Билл Дедман: Американский журналист-расследователь и его вклад в журналистику

American journalist

Bill Dedman is a Pulitzer Prize winning American investigative reporter and co author of the biography of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune. Often relying on public records as much as insider accounts, Dedman has reported and written influential investigative articles on racial discrimination by mortgage lenders and real estate agents, racial profiling by police, interrogation of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and efforts to understand and prevent school shootings. His work includes one of the early examinations, in 1990, of the cover up by the Roman Catholic Church of allegations of sexual abuse by a priest.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Dedman grew up in neighboring Red Bank, Tennessee. He started in journalism at age 16 as a copy boy at the Chattanooga Times. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, writing for the student newspaper Student Life and editing part time for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, but dropped out of college to work as the reporter at The Daily Star Journal in Warrensburg, Missouri. Dedman was a reporter for the Knoxville News Sentinel, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He was the first director of computer assisted reporting for The Associated Press. He has covered news and sports part time for The New York Times, including the home run record chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998 and 1999. From 2006 to 2014, Dedman was an investigative reporter for NBC News and NBCNews. com, formerly known as msnbc. com, uncovering stories including firefighter deaths from faulty equipment, fraud in Pentagon efforts to identify war dead, widespread failures to inspect highway bridges, efforts by U. S. officials to hide the risk of earthquake damage to nuclear power plants, hidden visitor logs at the Obama White House, suppression of Hillary Rodham Clinton's college thesis at the request of the Clinton White House, and journalists making campaign contributions. In 2014 he joined Newsday, the daily newspaper on Long Island, N. Y., as a senior writer, reporting investigative stories in print, online, and on television for Newsday and its sister cable television channel, News 12 Long Island. He was one of the four lead reporters on Newsday's 2019 undercover investigation of racial steering by real estate agents, Long Island Divided. The investigation revealed that Long Island’s dominant residential real estate brokerages help solidify racial segregation. Realtors frequently directed white customers toward white areas, while directing minority buyers toward more integrated neighborhoods. They also avoided doing any business in communities with large minority populations. Although not a college graduate, Dedman taught advanced reporting as an adjunct lecturer at Boston University, Northwestern University, the University of Maryland, and Stony Brook University, and served for six years on the board of directors of the association Investigative Reporters and Editors. Dedman's investigative reporting is analyzed at length in two books: Custodians of Conscience, which examines the techniques and moral implications of investigative reporting, and the textbook The Ethical Journalist: Making Responsible Decisions in the Digital Age

In addition to serious investigative reporting, Dedman has done quirky stories, including his account in The Washington Post of discovering the 1989 DC Prostitute Expulsion, when police officers attempted to force sex workers to march down 14th Street, past the Washington Monument and across the 14th Street Bridge toward Virginia.

While working for NBC News as an investigative reporter, Dedman uncovered the case of the reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark. He documented her life in a series of reports on NBCNews. com and The Today Show in 2010 2012. Dedman reported the Clark mystery first in an online slideshow, a series of 47 photos with 2,788 accompanying words in captions. The slideshow attracted more than 75 million page views, more than any story in the website's history. Dedman and Clark's cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr. (1936–2016), co wrote the 2013 nonfiction book Empty Mansions about Clark and her father, the Gilded Age industrialist William A. Clark. Published September 10, 2013, by Ballantine Books, Empty Mansions debuted at No. 4 on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover nonfiction, and was the No. 1 bestselling nonfiction e book in America. Empty Mansions has been published in translation in China, Brazil, and Italy, and in English in the U. S., Canada, the United Kingdom, and Commonwealth countries. The film rights to Empty Mansions were optioned by Fremantle, which is developing a TV series with HBO, director Joe Wright, and screenwriter Ido Fluk. The book was optioned earlier by film and television director Ryan Murphy.

Dedman has received the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for national investigative reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award grand prize, the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award, and awards from the National Press Club, Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, Society for News Design, and others. For the investigation Long Island Divided, the team at Newsday received The Peabody Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the George Polk Award in Journalism, the Sigma Delta Chi Award, an award from the News Leaders Association, and others.