{"id":14429,"date":"2025-03-07T13:24:27","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T18:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/?p=14429"},"modified":"2025-03-26T09:29:37","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T13:29:37","slug":"investigative-journalism-in-uncertain-times-featuring-walter-v-robinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/events\/2025\/03\/07\/investigative-journalism-in-uncertain-times-featuring-walter-v-robinson\/","title":{"rendered":"Investigative Journalism in Uncertain Times featuring Walter V. Robinson"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Investigative reporting is journalism’s costliest and riskiest endeavor. It is most vulnerable to government pressure because it is the most worthwhile work journalists do: It holds people in power accountable. Walter V. Robinson, editor-at-large for The Boston Globe, led the Pulitzer-prize-winning team of Spotlight reporters who uncovered the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church. For the 2025 Taricani Lecture on First Amendment Rights, Robinson will discuss the challenges facing investigative journalists when press freedoms are threatened and the vital role of protecting a free press in a democratic society.<\/p>\n

Moderated by Karen Bordeleau, executive editor of The New Bedford Light. She is an award-winning journalist with more than 40 years of experience in journalism and journalism education. She was the first woman to hold the top editor\u2019s position at The Providence Journal. Karen was inducted into the Rhode Island Journalism Hall of Fame in 2023, and she has also been honored with the top two lifetime journalism awards in New England.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Light reception to follow.<\/em><\/p>\nRegister Today<\/a><\/div>\n

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About Walter V. Robinson<\/h2>\n

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Editor-at-Large for The Boston Globe<\/h4>\n

WALTER V. ROBINSON is Editor At Large at The Boston Globe, where his high impact stories about local, national and international events have graced the front page since 1972.  Robinson led the Globe Spotlight Team that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its investigation of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.<\/p>\n

The Spotlight Team\u2019s groundbreaking investigation exposed a decades-long cover-up that, in Boston alone, shielded the crimes of nearly 250 priests. Twenty years later, the team’s work continues to spark similar disclosures across the country and around the world. Spotlight’s investigation was made into the 2015 Academy Award-winning film, \u201cSpotlight,\u2019\u2019 starring Michael Keaton as Robinson.<\/p>\n

In the mid-1970s Robinson covered politics and government for the Globe, and went on to cover the White House during the Reagan and first Bush Administrations. He covered the presidential election in 1984 and was the newspaper’s lead reporter for presidential elections in 1988 and 1992. In 2000, he did investigative reporting on that year’s candidates.<\/p>\n

In 1990 and 1991, Robinson was the paper’s Middle East Bureau chief during the first Persian Gulf War. In 1992, Robinson became the Globe\u2019s city editor, and then for three years the metro editor. In the late 1990s, he was the Globe’s roving foreign and national correspondent, and spent much of that time reporting on artworks looted by the Nazis that ended up in American museums; and the illicit international trade in looted antiquities. For his reporting on antiquities, the Archaeological Institute of America gave Robinson its first-ever Outstanding Public Service award.<\/p>\n

Since 2007, he has also been Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Northeastern University. As a Northeastern journalism professor, Robinson and his investigative reporting students produced 26 Page One investigative stories for The Boston Globe. He was the Edith Kinney Gaylord Visiting Professor in Investigative Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. At the Cronkite School, his students produced 13 investigative reports in just four years.<\/p>\n

Before joining the Globe in 1972, he served four years in the US Army, including a year in Vietnam as an intelligence officer with the First Cavalry Division.<\/p>\n

Robinson is a 1974 graduate of Northeastern University. He has been awarded honorary degrees by Northeastern and Emerson College. He is a board member of the New Bedford Light<\/em> and the Plymouth Independent.<\/em> He is a past board member of the New England First Amendment Coalition and the Plymouth Public Library Foundation. He has been a journalism fellow at Stanford University, and a Pulitzer Prize juror four times. Robinson is co-author of the 2002 book, “Betrayal: Crisis in the Catholic Church.”<\/p>\n

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\"Jim<\/p>\n

Jim Taricani, H\u201918, the husband of Laurie White, \u201981, was a veteran Rhode Island journalist and nationally respected investigative reporter for nearly four decades with WJAR-TV and a valued member of the URI family. Shortly after he passed away in 2019, Jim’s family announced the creation of the Taricani Lecture Series on First Amendment Rights<\/a> to honor his memory and his work. As a champion of the news media’s First Amendment rights, Jim was dedicated to protecting those rights, which he saw as critically important to society. <\/p>\nSupport the Taricani Lecture Series<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Investigative reporting is journalism’s costliest and riskiest endeavor. It is most vulnerable to government pressure because it is the most worthwhile work journalists do: It holds people in power accountable. Walter V. Robinson, editor-at-large for The Boston Globe, led the Pulitzer-prize-winning team of Spotlight reporters who uncovered the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3771,"featured_media":14434,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-taricani"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3771"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14429"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15602,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14429\/revisions\/15602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}