Starting Wednesday, National Public Radio will launch a three-day investigative series that looks into the youth and radicalization of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomb suspect.
When it airs, the “Going Radical” multi-part series will be dubbed an “NPR investigation” — a new term for the news outlet, which has created an investigative unit aimed at enhancing its role as a destination spot for watchdog news. Though NPR has produced investigative stories in the past, they weren’t a priority like they will be moving forward, says Ellen Weiss, NPR’s senior vice president for news.
“We’ve always done investigative reporting, but it’s been fairly episodic and ad hoc,” Weiss said. “It wasn’t really intrinsic in NPR’s DNA as it grew up as a news organization. But I think that once we saw that we had the capacity to do it, it just became a matter of, how do we not make it episodic but something we think about every day?”
The hope, Weiss said, is that the investigative unit will help NPR add another layer of depth to its stories, satisfy listeners’ desire for more watchdog reporting and motivate the public to regularly turn to public radio for this type of coverage.
“Every time we do a story that’s this revelatory, the response is huge from the audience,” Weiss said in a phone interview. “We know that people really appreciate this reporting and that people feel that there isn’t enough of this reporting. I think that’s where public radio has a responsibility to try to step into an increasing void in accountability journalism.” Recently, there’s been a greater push for local public radio and TV stations to produce more investigative stories.
Weiss reallocated resources to create the unit and hired the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Susanne Reber as deputy manager of investigations in December. Rather than hire new investigative reporters, she moved correspondents Danny Zwerdling and Joseph Shapiro onto the investigative unit, as well as librarian Barbara Van Woerkom and computer assisted reporter Robert Benincasa. NPR also plans to soon add a producer/off-air reporter to the team.
Though the six-person unit will produce much of NPR’s investigative coverage, other reporters will also be given the chance to pursue longer investigative pieces, as was the case with “Going Radical.”
“It isn’t going to be an exclusive group,” Weiss said. “Our hope is that a lot of people will cycle through.”
One of the goals in creating the unit, she said, is to encourage everyone in the newsroom to think about their role as watchdogs — and to reach new audiences. “We face some of the same challenges as some of the rest of the news media, but the difference is that we’re not losing audience. We’re gaining audience,” Weiss said. “And we’re expanding our ambitions.“
To help expand its reach, Reber recently established partnerships with other investigative journalism organizations, including the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica.
Reber, who is leading the investigative unit, said she hopes NPR and the partnering organizations can help fill the void that’s been created as cash-strapped news organizations cut back on their accountability reporting. “If our goal is to be a destination for investigative reporting,” she said, “then that by definition means you’re going to team up with other groups that are dedicated to in-depth research.”
Three NPR reporters — Peter Kenyon, Dina Temple-Raston and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton — teamed up for the Abdulmutallab series, which is set to air Wednesday through Friday on “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” They traveled separately and spent several weeks in Nigeria, Yemen, England, and Togo investigating the life of the would-be terrorist.
When Foreign Correspondent Quist-Arcton found out she was going to be given time to do the kind of in-depth reporting that’s required for investigative stories, she was relieved.
“It gives you time to breathe,” Quist-Arcton told me by phone while in Ghana. “I remember when I heard we were going to do an investigative series, I thought, ‘Oh this is really going to give me time to learn, to really sit down and talk to people and listen to people’s stories and their opinions and how they feel.”
Quist-Arcton spent four weeks in Ghana, where Abdulmutallab bought his plane ticket, in Togo, where he went to high school and mostly in Nigeria, where he was born and raised. During her travels, she reported on how the would-be bomber’s birthplace affected his devotion to Islam and his radicalization later in life. Foreign Correspondent Kenyon, meanwhile, was working out of Yemen, where he documented the ways that the impoverished country impacted Abdulmutallab.
Doing more in-depth reporting throughout the past month or so has given Counter-Terrorism Correspondent Temple-Raston the chance to cultivate sources and generate new story ideas. Temple-Raston was in London for three weeks, where she reported on Abdulmutallab’s life as a student and investigated his relationship with Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric accused of terrorist ties.
“They gave me two weeks in London to figure out everything I could about this kid, and I didn’t have to worry about anything else but that,” Temple-Raston said, acknowledging that most journalists these days don’t get this kind of time to work on stories. “That single-minded focus is new. It allows us to get out the hydraulic tools and dig down.”
Weiss said she hopes that providing reporters with the time and resources to use these tools will ultimately help both the newsroom and the public to think more deeply about stories.
“I have never felt that investigative reporting was something that should be isolated,” Weiss said. “My goal has always been that it become a normal part of the ecosystem and an ongoing part of the conversation. We should always ask ourselves, ‘How do we take our stories further?’ “
