straightforward enough.
But as my friend was talking, one thought kept running over and over in my mind: How the hell are we going to do this?
At ProPublica, our stories often take months, and occasionally longer than that. How could we cover something as fast moving as a new administration? We also tend to stay away from areas other reporters are already covering. If lots of reporters are already digging into something, why would we want to as well? One of our advantages is that we don't have to be comprehensive. We can and should skip stories where we're unlikely to distinguish ourselves.
We could have made the decision to stick with those inclinations — to veer away from the pack and focus on areas where others were now even less likely to be.
But we didn't do that.
Instead, on Inauguration Day, we announced what we would be covering — many, many areas related to the new administration. The same day, we reported Trump hadn't fulfilled his promise to hand over control of his businesses. Two weeks later, we reported that Trump's daughter Ivanka had failed to do the same.
And our stories kept coming: about how Trump was hiring lobbyists to work at agencies they once lobbied, about the hundreds of officials Trump had quietly installed across the government, and about a Trump trust document that states the president can pull money from his businesses any time he wants. (It's that last story that got the White House riled up and led Sean Spicer, to blessedly, label us a “left-wing blog.”)
We're still in flux. We definitely don't have all the answers. Like many newsrooms, we're still grappling with how to handle coverage of the new administration. But we have found a few principles to be helpful.
Worry Less About Zigging When Others Zag
Rather than tacking away from important topics that already have the country's attention, sometimes it makes sense to look for opportunities within them.
Take the work last year of the Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, who, of course, could serve as an example in any number of these tips. Countless journalists were covering Trump's campaign. The size of the scrum covering his candidacy probably set a record. But how many reporters were really digging into Trump's charity? It turned out none, until Fahrenthold.
That's obviously not an easy example to replicate. In fact, Fahrenthold has written about how he didn't know what he was launching himself into.
That doesn't mean you should chase the week's news, or worry about matching what other outlets are doing. What it means is deciding you're going to go after the most important and vital topics, and then giving yourself the task of producing revelatory coverage within them.
A hypothetical I've occasionally invoked: Imagine you had been a reporter during the civil rights era and were looking back at your career decades later. What would you have hoped to cover? (I've heard BuzzFeed's Ben Smith tell his staff something quite similar: Write now what you think you'll be proud of at the end of your career.)
Stop Hoarding and Start Sharing
ProPublica has been collaborating with other newsrooms since we started nine years ago. But over the past few months, we've landed on new ways of working with others.
On a Friday night in late March, the White House announced it was making many staffers' financial disclosure forms “available.” But it didn't post them online or even disclose which staffers had filed the forms.
To get the documents, reporters first had to guess who had filed the disclosures. Then, they had to fill out a form on the White House's website for each person. It was like dealing with the world's worst customer service department — only we were trying to wrangle purportedly public information.
Then, one of our editors, Tracy Weber, had an idea: Why not call our friends at other outlets and coordinate. Within minutes, The New York Times and Associated Press had agreed to work with us and post all the documents we gathered.
In another instance, we talked with the Times' Eric Lipton about our joint interest in documenting the legion of lobbyists joining the administration. The chat led to a very simple and quick collaboration: We shared data on administration hires with the Times, which used it to publish a hard-hitting story that cited our contribution.
It was just one example of many where even the simple act of comparing notes has paid off. That's clearly not the proper approach all the time. But it can be plenty of the time.
Do It Out In the Open
For years, we've reached out to readers to fuel our journalism. But we've been much more aggressive about it recently.
One thing has been to simply say what we're working on — even if it's just broadly. On Inauguration Day, we not only laid out our areas of coverage, but we also gave contact information for each of our reporters. And at the bottom of many of our stories now is a reporter's contact info, and, crucially, an explanation of what information they're seeking.
Do you have information about the Trump administration's beachhead teams and their role at federal agencies? Contact Justin at justin@ProPublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240. Here is a guide for how to leak to ProPublica.
It's not fancy, but it's effective.
Sometimes readers don't have insider tips, but they can still contribute. In February, a reader wrote us about a letter she received from Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt criticizing Obamacare. The letter was filled with misleading formation. We wondered if that was true of other congressional letters, so Charles Ornstein and Terry Parris Jr. asked readers to share any similar letters they'd gotten. Again, we coordinated to get the word out with other outlets: Vox, Kaiser Health News and STAT News. Readers sent in hundreds of letters. The result: We were able to lay out how legislators were sending their constituents correspondence “full of lies and misinformation.”
Others are also embracing the approach, and getting results: Last month, the Trump administration disclosed donors who funded the president's $100 million inauguration committee. The administration posted them as super-unhelpful, non-searchable PDFs. So reporters got together to fix that, turning the documents into data. Then, the Huffington Post's Christina Wilkie invited readers to dig in and background the donors. It turns out, some of the names were straight-up fake.
You Won't Be Able to Neatly Plan and Package Your Stories — and That's Okay
Just about the only certainty with this administration is that nobody knows what will happen. That means if you're going to cover one of the most consequential stories of our time, you're probably not going to be able to, say, carefully plot out a year's worth of stories in advance.
But that doesn't mean just writing what's in front of you, either. In fact, it's more crucial than ever to think carefully about which waters to swim in. You just may need to be at peace with the uncertainty about where exactly your coverage is heading. You may even have some false starts. And there's no guarantee it will work at all.
Success will require the typical alchemy needed for great journalism — doggedness, imagination, and luck. It will also require a leap of faith. Making that leap seems only fair given the faith that readers have put in us.
SUMMARY: Journalists around the world sometimes risk death or imprisonment to inform the public. In Mexico, dozens have been killed by drug cartels, the Turkish government has been cracking down by closing newspapers and locking up reporters, and U.S. reporters are enduring accusations of “fake news.” Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists joins William Brangham to discuss attacks on freedom.
SUMMARY: Bill O'Reilly is officially out at Fox News. After a review of sexual harassment allegations, the company announced Wednesday that the TV host would not be returning to the network. The New York Times' Michael S. Schmidt, and Noreen Farrell executive director of the Equal Rights Advocates, join Judy Woodruff to discuss O'Reilly's exit.
The Pulitzer Prizes awarded Monday encompassed, among other topics, reporting done on the presidential election; a fatal fire in Oakland, Calif.; and the attempts by the Russian government to assert its power.
• The New York Daily News and ProPublica won the Public Service award for a series on the New York Police Department's abuse of a law to force people from their homes over alleged illegal activities.
• The New York Times won three prizes, the most for any news organization.
• Colson Whitehead and Lynn Nottage were among the winners in the Arts categories.
Here is the full list:
PUBLIC SERVICE
ProPublica and The Daily News
The series by The Daily News and ProPublica exposed the widespread abuse by the New York Police Department of a decades-old law to bar hundreds of people from their homes and businesses over alleged criminal activity. The investigation, which was led by Sarah Ryley, 36, a journalist for The Daily News, found that the Police Department almost exclusively targeted households and shops in minority neighborhoods. The reporting spurred New York City to pass sweeping reforms.
Finalists: The Chicago Tribune | The Houston Chronicle
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BREAKING NEWS REPORTING
The East Bay Times
Dozens of journalists at The East Bay Times worked on the coverage of the deadly “Ghost Ship” fire in Oakland, Calif., in December, which killed 36 people at a warehouse party. “We had everybody involved, from investigative reporters to artists to breaking news reporters,” said Neil Chase, the paper's executive editor. Mr. Chase said the paper, whose reporting also revealed the city's shortcomings in preventing the tragedy, was donating the cash prize that comes with the award to a local fund for the victims.
Finalists: The staff of The Dallas Morning News | The staff of The Orlando Sentinel
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INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
Eric Eyre, The Charleston Gazette-Mail
Mr. Eyre (pronounced AIR), 51, won the award for a series of articles about the opioid abuse epidemic in West Virginia. Mr. Eyre, the paper's statehouse reporter, began his multipart series with these words: “Follow the pills and you'll find the overdose deaths.” It took Mr. Eyre years to acquire the documents most important to his reporting, and he did it “in the face of powerful opposition,” according to the Pulitzer citation. A lawyer defending a drug wholesale company said that it was vital to protect crucial court records “from the intrusive journalistic nose of the Gazette-Mail.”
Finalists: Michael J. Berens and Patricia Callahan of The Chicago Tribune | Steve Reilly of USA Today Network
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EXPLANATORY REPORTING
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and The Miami Herald
A sprawling network of journalists was awarded the prize for their explosive articles on the so-called Panama Papers. The Pulitzer board commended the “collaboration of more than 300 reporters on six continents to expose the hidden infrastructure and global scale of offshore tax havens.” The work was originally submitted for the international reporting award, but the board moved it to the explanatory reporting category.
Finalists: Joan Garrett McClane and Joy Lukachick Smith of The Chattanooga Times Free Press | Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, Lauren Kirchner and Terry Parris Jr. of ProPublica | The Staff of National Geographic
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LOCAL REPORTING
The staff of The Salt Lake Tribune
The prize honored reports about “the perverse, punitive and cruel treatment given to sexual assault victims at Brigham Young University.” The Tribune's first article said that the university, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, investigated students who reported sex crimes — and sometimes disciplined them for breaking rules on curfews and dress codes. The Tribune also found that the school's Title IX office, to which students could report sexual assaults, regularly alerted the honor code office, which looked into the rule violations. In November, Brigham Young took steps to restructure the Title IX office. The school also said that students who reported sexual assaults would no longer risk having their conduct reviewed by the honor code office.
Finalists: Jenna Russell, Maria Cramer, Michael Rezendes, Todd Wallack and Scott Helman, The Boston Globe | Michael Schwirtz, Michael Winerip and Robert Gebeloff, The New York Times
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NATIONAL REPORTING
David A. Fahrenthold, The Washington Post
Mr. Fahrenthold was cited for his reporting during the 2016 presidential campaign, which cast doubt on Donald J. Trump's “assertions of generosity toward charities.” A month after Mr. Trump skipped a Republican debate in Iowa to attend a fund-raiser for veterans, Mr. Fahrenthold found that only about half of the money had gone to veterans' charities. Mr. Fahrenthold, 39, later found that Mr. Trump had used his own foundation's money for business-related legal settlements and purchases that included two portraits of himself. In October, Mr. Fahrenthold received a tip about a video that showed Mr. Trump talking about women in vulgar terms. “The voice you'd heard in so many other contexts was talking in a way we'd never heard before,” Mr. Fahrenthold said Monday. “That's what made it so powerful.”
Finalists: Renee Dudley, Steve Stecklow, Alexandra Harney and other members of the Reuters Staff | The staff of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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INTERNATIONAL REPORTING
The staff of The New York Times
In “Russia's Dark Arts,” a team of New York Times journalists across two continents chronicled the covert and sometimes deadly actions taken by President Vladimir V. Putin's government to grow Russian influence abroad. The series, which began last spring, explored the rise of online “troll armies,” the strategic spreading of disinformation and Russia's unprecedented — and politically consequential — cyberattack on the 2016 American presidential election.
Finalists: Chris Hamby, BuzzFeed News | The staff of The Wall Street Journal | International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and The Miami Herald
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FEATURE WRITING
C.J. Chivers, The New York Times
Mr. Chivers, 52, spent months crafting his 18,102-word portrait of a young combat veteran haunted by his experiences in Afghanistan, who was imprisoned after a violent fight with a stranger. Unflinching yet empathetic, the reporting by Mr. Chivers — himself a former Marine — prompted the state of Illinois to vacate the veteran's jail sentence. “The truth literally set a young man free,” Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, where the story appeared, said Monday.
Finalists: Adam Entous and Devlin Barrett, The Wall Street Journal | Eli Saslow, The Washington Post
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COMMENTARY
Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal
Ms. Noonan, 66, has been a longtime observer and participant in the political sphere, having worked as a speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan. Her winning columns addressed the bruising 2016 campaign season and the rise of Mr. Trump, analyzing his populist appeal and his effect on the Republican Party. Paul Gigot, the editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, wrote in a memo to the newsroom, “Peggy didn't shrink from addressing Trump's many flaws as a candidate, but she always showed great respect for the intelligence of voters and explained the currents of American life and politics that catapulted Trump to the White House.”
Finalists: Dahleen Glanton, The Chicago Tribune | Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Media Network
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CRITICISM
Hilton Als, The New Yorker
A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1994, Mr. Als, 56, was praised for reviews that “strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context,” particularly when it comes to themes of gender, sexuality and race. Mr. Als, who was a finalist last year, is known for stylish and trenchant prose, and won the honor for a set of 10 pieces that covered works including “The Color Purple” and “Dear Evan Hansen.” American theater, he said in an interview, is an a transitional state. “We're living in an amazing age,” he said. “All kinds of stories are going to be told now that just didn't get an audience before. That's thrilling to me.”
Finalists: Laura Reiley, The Tampa Bay Times | Ty Burr, The Boston Globe
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EDITORIAL WRITING
Art Cullen, The Storm Lake Times
There is no mistaking the anger in the voice of The Storm Lake Times when it writes about the legacy of big agriculture: “Anyone with eyes and a nose knows in his gut that Iowa has the dirtiest surface water in America.” That voice is personal, too. It belongs to Mr. Cullen, 59, who owns the newspaper with his brother John. The Times comes out twice a week and has a circulation of 3,000. Among its admiring readers were Pulitzer jurors. They cited Mr. Cullen's “tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing.”
Finalists: Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post | Joe Holley, The Houston Chronicle
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Example
EDITORIAL CARTOONING
Jim Morin, The Miami Herald
The looming ogre of “Nationalism,” armed with a malevolent grin and the club of “Racism,” opened the door and cast his menacing shadow last June. “Hello,” he said. “Remember me?” For this and other work portraying a frightening America, Mr. Morin, 64, earned his second Pulitzer Prize. (The first was in 1996.) The Pulitzer jurors said he “delivered sharp perspectives through flawless artistry, biting prose and crisp wit.”
Finalists: Jen Sorensen | Steve Sack, The Star Tribune
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BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY
Daniel Berehulak, The New York Times
Mr. Berehulak, 41, was recognized for work that showed “the callous disregard for human life in the Philippines brought about by a government assault on drug dealers and users.” On Monday, Mr. Berehulak described observing “an assembly line of state-sanctioned murder” over 35 days in Manila. He dedicated his award to the families of those killed, saying he hoped “their pain might somehow be remedied by justice.” He was previously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2015 for his work documenting the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
Finalists: The staff of The Associated Press | Jonathan Bachman, Reuters
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FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY
E. Jason Wambsgans, The Chicago Tribune
Mr. Wambsgans, 44, was honored for his portrayal of a 10-year-old boy and his mother after the boy survived a shooting in Chicago. He has mainly photographed violence in the city for the past four years.
“Because he and his mother were so open, it was just a deeper level of intimacy than we're typically able to convey,” Mr. Wambsgans said. “It's kind of a bittersweet thing because there's not a week that goes by that I don't worry about this boy and his future.”
Finalists: Jake May, The Flint Journal | Katie Falkenberg, The Los Angeles Times
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FICTION
Colson Whitehead, “The Underground Railroad”
When he was working on his hallucinatory and chilling novel, which reimagines American slavery, Mr. Whitehead studied works by masters of magical realism, including Toni Morrison's “Beloved” and Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez's “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” His aim was to write about “the fantastic with a straight face.”
Mr. Whitehead, 47, said the critical reactions to the book have been enormously gratifying (the novel also won the National Book Award). But one of the most meaningful responses came from a stranger who approached him in a bookstore. “She said, 'Your book made me a more empathetic person,'” he said.
Past coverage: Profile | Review | Sunday Book Review
Finalists: “Imagine Me Gone,” by Adam Haslett (Sunday Book Review) | “The Sport of Kings,” by C. E. Morgan (Review | Sunday Book Review)
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DRAMA
Lynn Nottage, “Sweat”
Ms. Nottage's play explores working-class alienation in Reading, Pa., a city that has been hurt by deindustrialization. The Pulitzer citation called “Sweat,” which is currently running on Broadway, “a nuanced yet powerful drama that reminds audiences of the stacked deck still facing workers searching for the American dream.”
“I was trying to understand how economic stagnation is reshaping our cultural narrative,” Ms. Nottage said, “and wanting to tell the story of what was happening to people on the ground in a way that was truthful and emotional and unapologetic.”
This is the second Pulitzer Prize for Ms. Nottage, 52, who won in 2009 for “Ruined,” a play about rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Past coverage: Review | Feature | Off-Broadway Review | Ashland, Ore. Review
Finalists: “The Wolves,” by Sarah DeLappe (Review | Off-Broadway Review | Feature) | “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” by Taylor Mac (Review | Feature )
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HISTORY
Heather Ann Thompson, “Blood in the Water”
Ms. Thompson spent 13 years researching this account of the Attica prison uprising, which the Pulitzer board cited as “a narrative history that sets high standards for scholarly judgment and tenacity of inquiry.” In addition to extensive archival research, Ms. Thompson, 53, interviewed dozens of survivors, participants and observers, many of whom spent decades fighting to uncover the truth about the violent retaking that left 39 prisoners and hostages dead.
“This was a story that the people inside of that prison have been trying to tell for 45 years,” she said.
Past coverage: News Feature | Review | Sunday Book Review
Finalists: Larrie D. Ferreiro, “Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It” | Wendy Warren, “New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America” (Sunday Book Review)
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BIOGRAPHY
Hisham Matar, “The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between”
Mr. Matar was a 19-year-old student in England when his father, a prominent critic of the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi living in exile, was kidnapped and taken to a secret prison in Libya. This memoir recounts Mr. Matar's return to his homeland 22 years later, after the fall of that government, to find out what happened to him. The Pulitzer citation called it “a first-person elegy for home and father,” executed with “controlled emotion.” In an interview last year with The New York Times, Mr. Matar, 46, was asked to imagine what his father would have made of his journey.
“My failure to cure myself of Libya would have amused and perhaps even comforted him,” Mr. Matar said. “My search for him would have not. He wanted me, above all things, to be free and happy.”
Past coverage: Review | Sunday Book Review | Q&A | Excerpt in Sunday Review
Finalists: Susan Faludi, “In the Darkroom” (Review | Sunday Book Review) | Paul Kalanithi, “When Breath Becomes Air” (Review | Sunday Book Review | Well Review | Q&A With Widow | Essay by Widow)
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POETRY
Tyehimba Jess, “Olio”
Mr. Jess's second book of poems is a kaleidoscopic and formally ambitious collection about African-American artists between the Civil War and World War I, and the ways in which they both fought against and tried to make creative use of the cultural pressures of minstrelsy. Scott Joplin plays a prominent role in the book's imagination, as do less well-known figures, most but not all musicians. “American music is critically and fundamentally tied to the African-American experience, the experience of a people who were denied access to literacy for most of our time in this country through slavery,” Mr. Jess, 51, said in an interview in March with The New School. “They were forced to forge another kind of literacy through the music.”
Finalists: Adrienne Rich, “Collected Poems: 1950-2012” (Review) | Campbell McGrath, “XX”
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GENERAL NONFICTION
Matthew Desmond, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City”
In his meticulously reported book, Mr. Desmond, a sociologist, followed eight impoverished families in Milwaukee as they struggled to make rent. Mr. Desmond, 37, a director of the Justice and Poverty Project at Harvard, said he decided to investigate the causes and the repercussions of evictions as a way to write about the systemic causes of poverty in the United States.
“America's the richest country, with the worst poverty,” he said. “That ugly fact has troubled me for a long time, and I wanted to understand the role that housing plays.”
Past Coverage: Profile | Review | Sunday Book Review | Sunday Review Essay | Op-ed
Finalists: “In a Different Key: The Story of Autism,” by John Donvan and Caren Zucker (Sunday Book Review) | “The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery,” by Micki McElya
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MUSIC
Du Yun, “Angel's Bone”
Ms. Du, 39, won for her savage chamber opera, a collaboration with the librettist Royce Vavrek, which finds an allegory for human trafficking in the story of two angels who are brutally mistreated after they crash-land in a suburban backyard.
“In the U.S., trafficking seems very far from us, in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe,” she said. “But it's happening right in front of our eyes. And that's how this arose, to be able to create a platform that's not didactic, but a work that allows ideas to blossom.”
Past coverage: Review
Finalists: Ashley Fure, “Bound to the Bow” (Review) | Kate Soper, “Ipsa Dixit”
SUMMARY: The news of Gwen Ifill's death has left a void in the world of journalism and politics. Judy Woodruff and Hari Sreenivasan speak with a few of her friends and colleagues about her legacy and what made her so beloved.
SUMMARY: Three years ago, Pulitzer-winning journalist Paul Salopek embarked on a decade-long walk around the world, charting the path of the original human emigrants who left their birthplace in eastern Africa to spread across the globe. As he prepares to follow the Silk Road from Central Asia into China, Salopek checks in with Hari Sreenivasan to reflect on his journey thus far and what lies ahead.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Last fall, we took you to the Southern Caucasus Mountains in the country of Georgia to meet Paul Salopek. He is the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent on an epic journey he calls the Out of Eden Walk.
Beginning in the Great Rift Valley in Africa in 2013, Salopek is now three years into a decade-long walk around the world. After our walk with Paul, he crossed Azerbaijan, and then, around Christmas, hopped a freighter across the Caspian Sea, toward Central Asia.
And Paul Salopek joins me again.
Paul, tell our audience where we find you now.
PAUL SALOPEK, National Geographic Fellow: Today I’m in the port city of Aktau, Kazakstan, which is a very remote and isolated sort of starting line for the next Asiatic phase of the walk.
This is kind of where the Silk Road butted up against the Caspian Sea. And you might be able to hear a little bit of surf in the background. And it’s a very off-the-map place. I mean, it’s about, I don’t know, 100,000, 150,000 people, an old uranium mining town under the Soviet era.
And I will be walking due east from here as the sun rises towards China.
HARI SREENIVASAN: How long to get to China?
PAUL SALOPEK: It’s going to be an interesting passage, if the weather cooperates. I have some big mountains to go over. Maybe as soon as this coming winter, but more likely springtime.
It’s about 3,000 kilometers away.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And these 3,000 kilometers are different geographically and topographically than what you have already covered, right?
PAUL SALOPEK: Yes, they are. They’re very different.
As you recall, the last time I reported in, I was in the Caucasus, which is a very, relatively heavy populated corner of the world, very rugged, mountainous, also a crossroads of the world, lots of different cultures, languages, ancient migration, ancient invasions.
What I have before me now is a pretty arid plain, a high plateau of dry, brittle grasses with very little water. So it’s going to be more like an expedition this time. Rather than walking from farm to farm, I’m going to actually have to camp out and look for water and go into survival mode on this stretch.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, how do you ensure that you have enough food and water?
PAUL SALOPEK: I just last weekend purchased a cargo horse, a Kazakh horse. These are very sturdy little ponies. They can walk very far with very little water. And I will be leading that animal, and it will be carrying part of my water and part of my food.
Also, I had to do something that I have not done since Saudi Arabia. Over the last many weeks, I have had to go out and actually cache water, which is a very strange, a very surreal experience in this gigantic stage of open grass and sky.
Caching water means driving out to certain points along the proposed walking route and digging a hole in the ground and plucking in 10 to 15 liters of bottled water and then covering it up and taking a GPS coordinate. And so going out there and planning a few mouthfuls of water in this gigantic, operatic landscape is very strange. It’s kind of like a conceptual art piece.
There's a moment in almost every movie when people in the audience who really know the line of work depicted on screen cry out in frustration and say: “Oh, come on!” “Absurd.” “Never happens.”
Over the decades, Hollywood screenwriters have taken liberties with every imaginable profession and craft, from doctors to lawyers to spies to police detectives. Rocky Balboa survives punches that would decapitate an ordinary boxer. The car chases in 'The Bourne Identity' defy physics. John McClane, the hard-boiled cop in the 'Die Hard' series, displays a supernatural ability to evade bullets.
Journalism movies have had their share of utterly improbable moments. In the 1994 film “The Paper,” the city editor of a New York City tabloid gets into a fist fight with his female boss as he tries to stop the presses. (Not a great career move.) More recently, the first season of HBO's television series 'The Newsroom' showed a producer landing a series of astounding scoops in the first hours after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon. The reporter's information came from miraculously well-placed sources – a sister who worked at Halliburton and a close friend who happened to be a junior BP executive attending all the key crisis meetings.
All of this makes “Spotlight,” the film based on the Boston Globe's investigation of the Catholic Church, a remarkable achievement. The movie, which has been nominated for six Academy Awards including best picture, vividly captures the mix of frustration, drudgery and excitement that goes into every great investigative story. Where liberties were taken, and there were a few, they are in line with the realities of the news business.
One of the most credible aspects of the movie is the cluelessness with which the reporters begin their quest. As is often the case, the Globe's group of reporters, known as the “Spotlight” Team, have no idea of the size and scope of what they're trying to examine. At first, they stumble around, lacking the most basic information about how the church bureaucracy worked.
The notion of pedophile priests was not new. Newspapers from Dallas to Portland had done deeply reported stories on individual cases. Boston itself had just witnessed the criminal trial of a particularly notorious priest, Father John J. Geoghan. Initially, senior editors at the Globe are not even persuaded there was a story worth chasing.
As the film briefly acknowledges, the Globe was behind the Boston Phoenix, a respected alternative weekly, in covering the subject for local readers. Kristen Lombardi, a reporter for the Phoenix, had already written a series of stories implicating Cardinal Bernard Law, the leader of Boston's archdiocese, in allowing Geoghan to remain in daily contact with children for three decades.
“Spotlight” opens with the arrival of Marty Baron, a veteran journalist who took over at the Globe after a stint as editor of the Miami Herald. As investigative reporters know well, Florida is a reporters' paradise, lousy with graft, corruption and colorful characters. The state's public records laws are decisively tilted toward openness. When a Globe columnist covering the Geoghan trial wrote that “the truth may never be known,” Baron sat down with the head of the “Spotlight” team, Walter “Robby” Robinson, and asked him to take a fresh look at the issue.
The editor suggested filing a lawsuit to force release of records the Catholic Church had submitted under court seal. Such suits were unheard of in Massachusetts. Liev Schreiber, the actor who portrays Baron, captures the true life editor's white-hot focus and intensity, so much so that long-time colleagues were taken aback by the resemblance.
The movie accurately depicts the team's key early breakthrough. The reporters figured out that priests who had “acted out” with children were often listed in the diocese's phone book as 'on leave.' They obtained years of directories and pored through thousands of entries to create a database, using the then-remarkable new technology known as a computer spreadsheet. With artful editing and a stirring score, director Tom McCarthy made this excruciatingly boring work an inspiring event, which in a way it was.
Another turning point came when Sacha Pfeiffer, the Globe reporter played by Rachel McAdams, knocks on the door of a priest who off-handedly acknowledges that he has abused children. (He asserts, bizarrely, that his conduct was not improper because he was not sexually aroused.) The reporter is clearly flustered and unprepared for this admission and she rushes through the interview before a woman at the house can slam the door. The practice of “door stopping” is routine for investigative journalists; nearly all such encounters end in failure. But the few attempts that succeed deliver an adrenalin kick unlike anything in reporting.
Fascinatingly, one of the more compelling scenes about journalism in the movie was invented by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, the screenwriters who worked closely with the reporters and editors involved the story.
It comes late in the film, after the “Spotlight” team has figured out that scores of Boston-area priests had abused children. Eric MacLeish, a lawyer for the victims, angrily tells Robinson that he sent the Globe a list of 20 priests “and you buried it.” Soon after, the reporters come across a story that ran deep inside the Globe's metro section when Robinson was in charge of local coverage.
The writers came across the buried story when they interviewed MacLeish as part of their research for the film. They seized on it as the perfect way to illustrate the Globe's earlier failures to investigate an important local institution. The conversation between MacLeish and Robinson is fictional. But the sentiments portrayed in the movie are real. “It happened on my watch and I'll go to confession on it,” the Robinson told Entertainment Weekly. “Like any journalist who's been around this long, I've made my share of mistakes.”
In investigative reporting, of course, nearly all great stories are screamingly obvious in retrospect. The reporting and documents the Globe obtained through its lawsuit proved that Church leaders had knowingly shuffled around pedophile priests from parish to parish. Geoghan turned out to be a piece of a much, much larger story, one that has rippled across the United States and the world over the past 15 years. Baron has pointed out that the movie is not a stenographic record of how the investigation unfolded. But it gets the big things right, providing a compelling picture of how great reporters break big stories.
SUMMARY: Illustrative journalist Wendy MacNaughton offers her Brief but Spectacular take on telling undertold stories through drawing.
SUMMARY: Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi sits down with chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner to discuss the pardoning of Al Jazeera journalists, whether Egypt will step up military action against the Islamic State, President Bashar al-Assad’s future in Syria, the government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and the strength of the relationship between his nation and the U.S.
MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour): Mr. President, thank you for joining us.
This past week, the big news was that you released 100 political prisoners, including two prominent Al Jazeera journalists. Was the timing of that dictated by the fact you were coming here to the U.N. General Assembly, to quiet all the international criticism there has been of that?
PRESIDENT ABDEL-FATTAH EL-SISSI, Egypt (through interpreter): The idea is very simple. Once the legal procedures are over and there is a possibility for me to intervene and to issue a pardon, I didn’t hesitate.
MARGARET WARNER: In your system, does a legal pardon mean that you have concluded that the charges — that they were innocent of the charges?
PRESIDENT ABDEL-FATTAH EL-SISSI (through interpreter): Once those are over, the legal party allows the president to intervene to bring an end to this issue and to this legal issue.
MARGARET WARNER: Well, now there are still 18 journalists being held, and, by conservative estimates, 20,000 or more political prisoners, many of whom had been brought in on what are said to be trumped-up terrorism charges.
Could you act and will you act as swiftly once the legal process is over?
PRESIDENT ABDEL-FATTAH EL-SISSI (through interpreter): It is very important to stop at the word of under detention.
There is no legal formality that allows me to do so, but there are court procedures force that we can deal with these cases.
MARGARET WARNER: So, the big issue here at the U.N. General Assembly is going to be the fight against Islamic State, and, in particular, focused on Syria right now.
Now, the anti-ISIL coalition, of which Egypt is a member, you have been at it for a full year, and yet ISIS has grown, if anything, more powerful. Something like 30,000 new fighters, foreign fighters, have entered Syria. Why is that?
PRESIDENT ABDEL-FATTAH EL-SISSI (through interpreter): It’s the idea that we can fight ISIS only militarily. This means the strategy is incomplete. We need a holistic approach that would include security dimensions, an economic dimension, social and cultural dimensions as well.
SUMMARY: Thomas Erdbrink, Tehran bureau chief for The New York Times, offers a rarely seen personal look at daily life in Iran, the first report in a series called 'Dispatch: Iran.'
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Tonight, the first in a series of short films we will bring you by Thomas Erdbrink, the Tehran bureau chief of The New York Times. The Dutch-born journalist has lived in Iran since 2002.
Personal rather than political, his portraits show a side of life in the country few get to see.
Tonight, an introduction to our series, Dispatch: Iran.
THOMAS ERDBRINK, The New York Times: This is where it all started, here in the desert in the middle of Iran.
I was a young journalist and came here the write about a student uprising. I fell in love with Newsha, an Iranian photographer, and decided to move to Tehran.
It was so different for me to be here, and I think Newsha in many ways symbolized that. Of course, yes, I could have married a girl from the Dutch countryside and it maybe would have been different and maybe in many ways would have been easier, but I’m happy I choose you.
NEWSHA TAVAKOLIAN: Of course you should be.
(LAUGHTER)
THOMAS ERDBRINK: This is the mysterious and isolated country where I arrived as a young man and where I have been working as a correspondent for the past 12 years, first for some Dutch newspapers and television channels, and since a couple years for The New York Times.
SUMMARY: With a court ruling that two Al Jazeera journalists who were imprisoned in Egypt for more than a year will be released on bail, Judy Woodruff looks at a new survey of press freedom and abuses around the world. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner speaks with Ali Rezaian, brother of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who has been jailed in Iran on secret charges since July.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): An Egyptian court ruled today that two Al-Jazeera journalists who had been jailed for more than 400 days will be released on bail.
Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy still face a retrial. Their colleague, Australian Peter Greste, was freed a few weeks ago.
Today’s ruling is a small victory for press freedom advocates. But a new report released in Washington warns that journalists are increasingly coming under threat.
DELPHINE HALGAND, U.S. Director, Reporters Without Borders: The indicators compiled by Reporters Without Borders are incontestable. There was a drastic decline in freedom of information in 2014.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The world’s largest press freedom group surveyed 180 countries, and fully two-thirds in its estimation saw greater restrictions last year. The list placed Finland first as most free, with much of Europe near the top. The United States was 49th, with the report citing lack of a federal shield law and arrests of reporters in Ferguson, Missouri, among other factors.
But, worldwide, the principal cause of deterioration was widespread conflict, especially in Syria, in Iraq and Ukraine. Prime culprits were nonstate actors like the Islamic State group that have menaced and killed journalists. Another major cause, restrictions in the name of national security, from the Middle East, through Asia, and even, the group contends, in the United States.
And while bail was announced for two Al-Jazeera journalists in Egypt today, Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian remains behind bars in Iran. The dual U.S./Iranian citizen has been held since July on secret charges.
SUMMARY: In Paris, three men stormed satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo with assault rifles, killing the editor, prominent political cartoonists, a guard and others before firing at a police car and gunning down another officer. The gunmen -- identified as two French brothers and a teenager -- escaped, prompting a manhunt as France raised its terror alert to the highest level. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The nation of France is reeling tonight. Heavily armed gunmen shouting Islamist slogans stormed the office of a Paris publication today. They left a dozen dead and 11 wounded, four of them critically. Police later identified the gunmen, who vanished into a stunned French capital.
Hari Sreenivasan begins our coverage.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Shock and disbelief gripped Parisians moments after the military-style attack. Three hooded men with assault rifles forced their way into the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper.
Within minutes, they killed the editor, nine others, including two prominent political cartoonists, and a police guard. Back outside, they riddled a police car with bullets and gunned down another officer.
WOMAN (through interpreter): I was on my balcony, and I heard a loud noise and then I saw an injured policeman.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Amateur video captured a gunman who approached the wounded officer, and killed him with a shot to the head. Before driving away, the attackers shouted in Arabic “Allahu akbar,” “God is great,” and in French, “We avenged the Prophet Mohammed. We killed Charlie Hebdo.”
The left-leaning newspaper had repeatedly been threatened over satirical commentary and cartoons on Islam and other religions. In 2011, a firebombing gutted its headquarters after editors used an image of the Prophet Mohammed on the cover. No one was hurt in that attack.
SUMMARY: Mark Austin of Independent Television News talks to Judy Woodruff from Paris about the French security response to the mass killing at satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and how Parisians see the attack as an affront to cherished freedoms.
SUMMARY: Charlie Hebdo, the publication whose staff was attacked by three gunmen in Paris, has been threatened and firebombed in the past over provocative commentary and cartoons on Islam. Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and Bertrand Vannier of Radio France join Judy Woodruff to discuss the newspaper’s reputation and who might be behind the violence.
SUMMARY: Pens -- weapon of choice of the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo -- were raised in their honor at vigils around the world. Jeffrey Brown talks to two editorial cartoonists, Tom Toles of the Washington Post and Ted Rall of the Los Angeles Times, about the role of satirical cartoonists in society and their declining number in the U.S.
