Confessions of an Investigative Reporter

...To cover institutions well, though, we’re going to have to rethink how units are organized and reporters deployed...

...By scurrying after the tip of the day, says Los Angeles Times investigator Frantz, “we give short shrift to the really enterprising stuff...

...More than simply allowing reporters to poke into new areas, the use of these large data bases frees them from relying on government leakers to tell them what the numbers say...

...Spun and games been poking around the industry for years...

...Yet worse than a lack of ambition and originality is what the networks’ multimillion-dollar budgets do produce...

...I take some consolation in knowing I wasn’t alone...

...It was-as measured by the great yardstick of investigative reporting -Watergate in reverse, with the government hammering away until the media took notice...

...It was this kind of commitment by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong in The Brethren that allowed them to see that the justices’ lowly sounding clerks are some of the most influential people in the nation’s justice system, researching and even writing the court’s opinions...

...Almost never,” says congressional investigator Peter Stockton...

...An even craftier display of press management was the White House’s reaction to a February 1989 investigation by The New York Times’s top sleuth, Jeff Gerth, into ethical and financial conflicts by Bush’s ethics officer, C. Boyden Gray...

...After all, some of the nation’s top investigative reporters, such as the Los Angeles Times’s Douglas Frantz and CNN’s Brian Barger, also ran across bits and pieces of the BCCI puzzle while trailing Noriega but missed the banking scandal all the same...

...While others, such as Larry Gurwin of Regardie’s and Jim McGee of The Washington Post, helped break parts of the story, the real sleuths were government investigators, who not only uncovered most of the story but plugged away Christopher Georges is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Wall Street Journal reporter Walt Bogdanich’s 1988 look at faulty testing in America’s medical labs has spawned hundreds of investigations-and grim expodsof local labs...

...Congressional staffs have tripled in size since the early seventies, and legislative initiatives and constituent mail can only occupy so many hands...

...CBS’s “60 Minutes,” long king of TV’s investigative one told of the federal government seizing property hill, still draws tens of millions of viewers...

...But in the real world, the status NBC thinks it accrues by having a Fred Francis report live from the Defense department on the daily briefing somehow outweighs cutting him loose to dig out the bigger, better story...

...That’s unfortunate, since the stories that have the most lasting impact are long-term investigations like those by Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele into America’s tax inequities in the eighties-stories that played no small part in the tax reform act of 1986...

...Just days before Gerth’s piece ran, with the administration aware of the imminent story, the White House leaked its version to The Washington Post...

...In fact, the whole concept of reporting isn’t held in very high value in television...

...Of course, there’s something lazier than tagging along on government investigations: our occasional failure to even go that far, as GAO and inspector general reports that might point reporters in the right direction pile up untouched in newsroom libraries...

...But it was Post White House reporter Ann Devroy who, after learning that Sununu was having financial troubles, turned to Babcock to figure out how the chief of staff could afford to jet around the country...

...for years until the media woke up...

...In fact, I can’t think of a lead I’ve gotten from the national press in recent years...

...In November 1987, his original reporting on a sweetheart deal between thenpresidential candidate Bob Dole and a political contributor appeared 68 paragraphs into a 78-paragraph New York Times Magazine profile of the senator...

...Yet the greatest consequence of the I-teams’ lack of depth isn’t simply that they miss a few stories...

...We rarely hire people like accountants and lawyers...

...Gwynne, Selling Money, took the reader on a tour of his working experiences at Chase Bank, revealing how the international debt crisis really developed...

...The beat reporters might better understand what the investigator looks for when tackling a story, and possibly even break one himself...

...Everyone wants the cosmetic lure of having an I-team, but by and large what we do is amplify what’s already been done elsewhere...

...In fact, I didn’t even come close...

...As we worked on the story, the writing was literally on our walls: more than 40 feet of homemade flow charts mapping the wash-cycle of Noriega’s millions...

...No matter...

...one was a pickup from the trade high-profile team of 30 journalistic sleuths, and publication Thrift News disclosing the Keating Five...

...The courts, the pension plans, the military, and other unsexy monoliths are far more crucial to the public interest than Chuck Robb’s love life...

...Yet equally important are those reports that pick apart our institutions, find that they are workingand tell us why...

...Honest Graft, a book by Brooks Jackson examining Congress’s money culture, combined with Washington Post reporter Charles Babcock’s long-term reporting on topics such as congressional honoraria, had more to do with the resignations of both Tony Coelho and Jim Wright than any story aimed directly at probing these officials’ affairs...

...The story went on to disclose that the Customs agents who reported the corruption had been punished by their superiors for doing so...

...An example from my own experience illustrates how it works...

...Should this story have made the national press...

...The day after the piece ran, the PR firm dispatched a cast of celebrities like Meryl Streep to hold press conferences and get the message out...

...From the EPA to the IRS, nearly all government agencies have loaded warehouses of data onto publicly available computer disks...

...Unfortunately they’re all taking virtually the same notes on the same press conferences and then filing similar stories...

...There is an institutional reluctance to take on some of these stories,” said an investigative reporter for a national newspaper who asked to remain unidentified...

...And only by scrutinizing our institutionsby stepping back and reflecting upon the broader picture-can we live up to the moniker “investigative.’’ But with each episode of “60 Minutes” and “20/20,” it seems we are moving further and further from the ideal...

...At The Washington Post in 1989 Elsa Walsh and Benjamin Weiser uncovered how secret court settlements keep critical consumer-safety information under wraps...

...It took Babcock three months to locate and decipher Sununu’s travel records, and when he did, the story was there...

...In addition, we might reconsider who is doing the reporting...

...But at the same time, important stories often sit on the shelf until the government blesses them with an official investigation...

...Predictably, it has since come to light that the Patriot is beset with a multitude of technical problems...

...Pooped scoopers Blasphemous as it may sound, we can, in part, blame Woodward and Bernstein for our troubles...

...News and World Report investigator Steven Emerson uncovered millions of dollars in waste and mismanagement at the supersecret Defense Mobilization Planning System Agency and presented a detailed explanation of why the agency didn’t work...

...Although no scientific study had ever linked the dental use of mercury to any illness, “60 Minutes” seized primarily on one 1990 study by a long-time anti-mercury crusader showing that six sheep fitted with mercury fillings had a drop in kidney function...

...Watergate may have made the job tougher, but so have obstacles of our own making, starting with the notion of the I-team itself...

...The Post humed to get out the piece, which, couched in the administration’s version of events, raised a much milder set of problems...

...It’s the hardest battle I have...

...As a result, more young, eager staffers, led by the much-improved cadre at the GAO, have the time and resources to hunt down fraud and mismanagement...

...But focused as I was on Noriega -that is, the story that everyone from George Bush on down heralded as the story to get-I regarded BCCI as little more than a complex conduit to get me there...

...But these are the exceptions...

...If you want to get into the system, you have to think like the system...

...At The Washington Post, investigative reporter Charles Babcock recently broke the story of John Sununu’s frequent-flying bonanza...

...It’s always been a very informal system with people coming and going...

...It’s the from Michael Milken’s junk bond customers...

...Too bad for me, not to mention Ted Turner, who no doubt would have relished picking up the Emmy...

...Perhaps we can excuse the majority of the fare simply as audience-bait-stories such as a September 199 1 “PrimeTime” segment, “Brian’s Song” (promo blurb: “Beach Boy Brian Wilson is said by his family to be under the sway of a Svengalilike psychotherapist who is draining his finances”), or the fact that ABC’s “20/20” did more indepth segments in 1990 on domestic pets (four, including “Who Will Love My Pet: problems/solutions to pets surviving their owner’s death or incapacity”) than on any other topic...

...More than simply sharing tips and story ideas, beat reporters should be moved in and out of investigative teams, an approach that would benefit the beat walkers as well as the investigators...

...Alone among the nation’s major news organizations, the Los Angeles Times has consistently put these large data bases to use, producing a string of standout stories in the last two years- pieces showing how big political donors violate campaign contribution limit laws and how the federal government lost 40 cents on every dollar in the sale of S&L properties...

...More forward-thinking editors might consider relying on the wire services and CNN to handle the daily flow of briefings and photoops, freeing beat reporters to probe for institutional problems or systemic waste...

...Yet the contractor was building the jammers anyway, with the Navy’s blessing...

...CNN made its debut two years ago with a Savings and Loan...

...Despite clear pronouncements from the EPA to the contrary, “60 Minutes” instead seized upon a report by an environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which, although conducting no new or independent research, concluded that Alar could cause cancer in thousands of children...

...The book of another banker-turned-journalist, S.C...

...Finally, dutifully, we shot a half-hour one-on-one with the senator...

...one was a follow-up to congresNews Tonight,” “PrimeTime,” “Nightline,” and sional hearings involving Charles Keatings’s Lincoln “20/20...

...In the meantime, the price of apples fell to its lowest in years and Washington state apple growers lost nearly $125 million...

...This team of investigative beat reporters, moreover, would possess the wisdom of experience that prevents them from being spun...

...But it didn’t take $40,000 a story for a former reporter for a Washington, D.C., television station, Mark Feldstein, to advance-and at times lead-the investigation into Marion Barry...

...Customs Service...

...Echoing Westin is the former executive producer of CBS’s evening news and current CNN Special Assignment producer, Richard Cohen: “[Investigative reporting on TV] is a myth...

...It took several months to sort out the mess created by the televised report, but it eventually became clear that the risk reported was greatly overblown...

...We’ve flirted with the idea” of matching beat reporters with investigative reporters, says the Journal’s Bogdanich, “but we’ve never really made it happen...

...Of course, and so should most of the government investigations that uncover fraud, waste, and corruption But is it the type of story investigative reporters should be doing...

...The national media nurtures its reputation for accuracy, preferring to kill or delay a story rather than risk getting it wrong...

...And in the same year, former U.S...

...Journalism has become “the last refuge of the vaguely talented,” explains The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Richard Harwood...

...Instead, most take the easier path-becoming increasingly dependent on the inmates’ notion of what’s wrong with the asylum...

...The effects of Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the Vietnam war-the very forces that helped create the modern investigative frenzy in the first place-have conspired to change the climate of government...

...That should make us nervous...

...There will always remain some measure of doubt, but the studies, released a few months later, both concluded overwhelmingly that the use of mercurybased fillings is safe...

...As the first step toward the Madden standard in media, news organizations could give preference to reporters with real-life experience in areas they are expected to cover...

...But occasionally reporters’ best efforts never see the light of day, or if they do, they’re buried deep in the paper...

...The average government worker today has a computer on his desk with a lot of information in it,” says the Los Angeles Times’s investigative editor, Dwight Morris...

...One of our great failings,” says CNN investigative reporter Brooks Jackson, “is that we don’t read and synthesize the enormous amount of muckraking material these people put out...

...I spent the next three weeks on the “scoop,” shooting interviews and tracking down sources who had already been tracked down...

...The easy excuse for all this is the high cost of doing business...

...But as thorough as government investigators might be, there are plenty of stories they miss-like Iran-contra...

...In theory, the idea’s an ingenious one...

...In the fall of 1990, while I was at CNN, I followed up a “tip” from a “friend” to a government “source,” a Senate staffer who had spent well over a year gathering information showing that a new generation of radar jammers, at $3 million a piece, had repeatedly failed tests under combat situations...

...It tends not to be the team of highpriced technicians and video artists that gets the stories, but rather the lone reporter plugging away...

...military’s coverup of friendly fire casualties in the Gulf war...

...At least people closest to the TV news industry are honest with themselves...

...Not to be out-investigated, the executive branch boasts inspectors general and other internal watchdogs who now police dozens of federal agencies from Defense to the Postal Service...

...where the space program has gone Times have in recent years made an important com- wrong-reports that not only uncover the dirt, but mitment to explaining the news rather than breaking analyze why the system’s not working, giving us init...

...But the allegations reported, made by Customs insiders two years earlier, had already been investigated by the FBI, DEA, and a U.S attorney, found to be valid, and been reported in the local print press...

...This proactiveness is all the more crucial today, since the legacy of the seventies has rendered the government and other institutions smarter in dealing with the press when they have something to hide...

...But even so, the few stories we are left with that are labeled serious investigations only fit that billing in the most superficial sense...

...The irony is that it’s this “enterprising stuff’---examinations of institutions and systems-that leads most often to catching the big fish...

...It was this insider’s perspective that also allowed Gwynne, now with Time, to uncover parts of the BCCI scandal...

...the best business reporters often have studied economics or business...

...Each of the major dailies, wire services, and networks have at least one top-notch reporter covering the White House, the Defense department, and so on...

...you want the guys with enough smarts to put that valuable experience to work...

...Hardly...

...Turning to NRDC was far from crack reporting...

...But in many ways, we have been slow to change with it...

...After all, as NBC’s award- than 85 percent were follow-ups to government inwinning investigator Brian Ross recently told The vestigations...

...Given that, we can do the next best thing: Tap into the knowledge and accumulated wisdom of the beat reporters...

...The environmental group, in an attempt to get its story out, had hired a public relations firm that approached “60 Minutes” with the exclusive...

...Certainly, investigative reporters can’t be expected to examine institutions all of the time-there are the Nielsens to think about-but we do have the resources to zero in on several each year...

...an instinct toward the capillaries...

...how our banking syspers like The Washington Post and The New York tem has failed...

...For example, Bob Haldeman’s unrelenting internal check-up system, known as the “tickler list,” kept the pressure on Jeb Stuart Magruder to carry out Haldeman’s request to learn more about the Democrats’ strategy...

...It happens occasionally, and when it does, the results are impressive...

...The cost of laziness isn’t just a few unrealized Pulitzers for reporters...

...A close reading of The New York Times reveals a selection of what should have been front-page stories by Gerth that ran where only the most ardent of news junkies was sure to see them...

...Desperate to keep the “tickler” off his back, Magruder turned to an ill-conceived plan to bug the DNC headquarters, and the rest is history...

...Surrges rounded by the competition-in this case a courtroom of empty pews-I took frantic notes as five BCCI officials, one of whom had been Noriega’s personal banker, stood trial for a ledger of bank-related crimes...

...And while we gladly carry the water for the federal investigators who have already chased down the story, how often does it work in reverse...

...Yet some of the most creative examples of in-depth reporting have come from people who don’t just know the system, but who were part of the system...

...To be sure, such investigations appear occasionally-remember the series of 1990 stories by The Wushington Post’s Steve Coll and David Vise scrutinizing the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the 1986 series by Arthur Howe of The Philadelphia Inquirer on massive internal deficiencies at the IRS...

...My ineptitude in picking up BCCI when I practically tripped over it is but one minor illustration...

...It’s that they’re particularly vulnerable to manipulationto being “spun” to report whatever the aggressive insider itches to present...

...Fearful of losing Safety networks access, they hold back from revealing the grimy underside of-their beats...

...60 Minutes” took the bait and ran the hyped story...

...Consider-and only because it was hyped with an almost unprecedented double segment-the December 1990 piece by “60 Minutes” titled “Is There Poison in Your Mouth...

...At the core, he explained, were 23-year-old international bankers like himself lending millions of dollars to dangerously overleveraged foreign nations and companies...

...Research assistance was provided by Daniel Manatt...

...And at the same time, we create the mostly false impression that the press is probing our institutions and poking for malfeasance instead of selling commercial time to the highest bidder...

...A rare oversight by the dogged investigators of the Fourth Estate...

...And his August 1986 piece showing that Dan Rostenkowski, who at the time was a leading candidate to replace Tip O’Neill as House Speaker, had lied to the House ethics committee about a blind trust, was placed innocuously on page 30...

...A close examination of major institutional scandals within government and business in recent yearsHUD, the S&Ls, Wedtech, Salomon Brothers, BCCI, corruption at the Chicago commodi defense contractor scandal, and so on-reveals that it wasn’t the national press that exposed but the government itself or, in a few but the government itself or, in a few forts like a two-part series in 1989 explaining the incases, the regional or trade press...

...For example, millions of dollars worth of government equipmentwhile investigative reporters at The New York Times, as was revealed in 1990-4s explaining how the system allowed it to happen in the first place...

...Street Journal, and Lm Angeles Times all have inves- Not only are the original stories few and far betigative reporters, as do nearly 98 percent of the na- tween, but when they do appear, they generally have tion’s 500 largest newspapers...

...To the rescue is the I-team, which, unwed to sources or agencies and unencumbered by daily deadlines, can scurry from hit to hit fearless of losing future access...

...As it turned out, we never ran the story, but only because of logistical problems...

...It was done a few weeks later by the ABC News I-team, running on the evening broadcast under the heading “ABC News Investigation...

...We only rarely step The good news in all this is that investigative re- back to examine the most significant problems of porting in the regional and local press is truly in its government, financial, or scientific institutionsheyday...

...Consider, for example, former investment banker Michael Lewis, who left Wall Street to become a full-time journalist and relied on his inside view to write Liar’s Poker, a rich expost of the power of greed on Wall Street...

...ternational proliferation of biological weapons, more How could this be...

...60 Minutes,” for example, ran a story in 1989 stating that the chemical Alar, sprayed on apples to regulate growth, was “the most potent cancer-causing agent in the food supply today...

...Of course, you don’t want dumb jocks...

...By the very nature of our “surprise audits,” we might keep the people we cover on their toes, and even break a few big stories in the process...

...When CBS lured him into the booth, it brought in one of the best analysts in the business...

...By launching our own independent investigations of large institutions, we have the opportunity not just to reveal problems within the system, but to helpfix them before the bailout bill reaches $500 billion or the Challenger explodes...

...And then there’s John Dean and Taylor Branch’s Blind Ambition, which combined the knowledge of an insider with the skills of journalist to reveal more about the culture of the Nixon White House than all of the other Watergate books combined...

...The editors “don’t want to get too far ahead of the curve...

...Beat the press One result of all this self-policing is that internal investigators often beat the press to the story-and that’s fine: It doesn’t matter who blows the whistle on official corruption or wasted taxpayer dollars, as long as somebody does...

...Interesting, but the retaliation had also been fully investigated-and verified-by both the Customs Service and the federal Merit Systems Protection Board...

...The national media has long ignored the gold mine of computer-based data that most agencies are now required to make available...

...For those reporters without that experience, the next best training is academic...

...It’s a lot of PR,” explains Av Westin, whose resume includes founding ABC’s first investigative effort, “Close-Up,” as well as stints as executive producer of “World News Tonight” and “20/20...

...Damage control is now professionally swift and persuasive, as seen in the way the Reagan White House handled Iran-contra immediately after the scandal started to unravel...

...Conducting its own “investigation” of a story that had been percolating for years, the newsmagazine sought to show that ordinary mercurybased dental fillings are, and have been for decades, the cause of a wide range of debilitating illnesses from multiple sclerosis to kidney failure...

...Unfortunately, as investigative reporters freely admit, they only rarely cross paths with beat reporters...

...Finally, we should reconsider the tools we use in our reporting...

...Hitching ourselves to government investigators’ bandwagons does more than make us lazy...

...While science reporters at Newsweek and elsewhere had reported the story, stressing that the jury would remain out until the results of two comprehensive studies by the NM and the FDA were reported, “60 Minutes” refused to wait...

...The problem with the unit idea,” explains Steve Luxenberg, editor of The Washington Post’s investigative team, “is that your reporters don’t have their ears to the ground...

...But even if we only get to a handful of such audits each year, we’ll succeed in keeping the rest of America’s powerful institutions warily glancing over their shoulders...

...ABC News has not reports on the latest government advance on the Neil one, but four, investigative teams: one each at “World Bush investigation...

...As news organizations become bigger and bigger corporations,” says Bill Kovach, who now heads Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, “they behave more and more like the people they cover”-that is, less and less willing to take risks...

...And at the national level, investigators at pa- why our schools don’t educate...

...Beat reporters and editors, in order to keep the tips coming their way, can easily become captives of the agencies they cover...

...The massive proportion of the HUD scandal, for example, was laid out in IG reports years before the Bush administration turned it into an issue...

...The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall substantially on ABC’s own digging...

...While there is much worthy of praise in the national media’s investigative reporting, in one area-perhaps the most important one-we (and I use “we” because, as a CNN investigative reporter until this year, I'm as guilty as the next guy) are woefully lacking...

...For more important than unthe major stories of recent years, in only the rarest of covering, say, that military employees were pilfering cases did they uncover the scandal...

...Scud bluster It was about three weeks after the end of the Gulf war-and about 18 months after I botched the BCCI story-that I won my first, and only, award as an investigative journalist for a segment I helped produce on Raytheon’s Patriot missile...

...But while the national media advanced many of sight into how to fix it...

...When we in the media rely on others to tell us where to probe, when to look, and even how to look, we entrust to the very people we should be scrutinizing the media’s most precious heirloom: the right to set the investigative agenda...

...And that’s good...

...At The Philadelphia Inquirer, which has collected an unparalleled nine Pulitzer prizes for investigative work since 1975, there is no But with or without the background knowledge, reporters and their news organizations should be willInvestigative unit, explains reporter James Steele...

...Hardly...

...Investigative journalists might be going out in search of those elusive stories...

...Newspapers are facing cutbacks, and time-intensive investigative reports tend to be the first to go...

...Likewise, the unit produced get for the three networks and CNN tops $150 eight pieces on BCCI, only one of which was based million...

...It’s little wonder then, that much of the S&L scandal was uncovered not by an I-team searching for a story but by reporters from Thrift News who had Investigative reporters have, of course, come in with some groundbreaking, in-depth stories...

...Results of congressional investigations are too numerous to list, but some of the recent headline-grabbers have included universities’ misuse of federal funds and a legion of problems with the Stealth bomber...

...Endowed with subpoena power and with the full weight of the federal government behind them, these federal and congressional investigators have a leg up on the press...

...For example, the team produced 10 stoNew York Times, we’ve finally entered the “golden ries on S&Ls-a worthy topic-but six were simply age of investigative reporting...

...For instance, a 1991 New York Times feature by Susan Chira probed inner-city Catholic schools, analyzing why one such school in Detroit sends nearly 85 percent of its students on to post-secondary education, compared to a 55 percent dropout rate at a nearby public school...

...In TV newsrooms, where network investigative pieces cost nearly $5,000 a minute, there appears to be little wiggle room for long-term investigations that can often turn up dry holes...

...The vast pressure aides felt to expand their sphere of power combined with Nixon’s control-freak nature to set the stage for Watergate...

...The rest of the reporting was anecdotal...

...My reward, a bronze “Scudbuster” lapel pin and accompanying certificate, now hang above my desk, where they serve as a reminder of what we can accomplish when we really aren’t trying...

...Likewise, between the inception of the space shuttle program and the Challenger disaster, NASA’s inspector general issued hundreds of audit reports concerning safety problems and defective materials, but the media never noticed...

...Buried in the mound of documents we gathered, as it turned out, were the inklings of the scandal: Huge chunks of Noriega’s laundered millions had been funneled through Washington-based First American Bank, cryptically labeled in files as “BCCI-Washington...

...and, in age of the pin-sized camera, the Freedom of Informa- probably ABC’s best effort on the subject, one distion Act, and unprecedented investment in investiga- closed financial connections between Keating and tive teams: The combined annual investigative bud- Senator Alan Cranston...

...it leaves us-and the rest of America -thinking falsely that we are looking where the government isn’t...

...The savings and loans crisis, for example, didn’t merit a minute on any investigative broadcast until the Keating Five and Neil Bush were unearthed...

...And, as planned, we are detached-so detached, in fact, that we often lack a true understanding of the areas we are expected to scrutinize...

...Or that some of the national media’s most impressive investigative work has come from beat reporters like Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Barton Gellman, who exposed the U.S...

...As expected, the story that ran first received the lion’s share of attention, effectively defusing Gerth’s tougher analysis...

...Of course, said the Senate staffer, The New York Times was interested, but if CNN could get his boss on camera and get it done within a couple of weeks, the story was ours...

...Unfortunately, the award came from Raytheon itself, thanking me for what was, kindly put, a first-rate piece of journalistic puffery...

...The results tonight of an ABC News investigation,” said Peter Jennings, introducing a May 1991 spot on corruption in the U.S...

...I- A reporter for CNN’s investigative unit, I neS had been dispatched to Tampa, Florida, in early 1990 to help unravel the riddle of Manuel Noriega’s money laundering empire...

...ing to take the time to fully understand a story-not unlike a trial lawyer who prepares for a malpractice case by attempting to become as much of an expert as possible in the area of medicine in question...

...Confessions of an Investigative Reporter by Christopher Georges It’s almost two years now since I could have broken the BCCI story...

...Watergate also enforced the long-held notion that investigative reporting means the bigger the fish you catch the better the story you’ve got: From Spiro Agnew to Gary Hart, the stories that center around powerful people draw the biggest crowds...

...The value of an insider’s knowledge is illustrated by the success of football commentator John Madden...

...It takes months, sometimes years, to develop reliable, knowledgeable sources, not to mention a true feel for how, say, HUD or Wall Street works...

...From the idea behind the assignment-a reaction to a fleeting development-to the way I reported it-by relying on congressional sources and a mix of Washington-based policy types-I came up with exactly what I should have expected: yet another piece marveling at the space-age technology...

...The published results of the board’s public hearings, moreover, had long before been reported by the print press...

...News takers But as the truly great investigative reporting of recent years suggests, the big improvement we need involves not how we report our stories, but what we report on in the first place...

...The result: While reporters have dutifully “investigated” a slew of allegations of misconduct against people such as Newt Gingrich, Floyd Flake, Julian Dixon, Donald “Buz” Lukens, William Gray, Gus Savage, Barney Frank, and now Bill Clinton, we missed HUD, Iran-contra, and so on...

...Part of Watergate’s well-scrutinized legacy has been an increased ability by the government to monitor itself...