First, we interview Gina Gray, who took over as the public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery in April 2008, when she discovered that cemetery officials were attempting to impose new limits on media coverage of funerals of the Iraq war dead even after the fallen warriors families granted permission for the coverage. She said that the new restrictions were wrong, that Army regulations didnt call for such limitations, and advocated restoring full coverage. Six weeks after the media reported her efforts, she was demoted. A few weeks after this, she was fired.
Then, our panel discussion looks at trends in Investigative Reporting. In the Age of Infotainment, news organizations have notoriously shifted resources from serious, investigative journalism to soft, lifestyle, news you can use reporting. Nonetheless, practitioners of long-form journalism continue to ply their craft, and often are the only reporters who take an interest in the disclosures of whistleblowers, insiders with direct knowledge of wrongdoing. How has the landscape of investigative reporting changed over the last several years? What future ramifications are there from these shifts? Were joined by Jane Mayer, investigative journalist with the New Yorker, and Deborah Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and director of the Carnegie Seminar at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
This episode was filmed on August 22, 2008.
