Pulitzer Winner Speaks on Journalism, Democracy

By TERESA WINCHESTER
ONEONTA

Since 2003, Mike McIntire has been reporting for the “New York Times” on issues such as health and safety, public institutions, white collar crime, Wall Street bailouts, terrorism, gun violence, and more. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, sharing his first award while reporting for “The Hartford (Connecticut) Courant” for breaking news reporting.  He subsequently received Pulitzers for his reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and, in 2021, for reporting on the nefarious underpinning beneath “routine” traffic stops across the United States.

On Thursday, February 22, McIntire returned to his alma mater, Hartwick College, to give the 2024 Leslie G. Rude Memorial Lecture, titled “Investigative Journalism and Democracy,” appearing at the invitation of the college’s Institute of Public Service. Speaking to an audience of approximately 90 people gathered in the theater of Hartwick’s Anderson Center for the Arts, McIntire talked about his early experience in journalism, the evolution of investigative journalism, and briefly reviewed a number of his own articles on topics such as former President Donald Trump’s undisclosed income tax returns, his tax avoidance, and his personal involvement in the January 6, 2020 insurrection at the United States Capitol.

A 1985 Hartwick graduate, McIntire gave a nod to Hartwick professors John Lindell (political science and international studies), Mary Vanderlaan (political science) and Sugwon Kang (constitutional law) as positive influences in his formative years.

“There is a writing component involved in political science, and I found I liked research and writing,” he said, further noting, “Hartwick courses gave me a foundation, the best testament to a liberal arts education.”

McIntire spotlighted two pioneers of investigative journalism—both women and both named Ida.

Ida B. Wells was a Southern Black reporter whose research in the 1890s concluded that Black economic progress, rather than the rape of white women, was the underlying motivation behind lynchings.

Ida Tarbell, best known for her series of articles on the Standard Oil Company, published between 1902 and 1904, exposed the company’s monopolistic practices in regard to the distribution and sale of oil. Her articles ultimately contributed to the enactment of major anti-trust legislation.

McIntire then fast-forwarded to the impacts of investigative journalism the 1960s and 1970s.

“The two biggest stories were Watergate and the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam,” he said.

Reporting on the 1968 My Lai massacre exposed atrocities committed by American troops, supported by grisly photos of the dead bodies of old men, women, and children, provided a forceful impetus for U.S. military disengagement in Vietnam, as did the 1971 publication of the “Pentagon Papers” by the “New York Times.”

These “top secret” documents revealed that, early on, the U.S. government knew the war in Vietnam most likely could not be won.

The dogged work of “Washington Post” reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August, 1974. Their investigations uncovered not only Nixon’s participation in the cover-up of the 1972 burglary at the headquarters of the National Democratic Committee, but also a broad spectrum of clandestine, often illegal, activities undertaken by members of his administration. One ultimate result of Watergate investigations was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, designed to prevent secret surveillance by the president and others.

Whereas the early investigative reporters had to do the heavy lifting of searching out records at state capitals, libraries, and other brick-and-mortar repositories of knowledge, technology has fast-tracked the ability to transmit information rapidly and in great bulk, McIntire said. As an example, he cited the “Panama Papers,” a 2016 story developed from 11.5 million leaked documents, or 2.6 terabytes, of data exposing a rogue offshore financial industry.

McIntire spoke at length about his Pulitzer Prize-winning article, written with Michael H. Keller, titled “The Demand for Money Behind Many Police Traffic Stops.” A review of hundreds of municipal audits, town budgets, court files and state highway records supported findings that, especially in towns with populations of fewer than 30,000, the police have become money collectors in support of their town’s budget.

“There is a hidden scaffolding of financial incentives and all sorts of fees are tacked on,” McIntire said, citing the case of a Black man, Harold Brown of Valley Brook, Oklahoma, stopped because a light above his license plate was out. Brown wound up hand-cuffed, with a bloodied face and owing $800.00 in fines and fees.

The Harold Brown incident not only exemplifies how drivers are frequently stopped for minor infractions and how these stops often escalate, causing personal injury or even death; it is also indicative of the strong racial component associated with this practice.

Examining traffic stops in Newburgh Heights, Ohio, the article stated, “A Times analysis of more than 4,000 traffic citations there found that 76 percent of license and insurance violations, and 63 percent of speeding cases, involved Black motorists.”

The practice of bolstering municipal budgets and funding police departments stems in part, McIntire and Keller found, from $600 million for highway safety grants from the federal government, grants which subsidize ticket writing and, in some cases, lead to the establishment of quotas for numbers of tickets given out.

As the article relates, “[A]t least 20 states have evaluated police performance on the number of traffic stops per hour, which critics say contributes to overpolicing and erosion of public trust, particularly among members of certain racial groups.”

Further proof of the existence of quotas was made clear in an e-mail sent by Windsor, Virginia Police Chief Rodney Riddle to his force and obtained through a public records request to the Town of Windsor. “Please remember,” Riddle wrote, “that you are required to write a minimum of two tickets per hour while on grant time and there is zero tolerance.”

These journalistic investigations have brought about results. In 2021, the State of Virginia prohibited stops initiated due to defective taillights, tinted windows and loud exhaust. In 2022, Windsor police ended grant-funded patrolling. For McIntire, this exposé on traffic stops, like all good investigative journalism, offers yet another example of “the ills exposed through the research of documents”—research which enables investigative journalism to put a check on power and call it to account.