Test. Test. Test. Test. They were kind of happy to show off the fishing. It was a pretty big fishing business there. It had been there for about a decade. And in the beginning they were happy to show those guys around, but they constantly had a government minder with them. So you can go to look at the factory, but were going to come with you. And i kind of broke off at that point and pretended like i was more interested in teaching english at the school and visiting the market, going around the islands. I was free and they were stuck with the government minders. At a certain point when my colleagues wanted to follow up what i had come across, like the graveyard or whatever and would disappear for a few hours, the government minders started getting really nervous and angry and basically kicked us off and then i was left alone. My burmese colleague came. We were okay for a few days, but after a while they really hated us as well and started, you know thats when they kind of chased after us in the boats and threatened us. Problems, challenges, difficulties . The biggest challenge was compared with the vast veil of this issue, the small team that we had, actually, the post hole digger team, the department of justices team that are now doing the same thing, 20 people, my colleague oliver, he and i stuck together, the two of us, we would hide a researcher. Later in the year three of us hired an intern, another brilliant reporter, to do more. That was it. The database was designed by people who can code and things like that. It was a small team basically. We worked day in and day out all night and to keep up with not just the new cases each day but the cases that had already happened and to examine and, as i just mentioned, to keep track of the status of each case. Its much more than just theres a new case today, theres a new case today. The weight of information with so many different issues that you have to keep track of with google alerts and with calls to authorities over and over again to keep the information coming. It was exhausting. As a small team we thought at times, why are we doing this, but we sort of got through it. I think one of the main challenges was finding people who are still alive and willing to talk. There were some former exxon employees who still depended on the company for pensions and things like that so they obviously, you know, were not going to talk. Another challenge is the inside climate is very small. We had, i think, eight reporters total while we were doing this and four of us were on this project and the other four had to keep the website alive for months so we were willing to put in a lot of resources, basically half of it to do this story. Also were a virtual News Organization so were not in the same place physically so we have some people in san diego, the rest of us are in the east coast. Trying to do things mostly by email and phone and google hangout and we met a couple of times in person. That was that was fun. Jessica. So, i think we had two kind of primary challenges. The first was i mentioned briefly these two Supreme Court decisions. There was one in 2011 and one in 2013. Both received almost no attention. In part because they were dense, legalistic decisions that basically said they were premised on the idea to say its fine to ban class actions. Its fine not to go to court, youre waiving like going into a nursing home, renting a car, taking out a student loan, youre waiving your right to file a class action and thats fine because theres this other great system called arbitration, which is a perfectly fair alternative to going to court for people to resolve disputes from any kinds of disputes, whether its a small dollar dispute or something larger. And that had been largely untested. So this incredibly kind of important basis for these two decisions, no one had gone about seeing, well, is arbitration actually a fair alternative to court . And there were a couple of reasons why people didnt do that. One, theres no federal requirement that arbitration decisions be disclosed publicly. No one had looked at kind of how many people were actually going to arbitration. That was the first thing. And so with my colleague rob geblof, we saw between 2014 or 2010 and 2014 only five about 500 people, 505 people went to arbitration for disputes of 2500 or less. So this was so this whole notion that, you know, millions of people could fairly resolve their disputes through arbitration, we started to see that that was that was incorrect, but it was a huge challenge to even get to the point where we could quantify the number of people who are going to arbitration. So that was the first thing. So what our reporting showed was basically we ended up with this idea that, you know, corporations had killed the class action, but it wasnt enough to just stop there. The next huge challenge, i think, was trying to figure out the way that they did this because, as i said, this amounted to a huge power play. You know, you as a corporation can just get out of the legal system entirely. You can opt out. But how did you how did you do this . And the reason that i think people hadnt figured this out was because it was a very technical process. So what had happened was about ten years ago, maybe 20 state court judges when they were getting cases where companies were saying you cant go to you cant file a class action, they were saying, no, no, no, no, no, were going to strike this clause because were going to overturn this clause and allow you to go to court because this amounts to having a get out of jail free card. They actually said that. They said, you know, discover credit card company, if you ban people from going to form a class action, you are exempting yourself entirely so youre getting out of jail free. So we saw that state court judges were striking down these clauses, and then suddenly that changed. So the state court judges were what happened was a case where a state court judge in california had struck down a clause, made it all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court basically said to the state court judges, no, no, no, no, no, youre overstepping your authority. You have no right to strike down these clauses. Were going to uphold them. But we set out to try to figure out how that happened. In order to do that we really needed to learn the law and also to get to win the trust of the architects of the arbitration clauses who were a bunch of corporate lawyers who, you know, had no interest in telling us how they had engineered this, you know, kind of incredible coup. So what the big challenge was learning the law almost better than they knew it or as well as they knew it to go to them and say, look, i understand the genius of what you did. Regardless of, you know, whether we think class actions are good or bad, we can disagree on that, we can both agree that youve killed them and by saying that to them and then actually walking through with these various lawyers how they did it by saying, oh, so this is the legal argument that you engineered in this instance and this is the one that you made to the Appellate Court in new york and this is the one that you made to the Appellate Court in california, that began to help us because we were, i think, winning the respect of the people that had done this because just to say to them, look, i know what you did and i think its rather remarkable was a powerful thing. And then i had learned in the course of reporting that one of the kind of key Players Behind the scenes in this legal coup was john roberts who now we all know as the Supreme Court justice, but when he was a private lit at thlitigator he rd discover bank. Arbitration should be allowed to ban class actions and this was a very contentious idea. The Supreme Court didnt grant am certs. They didnt agree to take the case. Fast forward, you know, eight years Justice Roberts is no longer a private lawyer, hes a Supreme Court justice and suddenly the Supreme Court agrees to take a case involving the very same kind of issues that it had previously denied to take. So we knew he had made this legal petition on behalf of discover to get the Supreme Court to take this case and i went to talk to one of the architects and i asked him, what do you make of john roberts being on the court . It seems like it would be to your advantage since he had written this brief in 2002 petitioning the Supreme Court to take the very same case that they ended up taking eight years later, and i think the lawyer that i was talking to was so shocked that we knew about it, that he was thrilled to talk about it. He was like oh, well, yeah, no, we thought we had a good shot at winning this case. I helped john roberts craft that brief and he helped us later on. That was kind of a remarkable turn for us because it showed just how concerted this effort had been and how it involved the highest levels of the Supreme Court. So that that to me was one of the biggest challenges. Michael . So in our case just wrangling the data that went into producing these stories, we did five stories at the end of the day, was a pretty big task. It was a big challenge for us. It was the most intensive data type work that ive ever done on a project, and basically we did we took databases on test scor scores, student discipline, teacher quality, we had three or four datasets on teacher quality and data on assignment to special programs for kids and analyzed them in a way if we had wanted to we could have produced five separate investigative projects. We rolled it all up and synthesized it into one. Just knowing what to leave in and what to leave out took a long time and it was something we had to think a lot about. The other thing i would say is probably a mindset was a challenge. The mindset of the officials who we were dealing with and even the reporters and editors at the paper, the first part of that is when you have Something Like poverty or failure at school, its tempting to just write it off as this immutable, unchangeable truth that exists in the world and to avoid looking at how it evolved and became this way and to sort of obscure the accountability that you could bring to the situation. If you just asked the questions, you know, well, why does this situation exist as it does today, you know, when a group of disadvantaged kids does well in school, its because the School District did a great job, but when they fail, its because they dont come to school wanting to learn or theyve got bad parents. So, you know, convincing people that that wasnt the case was a challenge for us, but at the end of the day i think we pulled it off. Kimberly, before you start, were going to open it up for questions from the floor so if you have a question, we have a mike here and a mike there and if you would kind of walk up to the mike if youd like to ask the panel a question. Kimberly. Sure. Frankly, the lack of resources was a big problem here, too. It looked like we had a huge number of people. On some stories we did. We certainly had a huge group of people doing Amazing Things like videos, graphics, and the like. But just, you know, when it came to writing the stories, ill give you an example of how alone it felt at the time. So i decided that we needed to do something on body cameras. It was promoted for schools of transparency and accountability. I had a sneaking suspicion that that wasnt what was going on. I started to do some digging. I decided the best way to do this was to identify every single case in which there was a body camera video and go to the department and ask them not only for the video but ask them to tell me exactly what their policy was on release. Would they release it immediately after the event . Was it not until the investigation concluded . What investigation . The administrative investigation or the criminal investigation into the officer . And then i also wanted to know and i also wanted to take a look at all of the body camera bills that were being introduced to state legislatures because i was hearing that the Police Unions were and the Police Chiefs organizations were strongly lobbying on these and instead of them being told of a transparency and accountability, they were changing the language in bills so that they would be exempt from public records laws. So i had to call 50 Police Departments multiple times in order to get the data for the analysis on what was really going on with release, and i had to analyze over 200 bills and i had the help of julie tate, who called 20 of the departments for me because i thought i was going to drowned, but otherwise i did that all on my own. So the post had a lot of resources on it, but at the end of the day, that was one of five investigative stories i did last year and its the kind of thing that most investigative reporters would have spent a year on and that was just one of my five stories. So basically at 6 00 a. M. When my boyfriend would wake up he would see me staring at the computer and say, are you already at it . Thankfully he likes to watch sports on the weekend. When he was watching sports, i was working. I worked all year long last year. It was worth it but lack of resources and the incredible difficulty that i know the guardian incredibly felt with us. The pain was shared. So hard to get anything from the Police Departments. You didnt just call them and they gave you something, you called and you called and you emailed and you emailed and you went to the city council and the county council. You did everything you could to put some pressure on them just to squeeze a Little Information out. Imagine if youve got, you know, dozens, hundreds of departments youre trying to do that with. Its daunting. Really, we both could have used 100 people and they still would have been working all the time. So lack of resources, police not answering your questions, those were the obstacles. Okay. Well take questions. Ted . First i just want to say if i had a hat, id take it off. So impressive. It restores my faith in the field. I thank you all. My questions ted, im sorry. I should have if the questioners would identify themselves please. My names ted guf. I used to be able to claim to be an investigative reporter. I dont know if i can still claim that or not. Anyhow, my questions kind of broad. But it goes i think to all of you. We live in a different Political Climate, and im wondering to what degree that change in Political Climate affected your reporting in this way, in terms of either the sources of the problems you looked at, the accessibility to officials, the responsiveness, their attitudes towards the press, the willingness and appetite to follow on. For example, the judiciary, gubernatorial level, congressional oversight, whatever. How was your work changed by the change in the american Political Climate . I guess thats what i would ask. You dont all have to respond. Ill take a really brief response to that. Sure. Maybe one of you can do a little bit more. I think my impression is a lot of Investigative Journalism in the past was looking for things that are illegal and now youre looking for things that are legal. You know, abuses and things a that have been legalized. So that was the case in our situation and it sounds like a lot of you had the same, aside from the exxon story maybe. Climate change now is this huge partisan thing, right . Pretty hard to find anyone in the Republican Party who believes in the science, but what our story showed was, you know, back then in the 70s and 80s when exxon was doing this research, it was not a partisan issue. Exxon wanted to do the right science because they wanted a seat at the table when regulations came down the line and they were expecting that. After our series came out we did have many politicians commenting on it. Hillary clinton and Bernie Sanders both said they thought this warranted some kind of federal doj probe. The attorney general of new york has started an investigation into this and perhaps also california. The california a. G. As well. There have been all democratic, some members of Congress Calling on more federal probe into this. But i think with the elections coming up and just how sensitive this issue is, you know, i am not sure doj is quite eager to get into this, but theres been a lot of pressure on them to try to get them to look into this the same way they looked into big tobacco years ago. I just agree with what robin said. I think that was one of the biggest challenges, tha were constantly writing about things that are legal. You know, almost all of these shootings have been deemed justified. Tamir rice, all kinds of things that people have seen for themselves with their own eyes, and people are starting to realize, wow, thats legal, what theyre doing is legal. With what jessica uncovered, legal. And so your first challenge is sometimes with these stories, going to your editors and first telling them, you know, obviously not not with the shooting stories but lots of other stories, explaining that its outrageous even though its legal and then you have this huge threshold with readers of explaining why they should be outraged even though its perfectly justified under the law. That seems to be over and over and over again one of the hugest challenges with investigative reporting these days, i think. One of the things, the impact with the Political Climate. With the senators, it stuck in the senate committee. Similar bill in the house. The republican majorities think that its too much to ask to mandate Police Departments to report this information. Thats all that this bill is essentially asking for, to make it a requirement for Police Departments to report information rather than making it voluntary or making the department of justice having to pro actively find these cases themselves. I think thats quite surprising. You know, this is not a bill which is demonizing things, its not a bill which claims all Police Shootings are not justified. Theres very little prospect of this reform asking for the fbi and the doj working with executive actions of their own. I think part of it for us was kind of trying to understand that the Supreme Court, which we all like to think is free of politics but, you know, since scalias death i think we can all agree that maybe thats not true, but, you know, you have the Roberts Court that i think people have begun to show is a court that seems to be very, very pro business and its arbitration decisions, even though there was this huge uproar about citizens united, you know, and this move towards thinking about corporations and giving them rights as if theyre individuals, the arbitration decision somehow escaped that analysis. They werent looked at as if they were for what they really were, which is these very big gifts to Corporate America because and what we one of the challenges, i think, is that we had to show that this was a very political decision, both of them, both in 2011 and 2013. And that really came down to showing what the value of the class action is. And i think it gets villainized even by people within our own News Organization, and i had my own preconceptions about what a class action was. I thought about it as, you know, ambulance chasers who file, you know, Product Liability cases that have to do with medical malpractice or Something Like that and there had been so it was it was a challenge to show that for a whole range of cases, class actions are the only method of bringing them. So whether those are Sexual Harassment cases, unfair working condition cases, denial of minimum wage, antitrust cases where people are trying to fight a monopoly, we had to show that by eliminating that class action its a big advantage that you give to business, so i think to show that the court in these decisions was a political entity was, i think, what kind of came down to what was part of reporting in this climate. I think that was one of the challenges. She cited our stories in our dissent. I basically can die now and ill be totally fine. Next question please. My name is henry dassam. Im a reporter here in boston. I guess first of all id like to say thanks to the guardian and the post for your work. Ive used it in my reporting. Its good for society and good for lawmakers. Its also great for journalists and i think its great that youve both been nominated as well. One did include the other for nomination. My question is sort of related to something that you two have sort of talked about today, the issue of sort of competition with other outlets and everyone youre competing with other outlets. Im going to be the first guy to bring up spotlight today. Im surprised its taken this long. One of the interesting things from that is the debate that they had back in 2003 about when to publish and they were competing with another news source and they had to sort of decide when they had the story and when it was best to go with it. And i just wanted to ask all of you sort of when did you think you had the story and when did you think you didnt have the story and were worried about publishing too soon or publishing too late. So were running a little short on time so if we could keep the responses fairly brief please. First was the safety and then the second was making the actual link to the american dinner table because that also was a very, very complicated process that my colleague Martha Mendosa concentrated on. For a few weeks we thought we could only link it to the domestic market in thailand. It was kind of do we go with it or do we wait while we have, you know, other Competitive Pressures and make that until we can actually get the links . I think we very early on were determined to publish our database for the first time once we had several months of data. So to avoid misleading appearance of the trend. Once we had five months of data we launched on june 1st. The post a couple of days before that had published their first story on their findings. I guess you could say we could have that evening rushed out a similar thing. We decided well carry on. On june 1st and then it followed in july. So, yeah, its always a challenge to know when to press the button. We feel like we did the right thing. So we basically had the key documents by i think may or june. We wanted to work as quickly as possible. One of our considerations was with the paris climate talks in december 2015, we wanted our stories to come out before that so that they wouldnt get lost in the noise of the paris coverage and we ended up publishing in the middle of september. About a month after we published the Los Angeles Times released their own story that basically came to the same conclusions and they had part nerd up with the Columbia Journalism School and they used different documents. Most were from Public Company archives and it was pretty interesting. I personally had not known they were working on that project at the same time we were and it was nice to see that these two completely independent projects reached the same conclusion using different documents. I dont think we had really competitive pressure. No one really wanted to look at arbitration. The National Regulator had put out proposed proposed rules. Basically a draft of rules that would prevent Financial Companies from banning class actions in their contracts. They put it out i think in, i dont know, michael likes yeah, may. And being the jittery, crazy reporters that we are, we did a small news story about it, about the proposed rule and then i was afraid that that was going to spur a whole host of coverage. My editor assured me that i was being crazy and i was but the thing is small story people i hadnt been in the paper for a while because i was working on this. I got a lot of emails from people saying, wait, that 500 word story was your investigation . Like what have you been doing . I was like, no, no, no. Its not. Anyway, it was completely different. In terms of knowing when to pull the trigger for us, its interesting. We didnt set out to write a story about resegregation. The longest serving reporter on our team had been at the paper for three years. We were kind of short on institutional knowledge. What we were doing is looking at student test scores. We noticed there was a precipitous drop in reading scores in 2008, 2009. We started scratching our heads saying, maybe something happened in this time period. Lets check the clips. Sure enough there was a decision to revert to neighboring schools and thats how the story came about so then we wrote it. Similar thing for us at the guardian. After we had a few months of data, we thought we had some trends that were kind of reliable we started, you know, planning a story. I just started spending a lot of time looking at data base which was pretty primitive at that point. After several weeks of staring at it and doing my own like math on pieces of paper and stuff because it hadnt really been felt out as much as it had eventually was, it became pretty clear that half of the cases were incidents that involved people who were behaving erratically, either because they were on drugs, mentally ill, and half of them were likely git mate criminal stuff going on and officers showing up to robberies and stuff. Once i spotted those trends i kind of knew how we were going to write it and pulled the trigger on the first story. You know, i i think that you of course when theres competition youre like worried about it, but i dont think anybody cared but us and the guardian who got it first. I think america was super glad there were people taking a look at it and publishing stories and putting pressure on authorities so that they would start tracking it and im pretty sure theres about 20 people between the two organizations that really cared about who did it first and the rest of america doesnt really know. So we started a little bit late so ill take really its closing time, but im going to take one more question. It would be great if it would be something they could almost get a thoughtful sound bite answer from our panelists. So final question. Im an investigative reader if anything. I just want to thank you all for your courage, dedication, hard work, putting your marriages on the line and all of that. I had two questions but ill limit myself to one. How do you keep your motivation going . I mean, just i could read to you the titles of a book published in 1967 by jonathan kozal, this one michael might know. The book was called death at an early age, the destruction of the minds and hearts of negro negro children in the boston public schools. This is 1967 and were still fighting this fight. How do you keep your motivation going when you know the best you can do maybe is, you know, a shortterm result . How do you do it . How do you do it . You know, i can say that we worked i began working on this story in march of 2014, and basically just stopped working on it within the last couple of weeks. For once, this is the one story that ive worked on that i never got tired of doing. I was it was just that important. There were so many different facets and so much nuance to the Different Things that we were bringing to light that it just there was an Endless Supply of stuff to keep you interested. Plus, it was just a fricken outrage, you know . That this is going on in our community and being allowed to continue with nobody really raising any questions about it. So it was it was in this case it wasnt hard to stay committed to it. Its a really good question. Once i shut down an entire state agency because it was such a boondoggle and i moved away and its up and running again. You can get really discouraged, but if youve been doing it long enough you know that the most youre going to be able to do is just create some small change and then you hope that it holds and that some other reporter comes along and some more small change happens and it continues and that over time maybe were all dead before you really can look back and see, oh, because of 20 reporters and because of 50 activists and because of all this work people have done that constantly put pressure on important moments, that over time things change and things improve. Certainly its discouraging what you just said when you think about what michael has done and what he discovered, but maybe if you look back at what the educational system looked like nationally a long time ago, maybe you would find almost every School District not too long ago looked like the one michael wrote about. Your hope is that you produce a little change and then somebody else comes along and produces a little change. You hope that unlike that state agency, that it holds. Yeah, i mean, i think thats really perfectly said. I think its youre part of something much broader. Thats why its such an honor to be amongst so many journalists trying to do the same thing. And because kimberly said it so articulately, i dont think i need to go into kind of why im heartened by peoples work, but another big thing that kind of sustains you and keeps things going is your crazy kind of family within the paper. Like i had to have a brilliant, brilliant editor and amazing colleagues and, you know, its also just kind of going home and talking to your friends and having them tell you that youre not going to go totally crazy. And also just our families. I mean, michaels parents are here today, which is awesome. And its just a really i think i draw a lot of sustenance from the people who are around me and who believe in the project even when i forget to. Yeah. Waiting for the construction to stop. I would say for this story it was really easy to stay motivated because the documents were so exciting. We knew that we were the first people outside top have ever seen them. It was it was great. Our editor, jack cushman had been reporting on climate forever. If he was completely shocked by these documents, the rest of us knew that we had something really good. So, you know, we were it was very easy to stay motivated, and we havent stopped. We have some followup stories planned as well. Seeing the reaction from readers. You know, at the end of the day we do this for the people who read the work, and we had such an overwhelming response. I should have mentioned actually earlier. We had thousands of people sending in tips and sending in information, photographs and information about people who had died. Just to have people say were reading what you do, we think its important, please continue. You know, theres nothing more. You know, thats what you come into this for. This is kind of easy. I think covering a lot of tragedies and interviewing people who have been abused again and again and again, all you can really say to them when theyre asking you, whats going to happen to your story . Is it going to help me . Pretty much what you all were saying. We hope over time it will do something. In this particular case when we met those men and, you know, we saw that staggering level of desperation, i really felt confident being able to tell them, we will get you off this island. You are not going to get stuck on this island. And it was kind of a mixture of just gratuitous events that the fisheries minister was a really kick ass woman, she wouldnt let this happen on her watch. We knew that she would make it happen. We were in a way a little disappointed it happened so quickly because we had a whole bunch of Great Stories interviewing the guys back home. Send our guys back. But good. You know, this mornings panel demonstrates why we have the goldsmith awards program. This is important work. This is inspiring work. To me its also somewhat evolving work. I kept hearing words like data analysis, data collection, data gathering and so on. Maybe ten years ago that word would have been less prominent. So the method may be changing but the goal is the same, and id like to congratulate again all the goldsmith award finalists, a. P. , guardian, u. S. , inside climate news, new york times, tampa bay times, Washington Post and particularly to robin, john, lisa, jessica, michael and kimberly for representing not only your organizations so well but the whole investigative reporting field. Thank you. [ applause ] today hospital officials talk about new ways to finance Medicare Services hosted by the appliance for health reform. Live coverage begins at 12 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan 2. Today well hear about the future of personnel policy at the defense department. The featured speaker is brad carson, former acting under secretary for personnel and readiness. He just left the position after waiting for Senate Confirmation for the last year. Live coverage beginning at 1 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Tonight on the communicators federal Communications Chair tom wheeler in his first interview with cspan since being nominated by president obama since 2013. He talks about issues facing the fcc including net