Peter Whoriskey didn’t always know he was going to be a journalist. After quitting a tech job over three decades ago and briefly living in Italy — where he taught English and picked up a lasting espresso addiction — he landed a job at The Washington Post as a news aide. Soon, he noticed that there was nothing particularly magical that the newsroom reporters were doing that he couldn’t do himself. He decided to try his hand as a journalist by freelancing a few pieces for The Post.
At first, Whoriskey was content covering the daily happenings around the city. But as time went on, he began to think about the deeper causes of the issues he was noticing in the world. Before long, he was investigating some of the world’s most powerful people and institutions.
Whoriskey has since won a host of coveted journalism honors: a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service, as part of a Miami Herald team that exposed government failures in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992; a 2012 George Polk Award, for his investigation into how pharmaceutical companies influence research. He has helped expose negligent practices of private-equity-funded nursing homes and worked with a global collaboration to uncover a scheme by world leaders and billionaires — including Vladimir Putin — to hide their money in offshore accounts.
Whoriskey, who is currently a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, recently spoke with me about his career as an investigative reporter and what he hopes to accomplish during his year at MIT. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Alex Viveros: The staff of the Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for your coverage of Hurricane Andrew in the summer of 1992. Can you tell me a bit about your contributions to that reporting?
Peter Whoriskey: The summer of Hurricane Andrew, I did a story about how people were moving into mobile homes. It was mostly a story about economics, and we wanted to know: Why are so many people choosing to live in mobile homes?
During my interviews, I asked people who were selling mobile homes “So, are these safe in a Hurricane?” And they said “Oh, absolutely. In fact, the federal government stamps each one with a label that says ‘Hurricane Resistive.’”
Not many months later, Hurricane Andrew hits. Driving around after the hurricane, you’d go around these neighborhoods and roofs had peeled away. But a lot of the houses were still there.
And then you’d drive by the mobile home parks, and there was no sign that they had been mobile home parks. You’d just go by these open fields strewn with furniture, clothes, and appliances. The fields were flattened. None of those mobile homes — not a wall — was standing.
So I thought: Hurricane Resistive, eh?
I started poking into the federal regulations and realized that they were flimsy, at best. The structures built under those regulations didn’t stop even a below-hurricane wind from knocking a mobile home over. In a hurricane, the home was going to go.
AV: What happened after your story was published?
PW: Henry Gonzalez, a famous Texas congressman, called a hearing based on my reporting, and I flew up from Miami to cover the hearing. Congress put pressure on HUD [The Department of Housing and Urban Development], the agency that created the regulations, to change them. So HUD completely rewrote them.
The mobile homes industry objected, but HUD just said “No, the mobile homes ought to stand up in a hurricane.”
AV: Wow. What did it mean to you to know you could inspire that change?
PW: That was the best.
AV: You won the George Polk Award for Medical Reporting for your 2012 series on how drug companies influence research published in top medical journals. How did you find those stories, and what did they accomplish that hadn’t been done before?
PW: Nobody had done what we did, which was to look through a year of New England Journal of Medicine issues and count how many drug studies were funded by drug companies.
I believe the year before that we had done a story about Medicare fraud. One of those stories was about a drug that had piqued my interest in healthcare. So I started thinking: “I should look at more of these.”
AV: Can you remember any challenges you ran into while writing that series?
PW: Boredom. Going through a year’s worth of the New England Journal of Medicine and looking at the fine print.
I remember talking to some of the people harmed by ineffective or dangerous drugs, and that was obviously really sad.
AV: Are there any other stories that you find especially memorable?
PW: I really remember the story about Carlyle, one of largest private equity companies, buying out the second largest nursing home chain in the country. It follows how Carlyle made money and what the effect was on residents.
It was horrible. Horrible. There was a lack of staffing and residents had broken bones. The headline was “Overdoses, bedsores, broken bones.” It was not a good situation. The story came out almost five years ago, and I still get people asking me questions about it.
AV: Can you tell me about your involvement in the Pandora Papers investigative project in 2021, where journalists around the world reported on the secret offshore accounts of world leaders and billionaires?
PW: I’m not sure how I got called into that. My editor just said, “Do you want to do this?” And I said, “Okay.”
The Pandora Papers were an amazing collaboration that the ICIJ [International Consortium of Investigative Journalists] put together. It was really fascinating for a couple of different reasons. The first was just the security around the documents that they had.
Secondly, because of the international nature of the project, you realized how cool the journalists are in other countries. They’re braver; the things they put up with are so amazing and so daunting, and yet they overcome all of it.
AV: What are some other differences between U.S. reporters and reporters in other countries?
PW: It’s fairly easy to be a reporter in the United States. I [interviewed] this Indonesian reporter for a story about one of the billionaires there, and the reporter just said, “Oh yeah, he owns this newspaper.”
Then he proceeded to say some things that were not so flattering about the billionaire. And I said, “are you sure you’re comfortable talking about this?”
Then he said, in flawless, idiomatic English — which was not his first language — “We don’t give a shit.”
AV: What are you hoping to get out of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program?
PW: It’s a great opportunity to get to go to classes at MIT and get up to speed on some of the science that I’m interested in. Right now, I’m mostly interested in atmospheric sciences and climate change, so that’s what I’m focused on.
Alex Viveros is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
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