• Who We Are
• Welcome: A Note from the Founding Director
• Praise for the Institute's Work
• Florence George Graves
• E.J. Graff
• Dick Lehr
• Duke Law School research team
• April Robb
• Pamela Cytrynbaum

Who We Are

The magazine Florence Graves founded and published, Common Cause, "was the singularly best investigative magazine in the country."
--Bill Moyers, to Florence George Graves, Institute Founding Director

Welcome to the Elaine and Gerald Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Here you will find out:

• What is the Institute?
• What is investigative reporting?
• Why is this work especially important now?
• Why engage students in investigative reporting?
• What is the Institute's mission statement?
• Who is involved in the Institute's leadership?

What the Institute is:

The Elaine and Gerald Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, the nation’s first investigative reporting center based at a university, was launched in September 2004 to help fill the void in high-quality public interest and investigative journalism—and to counter the increasing corporate control of what Americans read, see, and hear. Our goals: investigate significant social and political problems, and uncover corporate and government abuses of power.

At the top of our website, you can click to find out more about our three major projects: the Political & Social Justice Project; the Justice Brandeis Innocence Project; and the Gender & Justice Project. Media criticism—holding the profession of journalism accountable for what is, and is not, reported—is another essential part of the Institute’s work.

By being housed within a university, the Institute is firmly placed within an academic tradition that honors freedom of inquiry—and that offers independence from the government influence and corporate control that too often undercut today’s media. Brandeis University, with its longstanding dedication to social justice, human rights, and the pursuit of truth wherever that might lead, is an ideal host for this institute.

What investigative reporting is:

Investigative journalism can be the most difficult and time-consuming form of journalism, and must meet the highest standards of proof and thoroughness. In their book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write that “while all reporting involves some investigation, what we have come to understand as investigative journalism adds another dimension. It engages the public to come to judgment.” Another journalist calls it “reporting with a sense of outrage.”

The most basic form is “original investigative” journalism, in which reporters uncover and document “activities that have been previously unknown to the public,” using shoe-leather to track down hidden information. Another form is “interpretative investigative” reporting, which “often involves the same original enterprise skills, but usually deals with more complex subjects that require the reporters to synthesize and interpret the information to reveal new ways of looking at trends or situations.” Here, journalists add context, analysis, and explanation in order to show why the newly revealed information matters to public policy and practice.

Why this work is important now:

Journalism is protected by the U.S. Constitution for a single reason: an unfettered media is essential for a healthy democracy. What you don’t know can hurt you—when it becomes bad medicine, dangerous products, unsafe or unfair working conditions, wrongful convictions, evaporated pensions, or skewed and harmful policies. Without oversight, human beings too often behave badly. When the facts are pursued with ruthless thoroughness, watchdog journalism helps keep American institutions accountable to all. 

Unfortunately, the American media are gradually abdicating their roles as public watchdogs. The ongoing drive for higher media profits means that fewer and fewer resources are available for serious investigative journalism. Corporations do not want to invest in time-consuming, risky, expensive investigations—resulting in stories that may bring on lawsuits and other attacks—when the airwaves and columns can be filled much more cheaply and quickly by feel-good features, quick-hit consumer news, and tabloid entertainment. 

Today, the media’s power to define and shape the globe is dramatically increasing … just as the media’s commitment of resources to difficult and time-consuming stories is diminishing. And so the Institute will help bolster the practice of investigative journalism, so vital to democracy, while helping students learn how to do investigative reporting that can make a direct and lasting impact on society.

Why we engage students in investigative reporting:

For reporters, students, academics, and the citizenry at large, having an independent reporting center based at a university is important for two key reasons. First, the Institute’s research will move farther and faster when students help dig, develop, pursue, reveal, and substantiate. Second, when students see for themselves how urgent it is to question and analyze the official version of any policy or practice—and are involved in the hands-on effort of those investigations—they develop as individuals, as professionals, and as citizens.

What is the Institute's mission statement:

Our mission statement depends upon a key statement in the larger Brandeis University mission statement: 

“The University that carries the name of the Justice who stood for the rights of individuals must be distinguished by academic excellence, by truth pursued wherever it may lead, and by awareness of the power and responsibilities that come with knowledge.”

Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism mission statement: 

To further Brandeis University’s mission by creating a community of journalists, students and scholars who can serve as a public watchdog—seeking the truth, revealing injustices, and exposing abuses of power, while holding the powerful accountable, giving voice to the voiceless and acting as a catalyst for social and political debate and reform.

Who is involved in the Institute's leadership:

The Institute’s founding director is Florence Graves, an award-winning investigative reporter and editor whose work focuses on exposing abuses of government and corporate power, and on revealing inequities between the powerful and the powerless. She also is a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. As an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, she and a colleague broke the Senator Bob Packwood sexual misconduct story, which led to an historic three-year Senate investigation followed by a Senate Ethics Committee vote to expel him and then his forced resignation. She has received a number of prestigious fellowship awards, including from the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, and the Pope Foundation. She founded the award-winning and nationally circulated political and investigative journal, Common Cause Magazine. Her work there led to congressional hearings and to reforms in public policies, and has received such prestigious awards as the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the highest award given in magazine journalism.

E.J. Graff is developing the Institute’s Gender and Justice Project. Her work for the Institute will build in part on the extensive research she did as part of her collaboration on former Massachusetts lieutenant governor Evelyn Murphy’s book, Getting Even: Why Women Still Don't Make As Much As Men--And What To Do So We Will. Ms. Graff is also a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. Her first book, researched while she was a Visiting Scholar at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely praised, and is regularly quoted in legislative hearings and court documents. Graff is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a contributing writer for Out magazine, and a contributor to TPMCafe.com.  Her work has appeared in such publications as the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Republic, Village Voice, Salon.com, Ms., Women’s Review of Books, and in more than a dozen anthologies.

For the last six months of 2007, the Institute's Visiting Journalist-in-Residence was Dick Lehr, a Boston University journalism professor, an attorney, and an award-winning Boston Globe reporter. In 2003, his investigation into the 1989 conviction of Shawn Drumgold for the murder of a 12-year-old Roxbury girl led to Drumgold’s release from a sentence of life without parole. At Boston University, he has overseen journalism students in investigating and publishing stories about police lying and about a possible wrongful conviction. Their story about the wrongful conviction in a rape case from the 1980s was named (in the student category) the 2004 winner of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Award for In-Depth Reporting. Lehr is the co-author of three books, including Black Mass, a book examining the FBI’s corrupt ties to Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, which was a New York Times bestseller for three months and a Boston Globe bestseller for 48 consecutive weeks. While working with the Schuster Institute’s Innocence Project, Prof. Lehr consulted on our open investigation, and worked to complete The Fence, an investigative book about police brutality in Boston and the blue wall of silence, for HarperCollins publishers.

Journalist Pamela Cytrynbaum spent two years as the Associate Director of the Institute, helping us to develop and launch an Innocence Project to investigate cases of potentially wrongfully convicted inmates. Previously, she co-taught the capstone Investigative Journalism course in Northwestern University’s nationally acclaimed Medill Innocence Project, where she also served as program assistant. In addition to her administrative appointment at the Institute, she held a visiting lecturer appointment through the American Studies Department, which includes the university’s Journalism Program, a minor. She taught journalism courses while here. Ms. Cytrynbaum has worked as a reporter for Chicago’s famed daily columnist Mike Royko, and has reported for many major metropolitan newspapers including the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune and the Chicago Tribune. She is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and holds a master's degree in teaching from Oregon State University. As originally planned, she has returned to Oregon, where she and her family make their home.

For longer biographies, please click the relevant links at left.