THE BOARD AND STAFF
WhoWhatWhy is made up of a combination of full-time journalists, expert advisors and other specialists.

FOUNDER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter with a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters-and explaining it to elites and ordinary people alike, using entertaining, accessible writing to inform and involve.

Over the course of more than two decades in journalism, Baker has broken scores of major stories. Topics included: early reporting on inaccuracies in the articles of The New York Times’s Judith Miller that built support for the invasion of Iraq; the media campaign to destroy UN chief Kofi Annan and undermine confidence in multilateral solutions; revelations by George Bush’s biographer that as far back as 1999 then-presidential candidate Bush already spoke of wanting to invade Iraq; the real reason Bush was grounded during his National Guard days - as recounted by the widow of the pilot who replaced him; an article published throughout the world that highlighted the West’s lack of resolve to seriously pursue the genocidal fugitive Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, responsible for the largest number of European civilian deaths since World War II; several investigations of allegations by former members concerning the practices of Scientology; corruption in the leadership of the nation’s largest police union; a well-connected humanitarian relief organization operating as a cover for unauthorized US covert intervention abroad; detailed evidence that a powerful congressional critic of Bill Clinton and Al Gore for financial irregularities and personal improprieties had his own track record of far more serious transgressions; a look at the practices and values of top Democratic operative and the clients they represent when out of power in Washington; the murky international interests that fueled both George W. Bush’s and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns; the efficacy of various proposed solutions to the failed war on drugs; the poor-quality televised news program for teens (with lots of advertising) that has quietly seeped into many of America’s public schools; an early exploration of deceptive practices by the credit card industry; a study of ecosystem destruction in Irian Jaya, one of the world’s last substantial rain forests.

Baker has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice and Esquire and dozens of other major domestic and foreign publications. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s military record. He is the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America (Bloomsbury Press, 2009); it was released in paperback as Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Secret History of the Last Fifty Years. For more information on Russ’s work, see his sites, www.familyofsecrets.com and www.russbaker.com.

Editorial Advisory Board: (Affiliations are for identification purposes only)

Mark Dowie (San Francisco) teaches science at The University of California Graduate School of Journalism. He is the former Editor-at-Large of InterNation, a transnational feature syndicate based in New York, and a former Publisher and Editor of Mother Jones magazine. During his 35 years in journalism, Dowie has written over 200 investigative reports for magazines, newspapers and other publications. Before and after working for Mother Jones, he also either worked or wrote regularly for the Cleveland Press, the San Francisco Examiner, California Magazine and American Health. He is the author of five books and the recipient of 18 journalism awards, including four National Magazine Awards.

Robert Dreyfuss (Washington, DC) is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, an investigative history of U.S. policy toward political Islam. For fifteen years, he has worked as an independent journalist who specializes in magazine features, profiles, and investigative stories in the areas of politics and national security. Based in Alexandria, Va., he covers national security for Rolling Stone’s National Affairs section. He is also a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. His web site is www.robertdreyfuss.com .

Daniel Ellsberg (Berkeley) is a pioneering whistleblower.  A former Defense and State Department official, his unauthorized release to the Senate and later the media of a top- secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam exposed massive deceptions by the government and contributed to the end of the war. Misconduct in a government prosecution of Ellsberg led to the convictions of White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.  Since the end of the war he has been a lecturer, writer and activist.  He is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

Margaret Engel (Washington, DC) served as the managing editor of the Newseum, the interactive museum of news in Washington, D.C. She is the president of the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the nation’s oldest journalism writing fellowship. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. She is a board member of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and a longtime member of Investigative Reporters and Editors. She has been part of the reporting staffs of The Washington Post, the Des Moines Register and the Lorain (OH) Journal.

Todd Gitlin (New York) is a professor of Journalism and Sociology at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A contributor to Mother Jones, The Nation and other publications, he is one of America’s leading cultural critics. Among his many books are The Whole World is Watching; Inside Prime Time; and Media Unlimited.

Mark Hertsgaard (San Francisco) is the author most recently of The Eagle’s Shadow:  Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World (2002).  Previous books include Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future (1999) and On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (1988).  He has contributed to leading publications the world over, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time,  Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, and the Guardian.  He is the environment correspondent for The Nation, the political correspondent for Link TV, and a commentator for the national radio program “Marketplace.”

Frances Moore Lappe (Boston) is author of Diet for a Small Planet and 14 other books including Democracy’s Edge. Co-founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (also known as Food First), and the American News Service (1995-2000).

Robert W. McChesney (Illinois) is Research Professor in the Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the President and co-founder of Free Press, a national media reform organization. His work concentrates on the history and political economy of communication, and on threats from media monopolies. McChesney has written or edited eleven books, including the multiple award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times.  In 2001 Adbusters Magazine named him one of the “Nine Pioneers of Mental Environmentalism.”

Morton Mintz (Washington, DC), a former chair of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, spent 30 years at The Washington Post. He is Senior Advisor to the journalism Web site Niemanwatchdog.com, served as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and is the author and co-author of numerous books. He has received the Worth Bingham, Heywood Broun, and George Polk Memorial Awards; the Columbia [University] Journalism Award, the Playboy Foundation’s Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award for Lifetime Achievement, and, twice, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild award for Public Service.

James C. Moore (Austin, TX)  is an Emmy-winning former television news correspondent and the co-author of the bestselling, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. His second book, Bush’s War for Reelectionincluded his groundbreaking ten year investigation into the president’s National Guard record. He has been writing and reporting from Texas for the past 25 years on the rise of Rove and Bush and has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976. He is also the author of The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power. His political columns and insights have been published in leading newspapers and periodicals around the globe. Moore is also an award winning documentary film producer. His current book project, When Horses Could Fly: A Memoir of the American Dream is a narrative examining the hopes and dreams of southerners in the aftermath of World War II.

Roger Morris (Georgia) is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who served in the Foreign Service and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Before resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, he was one of only three officials comprising Henry Kissinger’s Special Projects Staff conducting the initial highly secret “back-channel” negotiations with Hanoi to end the Vietnam War in 1969-1970. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, 1913-1952, and the best-selling Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, as well as, most recently, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America (co-authored with historian Sally Denton).

Wendell Potter (Philadelphia, PA) After a 20-year career as a corporate public relations executive, Potter left his job as head of communications for CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, to work for meaningful health care reform. In widely-covered testimony before Congress, he provided a window into health insurer internal practices. Potter now serves as a Senior Fellow on Health Care at the Center for Media and Democracy. He also speaks out on both the need for a fundamental overhaul of the American health care system and on the dangers to American democracy and society of the decline of the media as watchdog, which has contributed to the growing and increasingly unchecked influence of corporate PR. Potter has worked as a journalist, including with the Scripps-Howard News Bureau in Washington.

Jonathan Rowe (Point Reyes Station, CA) is a fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute, which seeks to resurrect the concept of the “commons”; he is also issues director at Commercial Alert, which fights the overpowering influence of commercial concerns in American life and culture, especially with regard to children.  He is a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly and YES! magazines and contributes columns to the Christian Science Monitor, where he was a staff writer. Rowe served as a senior staffer for Ralph Nader, as well on U.S. House and Senate staffs.  He hosts a show on KWMR-FM in Marin County, CA.

Cody Shearer (Washington, DC) founded the Institute for International Mediation and Conflict Resolution (IIMCR), a Washington, DC-based non-profit, with the mission of promoting peaceful remedies among a generation of future leaders. He served as a Washington-based journalist for 30 years, working as a network television producer and nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist.

Steve Weinberg (Columbia, MO) is a professor at the University of Missouri Journalism School, a former newspaper and magazine staff writer, and a full-time freelance writer since 1978.  In addition to his reporting, writing and teaching, Weinberg served as executive director of Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE), a 5000-member organization, from 1983-1990. He currently serves as an editor of the IRE magazine. Weinberg is the author of six nonfiction books, several of them seminal works on investigative journalism.

Patricia J. Williams (New York) is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University. She served as a deputy city attorney in Los Angeles and as staff lawyer, Western Center on Law and Poverty. Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Williams published widely in the areas of race, gender, and law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing. Books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster’s Egg; and Seeing a ColorBlind Future: The Paradox of Race. Columnist, The Nation. MacArthur fellow. Board of Trustees, Wellesley College.

Development Steering Committee: (Affiliations are for identification purposes only)

Karen Croft: Karen is an editor and producer  and VP of The Talbot Players, a creative shop launched by Salon.com founder David Talbot; she is in San Francisco

Peter Franck: Peter is a lawyer focused on intellectual property,  entertainment and media law.  A long time media activist, Peter chairs the Lawyers Guild Committee on Democratic Communications and is a former president of the Pacifica Foundation; he is in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cathe Kruger. Cathe is Executive VP of American Friends of the Phelophepa Train, a charity for rural health care in South Africa; she lives in New York and South Africa

Michael L. McGrael: During a career spanning forty years, Michael provided program leadership in philanthropy, strategic planning, and on issues of governance and mission development to charitable organizations in higher education, the arts & culture, health care and social & community services.  Now retired, he makes his home in Port Charlotte  FL.

Stephanie Schoen: Stephanie handles donor relations for Northeastern University; she is in Boston

Richard Schrader: Richard is New York Legislative Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council; he is in Springfield, MA

Jamie Wolf. Jamie is a writer and vice president of  PEN Center USA, the literary and freedom of expression group; she is in Beverly Hills

Blog Editor

David V. Johnson (San Francisco) is a writer and magazine editor in San Francisco. He has a Master’s degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, an M.Phil in classics from Cambridge University, and a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University. Before entering journalism, he was a professor of philosophy, specializing in ancient Greek ethics and moral psychology.

Assistant Editor and New Media Coordinator

Harrison Rice is a graduate of Boston University, Harrison has worked for several Washington, DC-based policy research groups

Publicity and Outreach Associate

Candice Bernd (Denton, TX) studies journalism at the University of North Texas. She has worked as a talk radio host/producer and reporter with a Dallas based AM station and been published in independent magazines. In The Hague, Netherlands, she studied the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and its relationship with the press and public.

Research Librarian

David MacHenry, with a Masters in Library Science from Southern Connecticut State University, David has extensive background as a research librarian, an information specialist, and a librarian for a major corporation

Copy Chief

Gerald Jonas served as a staff writer on The New Yorker for 30 years, and as the longtime science fiction book critic for The New York Times. He is the author of six nonfiction books, including “The Circuit Riders: Rockefeller Money and the Rise of Modern Science.” His work has also appeared in Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, and Grand Street. He graduated from Yale College magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. In addition to numerous awards in journalism and documentary film writing he won a Henry Fellowship to Cambridge University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship.

Consulting Art Director

Nancy Novick served as Art Director/Photo Editor, Columbia Journalism Review; chief designer, Journalism Graphics, serving major Journalistic operations such as the Overseas Press Club, the Committee to Protect Journalists, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and photo research/photo editor for trade publications in news, history and political science.

IT Director

James Huang

Reporting and Writing Team

The team is in formation. Our reporter-writers will include both heavily experienced investigative journalists and talented, energetic entry-level reporters with training at America’s finest journalism schools.