One of my investigative reporting heroes, legendary reporter Donald Barlett has died after a life of Herculean investigative reporting with James Steele at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Read their wonderful work when I was in high school in South Jersey. Good obit of Donald Bartlet, but under Jeff Bezos Washington Post ownership, this article sadly leaves out the Barlett and Steele investigation of Big Oil and contrived shortages. From the Washington Post:
Donald L. Barlett, Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter, dies at 88
Working alongside fellow Philadelphia Inquirer reporter James B. Steele, he exposed inequities in federal tax laws and corruption by public officials.
He had been in declining health in recent years, said his wife, Eileen Reynolds, who confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause.
For many readers and reporters, the names Barlett and Steele represented the gold standard in investigative journalism. Working together for more than four decades, beginning with a 26-year collaboration at the Inquirer, they pored over public documents to expose shortcomings by powerful people and institutions, helping readers navigate issues as varied as federal taxation, nuclear waste disposal, foreign aid and the American health-care system.
Their collaboration “transformed investigative reporting,” said veteran investigative reporter Joe Stephens, the founding director of Princeton University’s Program in Journalism, “and created a road map for a generation of journalists to follow, myself included.”
Instead of relying on unnamed sources and confidential tips, Mr. Barlett and Steele turned to the public record, conducting investigations that sometimes lasted a year or longer. They focused not on individual cases of wrongdoing but on systemic issues, reporting on the ways lobbying shaped federal legislation and the role that oil companies and the U.S. government played in exacerbating the energy crisis of the early ’70s.
“As much as anything, we tried in every series to tell people something they didn’t know,” Steele said in a phone interview. He and Mr. Barlett were both “riled by the hypocrisies of politicians,” he added, and aimed at “shining a light in dark corners, showing people how their government was or was not working for them, or how powerful officials were taking advantage of the system.”
In addition to winning two Pulitzers, both for national reporting, the duo was honored with six George Polk Awards and two National Magazine Awards. Aided by a tech-savvy Inquirer colleague, Philip Meyer, they were also widely credited with helping pioneer digital reporting techniques in the early 1970s, using a computer program to analyze more than 1,000 cases of violent crime in Philadelphia.
The resulting seven-part series, “Crime and Injustice,” diagnosed a host of ills in the city’s criminal justice system. “All too often, the innocent go to jail, the guilty go free or receive light sentences,” Mr. Barlett and Steele wrote in the first installment. “It is a system that really is no system at all and it has very little to do with justice.”
The 1973 project won journalism awards, although it was shut out at the Pulitzers. Steele said he later learned through the Inquirer’s executive editor, Gene Roberts, that a Pulitzer juror or board member had repudiated data-driven reporting, saying, “Any story that uses a computer is going to win a Pulitzer over my dead body.”
Computers, of course, are now indispensable to investigative reporting. They remained a crucial tool for Mr. Barlett and Steele, who turned to sprawling topics like federal taxation, winning their first Pulitzer in 1975 for “Auditing the Internal Revenue Service,” a series in which they revealed an unequal application of tax laws. Their second Pulitzer, in 1989, was for a 15-month investigation of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, in which they uncovered special treatment for companies and congressional backers.
That series “roused such widespread public indignation,” the Pulitzer citation noted, “that Congress subsequently rejected proposals giving special tax breaks to many politically connected individuals and businesses.”
Stephens, a former Washington Post reporter, said he regularly assigns the series to his journalism students. “It’s a master class in how to do fair and comprehensive reporting,” he said, adding that the series “was revelatory” in part because it showed the power of analyzing public documents. “You didn’t need to have a secret source in Washington, you could just read public documents and you’d find these scandals hiding in plain sight.”
Mr. Barlett and Steele also contributed to magazines including Time and Vanity Fair and expanded their reporting into books, beginning with a 1979 biography of aviator and business magnate Howard Hughes. In 1992, they published “America: What Went Wrong?,” which grew out of a nine-part Inquirer series about income inequality and the country’s shrinking middle class.
Maxwell King, the Inquirer’s editor at the time, recalled in the foreword to the book’s updated edition that the articles “engendered the most astonishing public response I have ever seen to a series of articles: Thousands of readers lined up on Broad Street, snaking down toward City Hall from the Inquirer building, all anxious to get a reprint.”
Drawing on economic data and interviews the authors conducted around the country, the book argued that Congress and the Reagan administration had engineered a vast wealth transfer “from the middle class to the rich, and from the middle class to the poor.” It spent weeks on bestseller lists and became a touchstone for Bill Clinton, who carried it on the presidential campaign trail in 1992 — a surreal sight for Mr. Barlett, a college dropout from southwestern Pennsylvania who tended to avoid the spotlight.
That was out-of-body,” he said in a rare interview.
In public, at least, Mr. Barlett was quiet and reserved, especially compared to his taller, more gregarious reporting partner. “You got the feeling he wanted to be back in stacks of documents in his little office at the Philly Inquirer, not on a stage,” Stephens said. Still, Steele recalled that “when other reporters would approach him” to talk shop, “nobody could have extended the helping hand more than Don.”
“He had an incredible sense of humor and whimsy,” said his wife, Reynolds. “What he surrounded himself with was whimsical art. Not great art,” she added with a laugh, “but whimsical art: a painting of a guy unloading a shopping cart and putting the groceries into the engine of a car.”
“He was another person,” she said, “behind that investigative reporter’s stoic, non-smiling face.”
he oldest of three children, Donald Leon Barlett was born in DuBois, Pa., on July 17, 1936. He grew up in Johnstown, Pa., where his father was a salesman and his mother managed the home.
Mr. Barlett attended Pennsylvania State University before dropping out to start his journalism career in 1956. He worked for newspapers in Ohio and Indiana, completed his first investigative piece as a reporter at the Reading Times in Pennsylvania and joined the Army in 1958, serving as a special agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps. He returned to journalism three years later, working as an investigative reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Chicago Daily News before being recruited by the Inquirer in 1970.
By chance, Mr. Barlett started at the newspaper on the same day as Steele, with whom he began collaborating the next year. “I told him I was intrigued by one story I kept running across on inner-city housing, how this federal program seemed not to be working,” Steele recalled. “He said, ‘Well, let’s just look at the deeds.’
On a trip to city hall, they examined property transfer records that showed “page after page after page” of repossessions by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The reporters thought they might spend a few months investigating the transactions. Instead, they devoted the next year to the project, uncovering how real estate speculators made millions while abusing federal mortgage programs, selling run-down homes to “unsuspecting poor families,” as they wrote in a 1971 article.
The duo found that they shared “a real unanimity of interests,” Steele said, and thrived while dividing the work equally, taking turns writing a section of an article or a chapter of a book.
“Nobody anointed us a team,” Mr. Barlett told the Inquirer in 1997, when he and Steele shifted to magazine journalism at Time Inc. “We just discovered we liked working together. We had similar work habits and saw the tremendous value of two people bouncing ideas off each other on these big projects.” They continued working together until Mr. Barlett retired in 2013.
Mr. Barlett’s first marriage, to Shirley Jones, ended in divorce. In 1998, he married Reynolds, whom he met when she was working as the community relations manager at the Inquirer. In addition to his wife, survivors include a son from his first marriage, Matthew Barlett; a stepson, Thomas Reynolds; and a sister and brother. His stepson Sean Reynolds died in 2001.
Interviewed by Post journalist Leonard Downie Jr., who profiled Barlett and Steele in his 1976 book “The New Muckrakers,” Mr. Barlett said he found himself energized — rather than exhausted — by their lengthy investigations. “When people ask me after each project we finish if I’m getting tired of this kind of work,” he told Downie with a smile, “I say, 'Are you kidding? How could I get tired of this?’ ”
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Thousands without power in SJC three days after a storm and you're talking about Bart? Let's get some headlines about Ron Disaster and how the state is barely habitable anymore because of Republicans. High prices, bad politics, deadly storms and with political profiteering from devastation...
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