Investigating Journalism

Case study 1:

An officer shot himself in the foot during a gun demonstration and the beat reporter did not cover it because he did not want to jeopardize his relationship with the offers. Later, officers told the reporter the sheriff forced new personnel to donate $2,500 to his election campaign.

Case study 2:

A reporter for Buchanan Record-Journal started investigating the Buchanan mayor after learning that he was involved in a hidden last trust. She discovered that he was using city personnel to assist him in obtaining cheap properties in another town and reselling for three times the amount.

Investigative Story:

Reporters at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contacted West Virginia University in 2007 after Heather Bresch, West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin’s daughter, took a job as top executive at Mylan Inc., discovering that she did not complete the graduate program and earn her MBA. The reporters, Patricia Sabatini and Len Boselovic, called the school to confirm Bresch’s credentials when she took the new position at Mylan. The initial article published Friday, December 21, 2007, dealt with the reporters’.

No one appeared to know that Bresch had not properly earned her degree, until officials at WVU told the reporters when they contacted them. This story was not just an ordinary story to cover because it had to be researched and the reporters had to contact several people to get to the bottom of the story. Obviously the fact that the degree had not been earned was being hidden or more people would have known about it. When the reporters contacted Bresch, she said that she was unaware that she did not earn her degree.

The reporters contacted school officials and former classmates and went over class rosters, instead of having one key document. They even looked into a lawsuit that Bresch helped Mylan with, showing that was traveling during the time she was supposedly taking classes. There are photos of Bresch, Manchin and WVU officials featured in the article, to allow readers to see who the people are in article that are being mentioned.

When the story first broke out, students in West Virginia made comments that Bresch still received the degree because she was the governor’s daughter. However, the company she works for probably found an interest in the story as well, questioning her credentials. Students at WVU and other schools, WVU officials, and parents would probably read copies of this story, since it first appeared that Bresch was being favored.

After the article initially ran, other newspapers such as New York Times and USA Today publishes articles about it. The headlines stayed simple. The headline in Post-Gazette was “MBA mystery in Morgantown.” USA Today ran a headline reading “State ethics commission probes WVU degree scandal.”

All the information was obtained lawfully from credible sources at the school. The reporters seemed to depend more on information received from them, instead of focusing on information from only Bresch’s classmates.