Note: The following transcript is created by both humans and AI, so despite our best attempts may contain errors. Additionally, Berkes has slipped out of retirement since this interview to do some production work on the black lung issue for the PBS series, Frontline.
Bull: And today is Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 1:13 Pacific Standard Time. This is Brian Bull, lead interviewer and director of the Public Radio Oral History project. Today, our guest is Howard Berkes, a long-time journalist who, in his time with NPR, covered or broke many major stories. This includes the Mount Saint Helens volcanic eruption, the Challenger Shuttle explosion, the Olympics bribery scandal and many more. His work has been honored with awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Radio, Television, Digital News Association (RTDNA), the Society of Professional Journalists and Harvard University’s Nieman foundation. Berkes also got a start at this station, KLCC, which is NPR’s member station based in Eugene, Oregon.
Howard Berkes, it’s so great to have you join us. Thank you for making it.
Berkes: It’s really great to be with you.
Bull: So, Howard, just some quick biographical information here, first. When and where were you born?
Berkes: (laughs) I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1954. My parents were living in Levittown, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, just north of Philadelphia.
Bull: And did you grow up primarily in Philadelphia?
Berkes: I lived in Levittown. Grew up there, went to school there until I was 17. I graduated when I was 17 from - from high school, and left shortly after that. I was a volunteer as a community organizer with an organization that was involved in development and hunger issues, and held local - what were called “Hikes for Hunger” or “Walks for Development” around the country. And I had organized one of those walks in high school - very successful one. And then I joined their staff as their Pennsylvania coordinator right out of high school, and then, after a semester at a college, I joined the regional staff there, which was based in the northeast.
Bull: What did young Howard do growing up, and how did he get hooked
into this thing called radio?
Berkes: Well, there were sort of two things that were going on. One is that my dad was a local politician whose nickname was “Boss Berkes.” He was a local township supervisor. He was the chairman of the Democratic Party in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He became a state lawmaker and eventually became Pennsylvania’s first drug czar.
But while I was growing up, he was very interested in seeing what newspapers were saying about him. So we had like five daily newspapers coming to our house every day, and I read them. You know, I would lie on the floor reading these newspapers, and I really liked the Jack Anderson investigative reporting column that was in the Philadelphia Bulletin. I read that every time that column appeared. So I was interested in news, interested in media from a young age.
I got interested in radio as well, and in high school with a couple of other guys, there was a local radio station right in Levittown, WBCB. We tried to get them to do a youth program as a music station. They didn’t buy it, but we did a pilot for them, and that was fun to sort of put together. I did the - our high school had, you know, like announcements in the morning. That was kind of like a radio thing, you know, I did that. So I kind of dabbled in that.
And when I did community organizing, I often was the media person when we - when we organized the Hike for Hunger. In high school, I was the media representative and the co-coordinator of the hike. I was dealing with newspapers all the time. I started getting quoted in the local papers in addition to my dad, you know.
And eventually, when I actually started working at NPR, my dad would introduce himself as “Howard Berkes’ father,” instead of me, always introducing myself as Milton Berkes’ son.
Bull: That’s a great switch around. I bet that made you proud. That made
him proud.
Berkes: Yeah, so I had this interest. And even though, you know, I did that community organizing, I - I worked in, you know, to make money and to, you know, have a real job, the organization I worked for collapsed in 1973 due to lack of funding, and I ended up in Washington, DC, working in a law bookstore., And when I moved to Oregon, I used that experience to get a job at the University of Oregon bookstore. So I had these jobs that had nothing to do with media.
But when I was a, you know, community organizing, I was always involved with writing the newsletter, making contact with media, and in Eugene, I listened to KLCC when I was there and it was a volunteer station at the time, almost all volunteer. And one day they had a PSA for a news volunteer workshop for people who wanted to become news volunteers.
Bull: I want to just pause you briefly, Howard. How did you come to be in
Eugene, Oregon anyway?
Berkes: Yeah, so after the - the organization I worked for, doing community organizing, failed in 1973 I ended up in Washington, working at a law bookstore, during Watergate, by the way, which was a very exciting time to be there. And I wanted to move west. I went on an Outward Bound course in the North Cascades in 1976.
I decided on that day that within the year, I wanted to live in the northwest. I was just taken by the forests and the mountains, and I dreamed about living there. And a year later, on July 4, 1977, I arrived in Eugene with everything I owned in a small Opel Manta Luxus.
Somebody on the Outward Bound course lived in Eugene. She was leaving the house, the room in the house that she was in - this group house, and she was leaving her room for the summer. And so she said, ‘if you want to take my room, you know, there’s a place to live,” and that’s why I ended up in Eugene.
I also had the intent to go to forestry school at Oregon State. I wanted to get a job as a park ranger or some kind of job in forestry. So that’s what compelled me to go to Eugene.
Bull: I would have guessed maybe you’d gone to the University of Oregon, and went to the J school there, but it sounds like you were already – did you ever go to college?
Berkes: I spent a semester at Temple University, at a suburban campus of Temple University right out of high school. I quit that to do the community organizing. Eight years later, when I got to Eugene I enrolled at Lane Community College, but that was mostly to get financial aid to support myself while I volunteered at KLCC, because I had quit my regular job at the University of Oregon bookstore and – to volunteer full time at KLCC, and that didn’t pay. You know, there was no, I never got paid by KLCC.
Bull: Wow.
Berkes: Yeah, so I don’t have a college degree. You know, I attended Harvard on a fellowship, I - but I don’t have a college degree.
Bull:And so yeah, now that I’ve established how you came to be in Eugene, Oregon, let’s talk a little bit about your earliest beginnings of KLCC and how that led to a career with NPR, please.
Berkes: Yeah, you know, KLCC had this fantastic staff at the time, a couple of paid people. Don Hein was the news director. And Don Hein really welcomed me into the KLCC fold as a news volunteer. I was the one person out of this training class for news volunteers that actually stayed and started working at the station. And it was a kind of place then where you could walk in and in the off hours, you could use the tape recorders and the equipment, the studios and stuff. And I was encouraged to do stories. I got training, as I said, from Don and from others there.
There was a producer there named Thurston Briscoe, mostly a music producer, but I learned a lot from him about cutting tape and mixing audio. There was a freelancer for NPR in Eugene at the time, M’Lue Zahner Ollswang was her name, then. I learned a lot from her. She was very generous with teaching me about the creative side of audio production.
And when I first started doing what that - before I quit my regular job at the University of Oregon- I would go into KLCC at six o’clock in the morning to help the morning newscaster, a woman named Gina Ing, prepare for her eight o’clock newscast, which was like 20 minutes a half hour. And my first job was to rip and read wire copy and to pull news spots from the morning newscasts on NPR. Morning Edition didn’t exist at the time. There was a morning - a short like 10-20 minute morning news program hosted by Alex Chadwick which had one or two stories basically each morning. And so there were newscasts in the morning around that.
Bull: This was maybe what? 1977, ‘78?
Berkes: This was 1977 or ‘78. That is when I started seven - definitely, I was there in ‘78. And so I did that for a while. I really loved radio and what I was learning, and I loved - I fell in love with the power of the human voice to evoke emotion and concern, and I just found it to be addictive. And then also the creativity of radio, where you could take listeners to a place that you were at with the use of natural sound and descriptive writing.
And so I loved the art of radio, and did some local stories, but also in part, because I ended up quitting my job at the University of Oregon bookstore and volunteering full time at KLCC, I became - I was a full time reporter. I was the host of the afternoon news magazine show. So I was there full time, still not getting paid. So I started pitching stuff to NPR. Right before Morning Edition went on the air in 1979 and in fact, in the pieces in the Morning Edition shows that were sent out to stations for feedback - before it actually became an official show - I was able to get a couple of news spots in that - in those pilots that were sent out.
And now you got to remember, this is a time period when NPR had very few reporters outside of Washington. They had one reporter in New York, one reporter in Chicago, one reporter in London. Everybody else was in Washington. And NPR member stations, most of them didn’t have news staffs. Maybe they had a news director who would read - rip and read wire copy during All Things Considered. Very few actually had reporters.
Bull: I’d be curious how that first conversation went, because NPR is, like you said, they relied on a lot of reporters in the East Coast. And did you - do you remember how you initiated this? Did someone reach out to you, or did you just call them one day and just say, I’m in Eugene and I’m willing to cover stories out of the Pacific Northwest? Do you remember how that all began for you?
Berkes: Because there were two people at KLCC who had filed for NPR, and that was Thurston Briscoe, who was an arts - did some arts stories, music stories and art stories. And actually got hired - when Morning Edition went on the air, he was hired. He was the first KLCC person to be hired by NPR. And then M’Lue Zahner Ollswang was selling stories.
They encouraged me to pitch stories. And of course, they had - there was an editor for the West. They had one editor for the West and one editor for the East at that time. And so they had contact with the editor for the West, and they introduced me to her, and she liked what I pitched and liked the stories I did, plus nobody else was filing news spots in the northwest, really not very often.
And I quickly realized that I could make $50 a day by filing two news spots every day for the newscast. And they didn’t care that I was in Eugene. As long as the story was somewhere in the northwest, it was fine. So I could pick, you know, there were plenty of things for me to file on. So I was filing lots of news spots, which they desperately needed, especially after Morning Edition went on the air.
And then I was pitching stories - which they love to have, stories from the west and from Oregon and Washington. And I got the NPR editor, Anne Gudenkauf, became a mentor. She was brutal with her criticism of my work, which actually helped me immensely in learning how to be a better audio journalist. And she would kick me stories, you know? She would give me assignments, she would accept my pitches. And again, it’s an atmosphere in which there aren’t very many people pitching to NPR. And when anything was happening in the northwest, they would often turn to me.
Bull: You know, NPR being relatively new at the time - I know that the network, the organization, began in 1971. Morning Edition launched in November 1979. It was still kind of going through little fits and starts, growing pains. What were some of the - I guess we’ll just call them “hiccups” for now - that you experienced as a correspondent far from “The Beltway,” I know that – that sometimes hiring and pay or things that came up from time to time.
Berkes: Well, I should say that when Morning Edition went on at the end of 1979 the airtime that NPR was sending out to stations more than doubled for the news programs, because, All Things Considered, was only an hour and a half program at the time., Morning Edition was two hours. Well, they didn’t have a reporting staff to fill that airtime and again, they didn’t have a lot of member stations filing stories. So, at the end of 1980. they saw that they were - that they desperately needed reporters. And so at the end of 1980 they hired eight people around the country --and I was one of them-- to start building a national news staff.
What they did, though, you know, like you said, this was a startup news organization, not a lot of money. They didn’t want to pay us full staff salaries so they hired us as contractors. We got a fraction of staff pay - no benefits - but had quotas in which we actually had to file more airtime than staff reporters at the time.
And now, we were all very happy to be working for NPR. It was a tremendous opportunity. There’s no question about that. But after a year of that, two years of that, we realized that we were being exploited. And I don’t think that NPR set out to screw us. I think that it was a product of not having a lot of money, experimenting with this idea of having these reporters around the country, but they became very dependent on us. And we were filing as much or more often than staff reporters, and our work was right alongside their work on the national programs. So there’s no question about the quality of work we were doing. So it was clear to us that we deserved to be on staff.
We also looked at the National Labor Relations Act and the Internal Revenue Service regulations on contractors, and we clearly did not fit the definition of “contractors.” We fit the definition of “employees.” And NPR was also a union shop at the time. At the time, it was the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and so they were employing a non-union workforce doing union work.
There were other things. We had to pay for our own tape. We had to pay for our own equipment. I spent probably about $10,000 putting together a studio with four reel-to-reel tape recorders so I could mix my own pieces and file my stories that way.
Bull: $10,000 in the - what the late 70s, early 80s?
Berkes: In 1980, ‘81.
Bull: Wow.
Berkes: And then, you know, they wouldn’t, I mean, in those early years, we had to buy our own tape. We had to buy our own cassettes and reel- to- reel tape equipment. They were really chintzy on travel. I can’t tell you how many times I camped on stories because we were under pressure not to spend money and that just became untenable. I mean, the reporters based in Washington were staying in first class hotels when they traveled, but we weren’t doing that. And so there was this disparity in the way that we were treated.
Bull: Was NPR a union shop at that time?
Berkes: Yes, yes, NPR was a union shop at the time. So the short story is that those eight reporters, we organized, we hired a labor lawyer, we got the union at NPR involved, and NPR just - the management at NPR wouldn’t have anything to do with us. So we sued them. We filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, and as the first hearing began of the National Labor Relations Board into this, you know, the hearing officer noted, “Look, this is going to be a long road for you all. It’s going to cost you all money once we get started, there’s no turning back. If there’s any way you can resolve this before we get started, I strongly suggest that you do that.”
And NPR caved and hired us all on the spot. And that was in 1982. At the end of 1982. So we had basically about two years of being under this contractor system. And I have to say, when we it came time to renegotiate our first- year contract, you know, I mean, we were lied to. I was told, for example, that I was the highest paid reporter and I couldn’t get more. But when we all got together and compared notes, I was the lowest paid reporter. I was the first one hired, but I had the least amount of pay.
Bull: Oh, my goodness.
Berkes: Yeah. I mean, we were treated very poorly, and so, you know, we didn’t get mad - we got even. And - and so in 1982 we were converted to full staff. And even then, there was still disparate treatment between reporters who were based in Washington and at the NPR bureaus and those of us, like me, who were far flung, remote reporters. Even then we were -- it was really difficult to get the infrastructure at NPR to recognize that they had these people that they had to support.
Bull: I have to ask you, Howard, there would be some reporters upon hearing this who would have just simply given notice and walked out the door and found a new opportunity where up, obviously, you wanted to stay on with NPR. What? What got you there in spite of this disparate treatment?
Berkes: We were told, by the way, that if we didn’t like the way we’re being treated - we should, we could, we should just walk, because there were plenty of other people who wanted to do that work.
I just - through my entire career, there had been, you know, bumps like this, of disparate treatment. I stuck with NPR because there was no other place to do what NPR enabled me to do, to do stories with natural sound and voices, to do the kinds of stories about people in the remote West. Ranchers and Native Americans, and stories about the politics of the West and the water issues. And you know, there was no other place doing that kind of journalism and doing it with the amount of air time that we got. In those early days my average piece was eight and a half minutes, you know, a segment length on Morning Edition.
And those shows were so desperate for stories, sometimes they would ask you to do another version of the same story for the next show. So we got a lot of airtime. We had a lot of great creativity we could put in our stories. There wasn’t anywhere else to do that. So it was a great opportunity.
Despite those downsides that we had with trying to get NPR to realize we were out there and that we needed the same support that everybody else had, it was still an amazing job. And I wasn’t about to give up on it. I was determined to fight for it. I was one of the people who organized this kind of revolt on the contract system. I became a union organizer, and I was a shop steward, for 30 years, because my feeling was despite all the negative things that we experienced, it was still a great organization to work for.
The problem was that there were individuals in the organization who were jerks - and that’s true in any organization -- and who didn’t know how to manage people or didn’t manage them in a fair way. And you know, we had to make them do that, and that’s the whole purpose of having a union anyway. So NPR was an enormous opportunity to do a kind of journalism that no one else was doing with lots of airtime, and creativity that you could apply to your stories. It was always a no- brainer for me. I wasn’t going to walk away.
Bull: No it sounds like you were very happy there to do the work and we’re very of course grateful that you stuck around. I can’t picture Howard Berkes with a set of call letters or byline anywhere else. I would love to hear now that, as you did this very early form of filing news from a remote location - what were some of the kind of the materials and tools that you’d use? Because today if you file for NPR, it’s all done through digital audio files, and everything could be done through a laptop, essentially as long as you have a good recorder. But there’s some pretty basic tools -- some might even say primitive or archaic now -- but I just would kind of like to hear what your filing process was like back in the late 70s, early 80s, please.
Berkes: Yeah, so, you know, what it was like before the digital era. So we were working with cassette audio tape and reel- to -reel audio tape. And in order to file from a remote location, you had to find a phone, and you had to connect your tape recorder to the phone to file the audio down the phone line. And to do that, you would unscrew the mouthpiece of the phone- and we had what were called alligator clips, connected to a cord - and you’d hook the alligator clips, to these two metal clips and in the unscrewed mouthpiece of the phone. You’d plug the other end of that cord into your recorder. You could plug your microphone into the recorder, and then talk through the recorder down the phone line. And then you could play tape down the phone line.
So for any deadline story where you needed to file quickly, one of the key elements was, how am I gonna find a phone? And these were often pay phones. And the phone companies would sometimes glue those mouth pieces shut on those pay phones so I would carry around a canning jar wrench, to unscrew the mouthpiece if it was glued shut.
But I’ve also - during the early Mount St. Helens reporting -- I woke up a motel owner in the middle of the night., There were no phones in the rooms in this motel and I had to wake him up in the middle of the night to file from his phone.
On one Mount St. Helens story that we were doing a quick turnaround on, we were in a school. We walked in the office and said “We need to use your phone. We’re on a deadline. We have to file a story.” And then we proceeded to unscrew the mouthpiece. And they’re looking at us like, what are these people doing?
And then early on in the 80s, probably around the mid-80s - where I was based in Salt Lake City, there were no satellite uplinks at the NPR stations in the area at that time. There was one satellite uplink at a commercial station. So NPR put in a high-quality phone line, that almost sounded like studio quality to this satellite uplink at this commercial station. And I would file stories that way. But even before that, you would put tape on a plane. And I’d go down to the airport, put it on a plane, air freight, and somebody would have to in Washington, would have to go to National Airport and pick it up to put it on the air. Or we would, if we had a little bit more time, we’d use Federal Express and we’d ship tape overnight.
Bull: I remember how excited I was when ISDN lines became a thing, but –
Berkes: I had -- when we got ISDN here in my neighborhood in Salt Lake-- the installer came with a manual instructing him how to install it, because it was the first ISDN line in this area. This was the first one that anybody had. And so ISDN made it possible to essentially encode and decode the audio quality that you were sending so that it would be studio quality. And that was a game changer. Otherwise, for breaking news, you were using the phone. Quality wasn’t great, but you did what you could. And nowadays, as you said, it’s…as long as you have a lop- a laptop and internet access, you can file from anywhere on the planet.
Bull: Yeah, it’s just really remarkable how much the technology has made everyone able to file from practically anywhere. Some people even file with their smartphones now. It’s just remarkable.
Berkes: Right.
Bull: At what point were you proudest to be working in public radio, Howard?
Berkes: (laughs) Well, I was always proud to be working in public radio, because I always recognized that we were doing things that nobody else was doing. Our stories were longer, we were putting real people on the air, we were holding public officials accountable. We devoted, you know, extensive time to our stories. We were - we did a lot of stories that just nobody else did. I liked the most the times when I was out working on something and there were - and people would greet me, happy to see me, because no other reporter had ever showed up to ask them a question, to come to their community to see what was going on.
I also covered breaking news, and you know, was in with the pack of reporters, which I--- I didn’t ever like being with the pack of reporters. So I always recognized from the very beginning that NPR was doing something that nobody else was doing, and had an approach to journalism that was people centered, that was centered on accountability, that was looking at issues that really mattered to average people, looking at how public policy affected average people in an analytical way. Giving time going to those people. I was always proud of that.
I always say - I was a shop steward at NPR for 30 years, a union activist my entire career. So I dealt with lots of complaints and lots of issues. And I always said that NPR among the staff, has a culture of complaint, which really is that the people who work at NPR --at least when I was there-- they worked there because of the mission that NPR had in journalism. And this was a mission with very high standards. And we held our editors and producers and the executives at NPR to those kinds of standards., And we felt when they didn’t meet those standards, we were disappointed, and we would complain. And that was it. When you’re in a mission driven organization and you believe in the mission, if you don’t feel that some people in the organization are doing the mission good, you’re not happy about it. So I’ve always had that pride and drive in my NPR career.
Bull: Now you’ve talked to some of my classes here at the University of Oregon on several occasions, Howard, and one thing that never fails to blow their minds is your case that investigative reporting doesn’t always have to be this intensive, time consuming, deep dive into data or trying to network secret sources and uncovering hidden documents. Can you just share with the Public Radio Oral History Project how some of your best stories came together relatively quick and simple?
Berkes:Yeah. I mean, there’s several examples. One is the Challenger disaster. So Challenger exploded on January 27th, 1986. Everybody is trying to figure out what happened. Why did Challenger explode?
Two weeks after the explosion on February 19th, Danny Zwerdling and I managed to talk to two engineers from shuttle contractor Morton Thiokol. Morton Thiokol was responsible for the booster rockets on Challenger, and it was the booster, one of the booster rockets, that failed and caused the explosion.
We managed to get extensive interviews with two of the engineers. We were working separately. Danny was in Alabama. I was in Brigham City, Utah. And that revealed for the first time what happened the night before Challenger was launched, which was an effort by those Thiokol engineers to keep challenger grounded because of cold weather predicted for the launch. They knew that the rubber O-ring joints that it sealed the joints on the booster rockets - might not seal properly, wouldn’t likely seal properly in such cold weather. Because there was a history of them not sealing properly in cold weather. And the previous coldest launch was in - in the 50s, and it was going to be in the 20’s overnight in Florida. And they recommended not to launch.
They were overruled by NASA and by their own managers, executives at Thiokol. One of those engineers, the one I had interviewed, went home that night, walked in the front door and said to his wife, “It’s gonna - it’s gonna blow up tomorrow. They’re all gonna die.” That was the night before it happened. So this had not yet been reported.
We started working on that story. Now we had hints about a disagreement the night before Challenger was launched for a week before that. I had a source, a name and engineer who was involved in that discussion,. And he tell told me that the engineers were coerced into the launch. And I called that guy, that engineer up, and he wouldn’t talk to me. He was afraid of losing his job and he - he off the record, confirmed that notion of coercion, but he wouldn’t go on the record and he wouldn’t go on tape. So we worked at that. We got the names of a few other engineers, but it wasn’t until February 19 that we, in earnest, started pursuing the engineers in - on that morning.
Danny flew to Alabama, where one of the engineers in that meeting was at the Marshall Space Flight Center. I went up to Brigham City, Utah, where Morton Thiokol was based, and started pursuing other engineers. And we - we had figured out who was in that meeting with NASA the night before the launch. We did all this basically in 12 hours. And I had names of engineers who we thought were in that room the night before the launch, and I went to the public library to look up their home addresses and phone numbers because there was no Google then. We didn’t have computers. And we identified some. And I started knocking on doors in Brigham City. I wasn’t the only reporter doing that. I knocked on the door of one Thiokol executive, and there were like 10 or 15 business cards from reporters from all over the world that fell out of the crack in that door.
But one door opened to me., A door opened to Danny Zwerdling in Huntsville, Alabama. And that night, we got these amazing interviews. We put together a story the next morning that blew the whole shuttle investigation wide open. It was the first detailed report of what happened. So you know, really 12 hours of investigating, 24 hours of - from when we started to when the story aired.
The other example, the Salt Lake Olympic bribery scandal in 1998 - in November of 1998 I believe it was - a local reporter here in Salt Lake City was leaked a document that showed that a woman who was the relative of a member of the International Olympic Committee was getting her apartment paid for and college tuition paid for by the Salt Lake Olympic bid and organizing committees.
This was not only unusual, it was a violation of IOC rules., And the Salt Lake Olympic Committee quickly admitted that there were actually 13 relatives of IOC members who were receiving benefits paid for by the Salt Lake Olympic Committee: college tuition, apartments, that kind of stuff. But that stayed largely a local story until I - I said, “Well, somebody at the International Olympic Committee has got to care about this.”
And up until that point, all that the IOC was saying was, “Well, we can’t control our members and we don’t have proof.” They would say that: “We don’t have proof that there was bribery, and we can’t control our members anyway.”
And so I decided to try to find out where the ethical bone was in the IOC body. And I talked to a couple of journalists who’d covered the IOC for a long time. I got a name: Marc Hodler, who was the second most senior member of the IOC, wrote the ethics rules. Was also chairing the committee overseeing Salt Lake City’s preparation for the games, and had been chair of the IOC Ethics Commission. And okay, he’s the ethicist, right? And I started calling him. He was in Switzerland. He’s a lawyer. At the time, he was a lawyer, he was in his 80s in Switzerland, and of course, so I would get up in the middle of the night to call. to call because he was in his 80s, he only worked in the morning. I would always miss him.
But finally, you know, one morning I got him, and he gave me the interview that really blew that whole thing open by essentially calling it bribery, saying it was illicit. They couldn’t do that. He was going to look into it. He was very upset. And that’s what really elevated that into an international scandal. Because after that interview with me, every other Olympic reporter was then finding him, getting him to say more outrageous things about what had happened, and it became, you know, it turned into the biggest scandal in Olympic history.
That really resulted from a couple of phone calls to find out who might be good to talk to, staying up late a few nights to try to get this guy. Finally getting him and getting the interview that changed things. Wasn’t millions of lines of data or hundreds of, or thousands of documents. It was just trying to figure out the right way to get what was needed to be gotten in order to find out what was going on and whether or not anybody who counted considered it illicit.
Bull: It’s great to hear this because, you know, I have colleagues in the journalism departments who, and in fact, I think one of the staffers at the Daily Emerald said this too, is that they often have students who are really excited to do investigative journalism, but they creep into it, and they stall themselves by thinking that it’s going to be something that’s going to take months and months and months of waiting for FOIA returns. And there’s a lot of action to be taken, and sometimes you just pick up on great details by simply asking the right person, like you did with the Olympic bribery scandal.
Berkes: Yeah, this actually happened at KLCC. You know, again, I’m a volunteer. There was an academic credit scandal at the University of Oregon that involved in the football team - where athletes were getting credit for courses in which they did no work. And I got a tip that this was happening with the swimming team and the wrestling team, which seemed really odd. Those weren’t, you know, those weren’t big name sports, right? But this turned out to be a ubiquitous practice at the University of Oregon.
And so anyway, I get this tip, and I’m this junior reporter. I just start making phone calls. I was able to confirm it, and actually --if I remember correctly -- this also happened with an athlete who was enrolled at Lane Community College. So again, that didn’t involve weeks of work. It involved figuring out, okay, I have this information, how can I get more information? How can I confirm it? And then, you know, was able to confirm it, and my stories were picked up by the Associated Press and other news organizations, because it showed a widening of this - of this scandal.
So no, I think all reporting is fundamentally investigative. It’s the approach you take. It’s figuring out how to get the information that you need. Who has the information that you need, how to get to them. So no, it doesn’t have to be weeks or months.
Bull: Times have really changed a lot since he you first began filing for NPR. The media landscape is glutted with competition and active misinformation, disinformation campaigns both here and abroad, have fogged up factual news. Newspapers continue to struggle, and NPR faces a diminished audience and renewed calls for being defunded by certain political entities. How do you think NPR will face these challenges?
Berkes: I don’t know. I mean, I - I’ve been retired. I retired in 2019. While I do often hear from colleagues who still work at NPR,. And, you know, I track some of what’s going on, I have no idea how NPR will navigate this environment. I have all the faith in the world in the reporters and the editors to continue to do the kind of reporting that I think has been fair and deep.
And they will - you know, we all have made mistakes from time to time in that reporting, but overall I think you’d be hard pressed to find an organization, a news organization, that isn’t as dependable as NPR. It’s as dependable as any of the major news organizations out there. And some of the best reporting in journalism is still done at NPR, still comes out of NPR.
So I couldn’t begin to figure out how to navigate this kind of environment. And I feel for the people who have to figure that out, and I feel for reporters and editors and producers who are just every day doing their best journalism work, but having to sort of look over their shoulder and not be sure about how their work will be received, what will happen to them as a result, and whether or not the organization they work for will continue to exist. It’s a sad state of affairs. You know, hopefully there are people at NPR who can figure out how to navigate this.
I will say that in my career, there were multiple instances of financial crises and other kinds of crises many times. Survived them all. Some resulted in layoffs. Some resulted in executives being ejected who really shouldn’t have been ejected. It’s part of life in the media world these days. And all I can hope is that the people who have their heads down every day doing the great journalism that they’ve always done and will continue to do - that that great journalism will somehow overwhelm these other factors and keep NPR not only in existence, but help continue to build respect and win more listeners and readers who also will contribute and help NPR survive.
Bull: At what point, Howard, did you decide to retire? It’s always, I think, difficult to leave a job that you love. But I also imagine there were things outside the workplace that drew you out and convinced you to put the microphone down?
Berkes: It was a matter of convergence of circumstances. One, I turned 65, and I could go on Medicare. I didn’t have to worry about not having company insurance and paying ungodly amounts of money for health insurance.
Another was I had just completed one of the biggest investigative projects of my career, which included a Frontline documentary about it and ultimately resulted in change in federal policy. This was dealing with black lung in coal miners. Very satisfying project that really spanned about 12 years. And also I knew that, that there were some younger people coming into the investigations team at NPR, and that if I left, they would be able to hire some really amazing, somebody amazing to basically take my budget line.
So those things all kind of - and I had, you know – I’d been was working for 38 years. I loved the reporting. I loved investigative reporting, but it was all pretty stressful. I didn’t have ante any major health problems as a result, but I had some basic ones, and the stress was not good. So to me, it just felt like the right time. I was, I was ready to do it.
Bull: I was just gonna ask you, how is retirement these days?
Berkes: You know, retirement is fantastic. I haven’t retired completely in the sense that I’ve done some stories since I retired, again on the black lung stuff that I had covered before, but I helped form another investigative news organization called Public Health Watch. I serve on their board. I’m the vice chair of that board, and I’m an advisor to the executive editor and director and help link them with public media for investigations and projects. But mostly I have time to ski and to hike and to kayak and travel. And we have a one-year-old granddaughter now, and it’s wonderful being able to spend time with her. My, you know, my daughter and son-in-law and granddaughter live just 10 minutes away. So my retirement is a mix.
I do a lot of mentoring. I judge journalism awards. You know, mostly I make work for other people and minimize the work that I have to do and -, and, you know, enjoy the time that I have and really enjoy not being on deadline. (chuckles)
Bull: Is there anything else, Howard, that you’d like to add about your career, your early start with NPR, or say to the public broadcasting industry?
Berkes: Well, I still believe that even in this era of podcasts, and many, many, many, many podcasts – some of which of which are produced by former NPR people, and have sort of NPR values applied to them– that NPR still has a unique role. With the reach with member stations throughout the country, into rural areas of the country, that NPR is still this unique entity with a laudable, ethical approach to journalism that needs to continue, that’s independent of a corporate parent. And I think that’s really important.
You asked me about pride. I was proud then, and I’m proud now. I am critical maybe of some, maybe of some things that might be taking place specifically, perhaps from time to time, but that’s what happens when you become an old man. You sit back and yell. (laughs) But overall, I think I always think of the reporters, producers, the editors who are doing the work every day, and I still end up working with some of them in a variety of ways.I still think some of the best journalists, including the younger journalists that are flocking to NPR and want to work for NPR – I think that’s a really good sign by the way, that that’s happening.
Some of them are the best journalists that I’ve ever encountered. And public media in this system that we have of member stations, which are by the way, part of that judgment of the best of the best journalism being done. We’ve gone from - in 1979- to not being sure whether we could have a station, whether we could get a story, to now having many reporters at many stations who are doing the best work that’s being done out there in audio journalism.
So, I think that’s quite an accomplishment for those people – Bill Siemering and others – who had that vision to create a public media, public radio. I think their vision has been fulfilled, and I hope that it continues to be fulfilled.
Bull: And that concludes my interview with former NPR investigative correspondent, Howard Berkes, on January 9, 20, 2025. Howard, it’s been great talking to you and hearing your reflections and insights. Be well and have a great 2025.
Berkes: All right. Same to you.
