Democracy & Journalism
We know from history that watchdogs are essential to a strong, functioning democracy. John Gardner, former secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, observed that as a government insider, he had seen that those with financial stakes in government policy knew how to get what they wanted, understanding just where and how to focus their considerable resources. "Everybody's organized but the people," he warned, when creating Common Cause. Gardner's words guided Common Cause Magazine, the award-winning investigative reporting journal created in the 1980s by the Schuster Institute's Founding Director, Florence George Graves.
Highlights
Human Trafficking & Modern-Day Slavery
A new beat covering human trafficking and modern-day slavery took Schuster Institute Senior Fellow to the World Cup in South Africa to report on the slave trade. Read the article>
Women Veterans' Healthcare
Senior Fellow Jan Goodwin explains how the Veterans Administration lacks resources and initiative to care for female veterans. Read the article>
Political Asylum
Senior Fellow Jan Goodwin reveals the shocking struggles some political asylum seekers to the U.S. experience once they arrive on American soil. Read the article>
Pandemic Flu & Infectious Disease Preparedness
Senior Fellow Madeline Drexler discusses the history and future of such epidemics as SARS, H1N1 influenza, and presents innovative approaches to global pandemic preparedness in her book "Emerging Epidemics: The Menace of New Infections" (Penguin, 2010).
Police Corruption
Visiting Journalist-in-Residence Dick Lehr details what really happened in the beating and cover-up of a black plainclothes policeman by white officers in Boston in his book "The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide," (HarperCollins, 2009).
The Boeing Parts Scandal
The Schuster Institute played a key role in exposing alleged problems in aircraft manufacturing in a report by Founding Director Florence Graves and student Research Assistant Sara Kehaulani Goo published in The Washington Post. Read the article>
Homelessness
The Schuster Institute awakened Beacon Hill to the issue of homelessness with the article "First Things First," written by Founding Director Florence Graves and Schuster Institute student Research Assistant Hadar Sayfan and published in the "Ideas" section of The Boston Globe. Read the article>
Political & Social
Justice Project
The Schuster Institute’s Political & Social Justice Project works in the tradition of Ida Tarbell, whose 1904 work exposed monopolistic and corrupt practices in the Standard Oil Company and led to long-lasting policy reforms. We investigate abuses of government, political, and corporate power, which often intersect, and which are being overlooked or inaccurately reported.
That’s important. The few news organizations that are still sending reporters to Washington, D.C. generally assign them to cover the daily machinations in Congress and the White House—not the agencies mandated to carry out the government’s business.
News organizations with enough resources to assign full-time reporters to an agency “beat” usually focus on only a handful of major agencies, such as the Pentagon, Department of Justice, Department of State, and Treasury. Those “beats” generally involve tracking major policy decisions, and rarely leave enough time for reporters to make connections between the policies and the influence-peddlers who stand to profit from those policies.
While there are many important stories to be told about how our federal government is—or is not—fulfilling its legal duties, few reporters are assigned to find them.
That is why the Schuster Institute’s Political & Social Justice Project hosts, both on staff and as fellows, dedicated reporters pursuing problems on issues as wide-ranging as veterans’ affairs, political asylum, housing, airplane manufacturing, public health, and modern slavery.
Human trafficking and modern slavery. According to economist and sociologist Kevin Bales, more people are enslaved today—an estimated 27 million—than at any time in human history. They are forced to work without pay, under threat of violence, and unable to walk away. Historically, journalists have been—and continue to be—instrumental in exposing and illuminating the facts and evils of slavery. Reporters like William Lloyd Garrison and Ida B. Wells helped increase public awareness and outrage, educating policymakers and others in power, and ultimately prompting reforms in the United States.
But slavery has not ended. Human beings are today enslaved all over the world—including in the United States. They are forced to work in agriculture, fishing, gravel pits, mines, restaurants, as domestic servants, and in brothels.
Unfortunately, members of the news media do not always report accurately or thoroughly on the contemporary realities, laws, practices, and perceptions of human trafficking and modern-day slavery.
Sometimes editors see a few stories about slavery or trafficking and conclude “that story’s been done,” leaving no need for more. And in an increasingly constrained journalistic and economic landscape, few reporters can afford to invest the time and energy needed to responsibly cover human trafficking.
For these reasons, the Schuster Institute is shining a spotlight on the subject of human trafficking and modern-day slavery, dedicating an experienced journalist full time to covering the facts and nuances of today’s unconscionable trade in human beings.