Donald L. Barlett

Last updated
Donald L. Barlett
Born (1936-07-17) July 17, 1936 (age 87)
Occupation(s)Investigative journalist and non-fiction writer
SpouseNancy Barlett
Website http://barlettandsteele.com/index.php

Donald L. Barlett (born July 17, 1936) is an American investigative journalist and author who often collaborates with James B. Steele. According to The Washington Journalism Review , they were a better investigative reporting team than even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. [1] Together they have won two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Magazine Awards and six George Polk Awards. In addition, they have been recognized by their peers with awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors on five separate occasions. They are known for their reporting technique of delving deep into documents and then, after what could be a long investigative period, interviewing the necessary sources. [2] The duo has been working together for over 40 years and is frequently referred to as Barlett and Steele.

Contents

Early life and education

Barlett was raised in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He attended Penn State University.

Career

After Penn State, Barlett served three years as a special agent with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps until 1956, when he began his journalistic career as a reporter for the Reading (Pennsylvania) Times. Nine years later he became an investigative journalist for The Plain Dealer , and later took similar jobs with The Chicago Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer , where he was to join his collaborator James B. Steele. In 1997, Barlett and Steele became editors-at-large for Time . In 2006, they moved to Vanity Fair as contributing editors. Over the years, Barlett and Steele wrote on such diverse topics as crime, housing, nuclear waste, tax loopholes, the decline of the middle class's standard of living, Howard Hughes, the role of big money in politics, oil prices, immigration, and health care.

Barlett and Steele won two Pulitzers [3] and were recognized for their contributions to American journalism for their work while at The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1972, during one of their earliest collaborations for The Inquirer, Barlett and Steele pioneered the use of computers for the analysis of data on violent crimes.[ citation needed ] Barlett and Steele won their first Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Special Award [4] [5] in 1975 for a series called "Auditing the Internal Revenue Service" published by The Inquirer. [6] They won their second Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Award for Large Newspapers [4] in 1989 at the Inquirer for their coverage of temporary tax breaks embedded in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. [7] Their 1991 Inquirer series America: What Went Wrong? was named by the New York University department of journalism as 51st on its list of the 100 best pieces of journalism of the 20th century. [8] Rewritten as a book it became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. It is one of seven books Barlett and Steele have published, five of which were written while at The Inquirer.

After 26 years as a team for The Inquirer, Barlett and Steele left to pursue investigative reporting at Time. [9] It was while they were at Time that the investigative reporting team won their two National Magazine Awards, as well at their record breaking 6th George Polk Award, although this time for excellence in magazine journalism. [10]

After leaving Time over monetary issues, Barlett and Steele were hired by Vanity Fair to be contributing editors on the understanding that they would contribute two articles in their signature long-form style each year. [11] [12] In 2007, Barlett and Steele, while still working for Vanity Fair, were featured in the PBS documentary series, Exposé: America's Investigative Reports, in an episode entitled "Friends In High Places," which was about government contracts. When asked on the program how they have managed to work for so many years together, Barlett said, "We're both very boring. Who else reads the tax codes?"

Impact

Barlett and Steele are used as examples in investigative reporting textbooks as a model of technique and excellence in journalism. As career investigative journalists, Barlett and Steele have become well known for their teamwork, [13] "documents state of mind," [14] consistent accuracy, [15] "replicability" for revealing their sources, [16] and ability to make their work relevant to ordinary people, such as in "America: What Went Wrong?". Their employers, especially Gene Roberts at The Inquirer, [17] provided them with the opportunity to spend a long period of time reviewing documents in pursuit of journalism with depth and gave them the space to publish their work in lengthy articles in newspapers and magazines.

About Barlett and Steele, fellow investigative reporter Bob Woodward said, "They're an institution. They have kind of perfected a method of doing their work, and I have the highest regard for it. Systematic, comprehensive - they take a long time, and they don't mind saying what their conclusions are." [18]

Both Pulitzer Prize Awards illustrate the auditing function of investigative journalism, whereby the press as "The Fourth Estate" watches over government. In 1975, they audited the Internal Revenue Service. In 1989, they acted as watchdogs over the House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dan Rostenkowski and the insertion by Democrats and Republicans of temporary tax breaks in the Tax Reform Act of 1986.[ citation needed ]

Barlett and Steele are acknowledged as having affected business investigative journalism throughout their four-decade career, and the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism established an annual award in their name in 2007.

Published works

Books

Related Research Articles

Below are the winners of the 1989Pulitzer Prize by category.

The Pulitzer Prizes for 1975, the 59th annual prizes, were ratified by the Pulitzer Prize advisory board on April 11, 1975, and by the trustees of Columbia University on May 5. For the first time, the role of accepting or rejecting recommendations of the advisory board was delegated by the trustees to the university's president, William J. McGill; the change was prompted by the desire of the trustees to distance themselves from the appearance of approval of controversial awards based on work involving what some considered to be illegal leaks, such as the 1972 Pulitzer Prize awarded for the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

James B. Steele is an American investigative journalist and author. With longtime collaborator Donald L. Barlett he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Magazine Awards, six George Polk Awards and many other national awards during the 40 years they worked together at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Time, and Vanity Fair.

Walt Bogdanich is an American investigative journalist and three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

Daniel Hertzberg is a former American journalist. Hertzberg is a 1968 graduate of the University of Chicago. He married Barbara Kantrowitz, on August 29, 1976. He was the former senior deputy managing editor and later deputy managing editor for international news at The Wall Street Journal. Starting in July 2009, Hertzberg served as senior editor-at-large and then as executive editor for finance at Bloomberg News in New York City before retiring in February 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Barstow</span> American journalist

David Barstow is an American journalist and professor. While a reporter at The New York Times from 1999 to 2019, Barstow was awarded, individually or jointly, four Pulitzer Prizes, becoming the first reporter in the history of the Pulitzers to be awarded this many. In 2019, Barstow joined the faculty of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism as a professor of investigative journalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scott Higham</span>

Scott Higham is an American investigative journalist and author who documented the corporate and political forces that fueled the opioid epidemic, in addition to conducting other major investigations. He is a five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Pulitzer twice with his colleagues at The Washington Post. He is a member of The Post’s investigative unit and the co-author of two books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raquel Rutledge</span> American newspaper reporter

Raquel Rutledge is an Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative reporter working at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Her investigations have uncovered government benefits fraud, public health, workplace safety issues, tax oversight failures, malfeasance in undercover federal law enforcement stings, life-threatening dangers of alcohol poisoning at resorts in Mexico, and a disproportionate fire risk faced by renters living in Milwaukee's most distressed neighborhoods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Duhigg</span> American journalist and author

Charles Duhigg is an American journalist and non-fiction author. He was a reporter for The New York Times, currently writes for The New Yorker Magazine and is the author of two books on habits and productivity, titled The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business and Smarter Faster Better. In 2013, Duhigg was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series of 10 articles on the business practices of Apple and other technology companies.

Duff Wilson is an American investigative reporter, formerly with The New York Times, later with Reuters. He is the first two-time winner of the Harvard University Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Alix Marian Freedman is an American journalist, and ethics editor at Thomson Reuters.

Gary Cohn is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Mark Maremont is an American business journalist with the Wall Street Journal. Maremont has worked on reports for the Journal for which the paper received two Pulitzer Prizes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amanda Bennett</span> American journalist (born 1952)

Amanda Bennett is an American journalist and author. She was the director of Voice of America from 2016 to 2020, and the current CEO of U.S. Agency for Global Media. She formerly edited The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Lexington Herald-Leader. Bennett is also the author of six nonfiction books.

James Ray Polk was an American journalist, known for his investigative reporting and coverage of American political corruption and fraud. Over the course of his career, he covered the Raymond Donovan investigations, the Bert Lance controversy, the Abscam scandal, and the financial dealings of John Zaccaro, husband of 1984 Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Carreyrou</span> American journalist and author

John Carreyrou is a French-American investigative reporter at The New York Times. Carreyrou worked for The Wall Street Journal for 20 years between 1999 and 2019 and has been based in Brussels, Paris, and New York City. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice and is well known for having exposed the fraudulent practices of the multibillion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos in a series of articles published in The Wall Street Journal.

Susanne Craig is a Canadian investigative journalist who works at The New York Times. She was the reporter to whom Donald Trump's 1995 tax returns were anonymously mailed during the 2016 presidential election. In 2018, she was an author of The New York Times investigation into Donald Trump's wealth that found the president inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father, some through fraudulent tax schemes. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2019 for this coverage. In 2020, she further reported on Donald Trump's tax record which disclosed that he paid $750 in federal income tax during 2016 and nothing at all in 10 of the previous 15 years. Craig is also known for her coverage of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and of New York State and New York City government and politics.

The Gerald Loeb Award is given annually for multiple categories of business reporting. Special awards were occasionally given for distinguished business journalism that doesn't necessarily fit into other categories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Kaufman</span> American journalist born 1956

Jonathan Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, author, editor, Director of the Northeastern University School of Journalism, and professor of journalism.

Margie Mason is an American, Pulitzer-winning journalist. She's a native of Daybrook, West Virginia and one of a handful of journalists who have been allowed to report from inside North Korea. Mason has traveled, as a reporter, to more than 20 countries on four continents. She has worked for the Associated Press for more than a decade, and is the Indonesian Bureau chief and Asian medical and human-rights writer in Jakarta, Indonesia. She was one of four journalists from the Associated Press who won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the 2015 George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, and the 2016 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

References

References

Lovelady, Steve (2006-05-18). "Once There Were Giants". CJR Daily.

Notes
    1. Ponnuru, Ramesh (17 July 2000). "Time's Terrible Two: The perils of Barlett and Steele". National Review. LII (13).
    2. Alter, Jonathan (April 24, 1989). "Two Reporters You Don't Want on Your Tail". Newsweek.
    3. "The 1989 Pulitzer Prize Winner in National Reporting". www.pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2023-11-13.
    4. 1 2 "Historical Winners List". UCLA Anderson School of Management . Retrieved January 31, 2019.
    5. "Royster wins Loeb Award for financial journalism". The New York Times . September 25, 1975. p. 64. Retrieved February 6, 2019.
    6. "1975 Winners". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 30 April 2011.
    7. "1989 Winners and Finalists". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 30 April 2011.
    8. Barringer, Felicity (March 1, 1999). "Journalism's Greatest Hits: Two Lists of a Century's Top Stories". The New York Times .
    9. O'Reilly, David (Feb 2, 1997). "Barlett, Steele Leave Inquirer After 26 Years". The Philadelphia Inquirer.
    10. Colford, Paul (March 16, 2001). "Time Pair Snare Record Sixth Polk". Daily News (New York).
    11. Seelye, Katharine (May 18, 2006). "Richard Stengel Is Chosen To Be Top Editor at Time". The New York Times.
    12. Seelye, Katharine (August 7, 2006). "An Established Reporting Team Moves to Vanity Fair". The New York Times.
    13. Meyer, Philip (April 28, 2011). "In Pulitzers, journalism's evolution is taking shape". USA Today.
    14. Houston, Brant; Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. (2009). The Investigative Reporter's Handbook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 5. ISBN   978-0-312-58997-4.{{cite book}}: |author2= has generic name (help)
    15. Cox, James (April 14, 1992). "Stoking Fires of Debate". USA Today.
    16. Marvin, Carolyn; Philip Meyer (2005). "What Kind of Journalism Does the Public Need?". In Geneva Overholser & Kathleen Hall Jamieson (ed.). The Press. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 400–411 [403]. ISBN   978-0-19-517283-6.
    17. Cauchon, Dennis (August 1, 1990). "Roberts to leave 'Inquirer'". USA Today.
    18. Cox, James (April 14, 1992). "Stoking Fires of Debate". USA Today.