By Sarah Rohrs

It's a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell.

Reporters live by this credo and place it at the center of their most celebrated and important work, muckraking, investigative stories in which they tirelessly uncover the hidden lies, deceit and cheating of public trust and money deliberately covered up by people who know better. I saw the adage each time I talked to my editor in my first reporting job at the Point Reyes Light a small weekly in Marin County, California that won the Pulitizer gold medal for Meritorious Public Service. Publisher Dave and Cathy Mitchell won the award for a series of exposes and editorials about Synanon, a drug rehabilitation center that had become a cult and had resorted to violence to silence its critics. The Point Reyes Light is one of the few weekly newspapers to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. My first editor showed me that opportunities for investigations exist in every community and at every paper to do important investigative reporting.

In my 13 years as a reporter, my biggest and most important investigation came in 1991 when I learned a few backyards in Benicia, California had methane wells and one, in particular, had been sinking slowly over the last few years. The developer had built houses on a landfill (the Braito landfill) without cleaning out all the waste first and without telling anybody. Decomposing waste caused this resident's yard to sink and methane gas to spread to nearby homes in a suburban residential neighborhood. The developer continuously cried out "it was all a mistake," and then hired public relations specialists to humiliate reporters (mainly me!) and downplay the story. But documents and interviews of past employees in the ensuing government investigation showed that the company knew about the waste and had intentionally built other houses on yet more pockets, some that had hazardous waste in them.

While lengthy investigations and exposes are the most celebrated stories in journalism, they are, unfortunately, all too rare. We are steeped in a culture hooked on junk food stories and tabloid titillation. Every morning newspaper readers get a steady diet of sugary stories about, for example, Madonna's baby or Barbie's new waistline. In reality these kinds of story have little to do with the role journalism plays in society, and are rather embarrassing to most reporters. Many news stories that fill up a newspaper's front page and the inside pages are shallow and superficial.

Investigative reporters set out to uncover what public figures want to remain hidden from unsuspecting taxpayers and naïve voters. Some issues may involve illegal activities while others may simply be tragic mistakes. A special Orlando Sentinel investigation found that Florida was allowing drunk drivers to take the wheel again with tragic consequences. Here are the opening graphs of the series, "Florida's License to Kill." Florida is letting thousands of chronic drunken drivers, killers in car accidents and other unfit motorists take the wheel again, with disastrous results. These motorists have received permission to drive again despite terrible driving records that had caused their licenses to be revoked for five years, 10 years or even permanently. The result: Dozens of people have been maimed or killed.

Lawmakers decided to give second chances to remorseful drivers as a way to help people who would not be able to support themselves and their families if they could not drive. Yet, The Orlando Sentinel found during a three-month investigation that many fail to reform, continuing to drive drunk and causing deaths and injuries." In another example, the Miami Herald spent eight months uncovering the city police department's overtime scam in its "Collars for Dollars" series. This story and others in the series confirm many people's beliefs that cops abuse their power and cause taxpayers' a lot of money.

Here's the opening: "Cops call it "Collars for Dollars." It's how they turn arrests on the streets into money in their pockets. Until now, it has been a courthouse secret. It works like this: Police list each other as witnesses in drunk driving and misdemeanor cases even if they did little or no police work. Then they all get to go to court, where they make overtime they don't deserve. "That is stealing," said former Miami Police Capt. Nate Harris, who tried unsuccessfully to stop it in his department two years ago. "It's embezzlement, is what it is." An eight-month Miami Herald investigation documented Collars for Dollars abuse involving hundreds of officers in thousands of cases. It happens so often that it costs Dade County taxpayers millions. It burdens the courthouse with thousands of unnecessary witnesses, leads to lost cases and even traps some innocent people.

This kind of reporting that takes time, determination, intelligence and courage. Too often newspapers try to pass off sloppy and sensationalized stories as investigative reports when they, in fact, denigrate the profession and erode the public's trust in the press. The temptation is great to make a story bigger than it is. Sloppy reporting and errors in judgment lead to critical mistakes, bias and distortion.

Major daily newspapers cover the "big stories" of the day, but they do little to help the public understand the complex, difficult issues of our times. Large newspapers have the means, staff and money to allow a reporter or an investigative team to spend weeks, even months, on an investigation. But editors may lack the incentive and vision to assign such stories and free up their staff from safe, routine reporting. Editors of smaller papers often lack the staff and courage to pursue investigations of people and institutions they work alongside in their own communities. While most news reporters do some investigations among their regular stories, they lack the education and drive to learn more about how things are supposed to work and how to get the real answers. They expend great amounts of time asking questions and assembling those answers into a clear, coherent account. But they devote little time mastering investigative techniques that would better serve their readers and alert them to the never-ending problems in the economy, the environment and the political system. Investigative reporters ask the same "who, what, when, where, why and how" questions as regular news reporters, but they know how to scratch and dig below the surface to uncover and explain.

In an effort to save time and make deadlines, reporters usually conduct interviews, quoting one or more source in an effort to get one or more sides of an issue. In this way the reporter lets the reader come to his own conclusions about what may be true. By relying on interviews reporters can be easily manipulated, especially by public relations flaks, celebrities and government officials who are savvy about lying to and using the press to their advantage. They often miss the story by barely skimming across the surface. In an investigative piece the reporter tells the reader what is true and then gets reactions in interviews of those involved in the cover-ups. The results of such stories can be swift and dramatic as government agencies launch their own investigations, pass laws, increase patrols or inspections, and so forth.

According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, investigative reporting "often takes months of research and hundreds of interviews to sort through leads, make connections and corroborate sources, followed by weeks of writing and rewriting to bring clarity to complex issues." According to the CIR, a San Francisco-based organization that conducts its own investigations and assists other journalists in their work, investigative reporting is a "time-consuming and costly form of journalism (that) emphasizes the examination of power - whether economic, political or social - and associates secrecy with a lack of accountability."

Here are a few stories the CIR has listed on its web site that it helped bring to light:

Health insurers face criticism for practices that include denying coverage to victims of domestic violence. Hippocrates, The Washington Post, National Public Radio (1989-95).
The export of toxic waste by industrial countries increasingly threatens to turn the earth into a "Global Dumping Ground." PBS Frontline, CBS Evening News, InterNation Syndicate (1987-91).
Secret presidential decrees have propelled the U.S. into military action and other controversial events of the past 40 years. San Francisco Examiner, The Nation (1988- 89).

Lengthy investigative stories give readers the information they need to understand the complex institutions and forces that shape both their lives and the environment around them. The Baltimore Sun did just this by bringing to light a new health and environmental problem that demands special attention. In "The Shipbreakers. Scrapping Ships. Sacrificing Men," two reporters show that men dismantling U.S. Navy ships are getting ill and injured, and that their the work is causing a great deal of pollution. In these opening paragraphs, note the clear and descriptive writing and how the reporters presents the complex issue through one man's story:

"Raul Mendoza knew that scrapping ships was dangerous, he knew about the smoke and the fumes and the accidents. He'd worked in Baltimore, where asbestos clouded the air, and North Carolina, where oil spilled into a river, and California, where workers were told to lie to government inspectors. But he needed a job. So, on Dec. 22, 1995, in Brownsville, Texas, he climbed into the hold of the USS Yukon, an old Navy tanker. Working in total darkness without safety equipment, he walked across a girder. Then came the scream. Mendoza had fallen 30 feet into a tank, straddling a cross beam in a blow that split his pelvis. He flipped off the beam and landed on his chest. He was pleading for help. Untrained in shipboard emergencies, rescuers took three hours to extract him. By Christmas Eve, he was dead.

Raul Mendoza is just one of the casualties of a little-known industry called shipbreaking. Spurred by the Navy's sell-off of obsolete warships at the end of the Cold War, the business has grown up overnight in some of America's most economically depressed ports. And almost everywhere the industry has arrived, harm to human health and the environment has followed. A yearlong investigation by The Sun has found: Workers have been toiling in air thick with asbestos dust. In Baltimore, laborers scrapping the USS Coral Sea ripped asbestos insulation from the aircraft carrier with their bare hands. At times they had no respirators, standard equipment for asbestos work. Inhaling asbestos fibers can have slow but lethal consequences, as men who built the ships now being torn apart have learned. Tens of thousands of former shipyard workers in Baltimore and elsewhere have died of asbestos-caused diseases." 

Investigative Reporters and Editors, another organization that assists journalists in this craft define this such reporting in this way: "It is the reporting, through one's own work product and initiative matters of importance which some persons or organizations wish to keep secret. The three basic elements are that the investigation be the work of the reporter, not a report of an investigation made by someone else; that the subject of the story involve something of reasonable importance to the reader; and that others are attempting to hide these matters from the public."

Investigative stories confirm our suspicions. They can begin with a tip from a reader, but are often the result of a curiosity and suspicions on the reporter's part. In my current job at the Vallejo Times-Herald , numerous animal lovers have approached me with complaints about malfeasance and animal cruelty at the local humane society which I am now checking out through a public records search. These complainers at first wanted me to print all their allegations verbatim, but I can't do that until they are substantiated. To do so would court libel charges against me, the newspaper and the complainers. Given the number of complaints I've gotten I'm suspicious about this animal control officer and look forward to exposing him, if I can. And nothing is more satisfying for a reporter and a reader than to have suspicions confirmed, documented, substantiated and then revealed in public. Probably the proudest moments of a journalist's career are following the fall-out of an investigation he's worked so hard on.

In the story that won the 1997 Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting a team of reporters from the Seattle Times showed that in states across the nation taxpayers' money from a U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development program to build low-cost homes for low-income Native American tribal members was going everywhere but onto reservations. In the opening paragraphs, note how the writer (with clear and short sentences) lures the reader in by taking him on a trail down the driveway, describing the house and telling him why he should be suspicious of it:
"At the end of a long, bending driveway, it appears: a sprawling new house in the middle of an acre and a half of trees. The house can't be seen from the road. And there are some who wish it wouldn't be seen at all - namely those responsible for building it and the couple living there, who earn more than $90,000 a year. Why? Because this secluded manor was built with tax dollars intended to help needed Native Americans." 

These are the stories that give reporters their most romantic and powerful allure. But while they carry a high profile and their stories carry a big play on Page One of the newspaper, their work is difficult, and quite stressful. Burn-out is common. Reporters may spend inordinate amounts of time talking to disturbed, and paranoid sources, sifting through mountains of documents, and traveling a lot to track down sources. Long hours and nights away from home can wreak havoc on relationships and families. An investigative reporter's work can also be dangerous. Investigative Reporters and Editors was created in 1975 when a large group of reporters came together after a car bomb killed founding member Don Bolles, a hard-nosed reporter for the Arizona Republic. After Bolles' death, these investigative reporters from across the country descended on the Central Arizona desert to finish the investigation their colleague had started. As IRE notes in its web site, their work resulted in the Arizona Project, a massive investigation into organized crime, corrupt politicians and dirty land deals.

Investigations take a lot of exacting and demanding work. IRE promotes networking among reporters, broadcast journalists and freelancers through a sharing of information, conferences and training courses on how to use the Internet to access information and public records, particularly through the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. The Center for Investigative Reporting promotes similar goals and activities. Publications on how to do muckraking journalism, and search through public records is available at both these organization's web sites.

Detectives and insurance brokers know more about personal and business background checks than the average reporter. In my reporting of the Braito landfill story in Benicia, I relied too heavily on interviews and did not know where to look or how to search for documents, although I did do stories on documents that others close to the toxic waste investigation found. Sources called me regularly insisting the existence of a conspiracy between the developer and the state agency in charge of investigating the landfill and directing its clean-up. I could never prove this through standard interview techniques and my attempts to find documents to substantiate the allegations failed. I still have a lot to learn about investigative reporting.

To show how investigative reporters use public documents, interviews and telephone work to track down a story, I'll close with this account of how IRE and the television investigators working for Frontline tracked down information for "Hot Guns," a report on the manufacture and sale of illegal, cheap guns. This report will air this summer, but you can get a preview and more information about the series at http://www.muckraker.org/stories/hotguns.html. This is the account in its entirety:
"Hot Guns" began as a totally different story: an examination of the gun massacre in Killeen, Texas in 1991 and, spearheaded by a survivor of the carnage, the eventual passage of a law allowing the legal right to carry a concealed weapon in that state. Killeen was the worst one-day gun massacre in U.S. history and left 22 dead and 44 wounded. But lacking a new angle, reporters at the Center for Investigative Reporting set out to find an original way to tell a story about guns in America. Of immediate interest was the little known story about the southern California manufacturers of inexpensive handguns. Overall, there were surprisingly few stories on the rise of the cheap gun industry in the U.S. Two exceptions stand out: reporter Alix Freedman did a memorable print investigative story on the subject in a 1992 The Wall Street Journal article; and Day One produced a segment in May 1994, "America Under the Gun," where ABC News reporters looked at Lorcin Engineering and interviewed the firearms manufacturer's president, James Waldorf. Both stories appeared before a major theft of guns from the Lorcin plant became public. This theft of guns became the central story element for the CIR/Frontline documentary "Hot Guns."

The investigation of the story began with a standard methodology: gathering all of the existing published reports on the topic. This included newspaper and magazine articles, books, journal articles and reports. Then a search for relevant civil lawsuits took place. This revealed a host of personal injury and product liability cases filed against the gun manufacturers located in southern California.

A search for criminal lawsuits proved most fruitful. Shortly before the investigation began, a criminal cases against two former Lorcin employees became public. Jeremy Mendoza and Ernest Zamora, who stole guns from the company while working there, pled guilty to gun theft charges, and began serving time for one of the largest gun theft case U.S. history. This seemed to be an excellent story to focus on if access to some of the key players involved could be obtained.

A call to the Federal Inmate Locator Service determined in what prison they were incarcerated. Letters were written to them requesting an interview but neither responded. An accomplice was also contacted who was serving time in another federal prison. After months of attempting to make contact with him, he finally responded and an interview was arranged. This footage was, in the end, not used in the program.

Contact was also made with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to see if they would cooperate with an examination of the case of the stolen Lorcin guns. After some consideration, they agreed to grant interviews with some of the key officials involved in the case.

We determined though The Press Enterprise, which ran a local newspaper story in Riverside County on the theft case, that the stolen Lorcin guns were used to commit crimes around the country. The victims of these crimes were located through official police records, former co-workers, employers and by using national telephone listings. Several of them were interviewed for the documentary, with two appearing in the final cut.

We also attempted to contact the criminals who used these guns in crimes. Most of them were serving time in California prisons. We hoped to find out how the stolen guns were sold onto the street and follow their trail from theft at the factory to the crimes where they were used. Many of these inmates responded to our letters and said they would agree to be interviewed. However, currently the California Department of Corrections forbids media interviews with inmates. This policy is being contested by the Society of Professional Journalists and other organizations.

Perhaps the most useful part of our investigation was a search though public records. For this we consulted the Center's guidebook, Paper Trails: A Guide to Public Records in California, to find out what records were publicly available, where they were kept, and what types of information they contained. Most useful for reporting "Hot Guns" were records that allowed us to gather company background information and to find company ex-employees who might be willing to talk about how the company conducted business. Paper Trails' extensive subject index allowed us to zero in on two specific public records to locate former Lorcin employees. Cal/OSHA accident report files helped us find an ex-employee who was shot in the head when a Lorcin gun fell to the ground during a test firing at the plant. A review of cases at the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission found Michael Bryant, another former Lorcin employee, who was terminated by and filed a complaint against Lorcin charging racial discrimination. His interview appears in "Hot Guns."

Paper Trails was also used for an exploration of local zoning and licensing records in Riverside county that helped determined there were no official local or county records indicating that guns were being manufactured at Lorcin's address. These records indicated that the area containing Lorcin's factory had been zoned for medium industrial purposes, which legally included gun manufacturing. There were no specific local approvals needed to operate a firearms manufacturing plant. The public records indicated there was an official chance that no local authorities knew that Lorcin manufactured hundreds of thousands of guns at their facility.

Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is also a useful way to gather records about a subject when a federal agency is involved in a story. A FOIA request to the ATF produced production figures for Lorcin and other gun manufacturers and retrieved Lorcin's original application for a Federal Firearms License (FFL).

Working the telephone and making contacts with people interested in this subject also led to a valuable tip from a lawyer who follows firearms litigation. Lorcin filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy while we were reporting our story. Early knowledge of this allowed us to attend the bankruptcy creditor's committee meeting on the bankruptcy and learn valuable information about how the company operates. It also allowed us to make contact at the meeting with Jim Waldorf, President of Lorcin. Later, we were able to obtain a copy of Waldorf's deposition in the bankruptcy, and arrange an on-camera interview with him. "Hot Guns" shows that there is no mystery to investigative reporting, just hard work over time and a little luck."

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