Reveal

This is the second episode in our three-part series taking listeners inside the failed federal response to COVID-19. In episode two, series host Jessica Malaty Rivera, along with reporters Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler, asks a profound question: Why was there no good U.S. data about COVID-19?  In March 2020, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx had a daunting task for healthcare technologist Amy Gleason, a new member of her data team. Her job was to figure out where people were testing positive for COVID-19 across the country, how many were in hospitals and how many had died from the disease. Accounting for national numbers about the disease was extremely difficult, because when COVID-19 hit, the federal government had no system set up to get data from each state.  Gleason was shocked to find that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasn’t reflecting the immediate impact of the coronavirus. At the same time, the country was suffering from another huge shortfa

The United States has 4% of the world’s population but 16% of COVID-19 deaths. This series investigates the failures by federal agencies that led to over 1 million Americans dying from COVID-19 and what that tells us about the nation’s ability to fight the next pandemic. Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera is the host for this three-part series.   The first episode takes us back to February 2020, when reporters Rob Meyer and Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic were trying to find solid data about the rising pandemic. They published a story that revealed a scary truth: The U.S. didn’t know where COVID-19 was spreading because few tests were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also didn’t have public data to tell citizens or federal agencies how many people were infected or where the outbreaks were happening.   Their reporting led to a massive volunteer effort by hundreds of people across the country who gathered the data themselves. The COVID Tracking Project became a de facto source of

A sharp sound. Followed by body numbness. Difficulty speaking. Extreme head pain. Since 2016, U.S. officials across the world – in Cuba, China and Russia – have reported experiencing the sudden onset of an array of eerie symptoms. Reporters Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson try to make sense of this confusing illness that has come to be called Havana syndrome. This episode is built from reporting for an eight-part VICE World News podcast series by the same name.   The reporters begin by tracking down one of the first people to report Havana syndrome symptoms, a CIA officer working in Cuba. This “patient zero” explains the ways Cuban intelligence surveil and harass American spies working on the island and his own experience of suddenly being struck with a mysterious, painful condition. When he reports the illness to his bosses at the CIA, he learns that other U.S. officials on the island are experiencing the same thing.   A CIA doctor sees reports from the field about this strange condition happening in Cuba.

In 2010, Milique Wagner was arrested for a murder he says he had nothing to do with. The night of the shooting, Wagner was picked up for questioning and spent three days in the Philadelphia Police Department’s homicide unit, mostly being questioned by a detective named Philip Nordo.  Nordo was a rising star in the department, known for putting in long hours and closing cases – he had a hand in convicting more than 100 people. But that day in the homicide unit, Wagner says Nordo asked him some unnerving questions: Would he ever consider doing porn? Guy-on-guy porn? Wagner would go on to be convicted of the murder in a case largely built by Nordo — and Wagner’s experience has led him to believe Nordo fabricated evidence and coerced false statements to frame him. For years, Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Chris Palmer and Samantha Melamed have dug into Nordo’s career, looking into allegations of his misconduct. In this episode, they follow the rumors to defense attorney Andrew Pappas, who subpoenas the prison

In the second half of our two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), members of the Pine Ridge community put pressure on the Catholic Church to share information about the boarding school it ran on the reservation.  Listen to part 1 here. ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, visits Red Cloud Indian School, which has launched a truth and healing initiative for former students and their descendants. A youth-led activist group called the International Indigenous Youth Council has created a list of demands that includes financial reparations and the return of tribal land. The group also wants the Catholic Church to open up its records about the school’s past, especially information about children who may have died there.  Pember travels to the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, which administered boarding schools like Red Cloud. She discovers that many records are redacted or off-limits entirely, but then comes across a nuns’ diary t

In a two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), we expose the painful legacy of boarding schools for Native children. These schools were part of a federal program designed to destroy Native culture and spirituality, with the stated goal to “kill the Indian and save the man.” ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, explores the role the Catholic Church played in creating U.S. policy toward Native people and takes us to the Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Under pressure from the community, the school has launched a truth and healing program and is helping to reintroduce traditional culture to its students. Next, Pember visits 89-year-old boarding school survivor Basil Brave Heart, who was sent to the Red Cloud School in the 1930s. He vividly remembers being traumatized by the experience and says many of his schoolmates suffered for the rest of their lives. We also hear from Dr. Donald Warne from Johns Hopkins Uni

Nicole Chase was a young mom with a daughter to support when she took a job at a local restaurant in Canton, Connecticut. She liked the work and was good at her job. But the place turned out to be more like a frat house than a quaint roadside sandwich spot. And the crude behavior kept escalating – until one day she says her boss went too far and she turned to the local police for help. What happened next would put a detective on the hot seat and lead to a legal battle that would drag on for years. The United States Supreme Court would even get involved. Reveal reporter Rachel de Leon spent years taking a close look at cases across the country in which people reported sexual assaults to police, only to find themselves investigated. In this hour, we explore one case and hear how police interrogated an alleged perpetrator, an alleged victim and each other.  De Leon’s investigation is also the subject of a forthcoming documentary, “Victim/Suspect,” which debuts May 23 on Netflix.   Support Reveal’s journalis

In the early 2000s, rampant steroid use across Major League Baseball became the biggest scandal in the sport’s history. But fans didn’t want to hear the difficult truth about their heroes – and the league didn’t want to intervene and clean up a mess it helped make.  We look back at how the scandal unraveled with our colleagues from the podcast Crushed from Religion of Sports and PRX. Their show revisits the steroid era to untangle its truth from the many myths, examine the legacy of baseball’s so-called steroid era and explore what it tells us about sports culture in America. We start during the 1998 MLB season, when the home run race was on. Superstar sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battled to set a new single-season record, and McGwire, the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman, was portrayed as the hero baseball needed: part humble, wholesome, working man and part action hero, with his brawny build and enormous biceps. So when a reporter spotted a suspicious bottle of pills in his locker in the middle o

In this week’s episode, produced in collaboration with the Associated Press, reporters on the front lines take us inside Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and share never-before-heard recordings of Russian soldiers.  The day President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, Feb. 24, 2022, Russia unleashed a brutal assault on the strategic port city of Mariupol. That same day, a team of AP reporters arrived in the city. Vasilisa Stepanenko, Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov kept their cameras and tape recorders rolling throughout the onslaught. Together, they captured some of the defining images of the war in Ukraine. Stepanenko and Maloletka talk with guest host Michael Montgomery about risking their lives to document blasted buildings, burned-out cars, enormous bomb craters and the daily life of traumatized civilians. As Russian troops advanced on Mariupol, the journalists managed to escape with hours of their own material and recordings from the body camera of a noted Ukrainian medic, Yuliia Paievska. The pow

WBEZ reporter Shannon Heffernan brings us the story of Anthony Gay, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on a parole violation but ended up with 97 years added to his sentence. Gay lives with serious mental illness, and after time in solitary confinement, he began to act out. He was repeatedly charged with battery – often for throwing liquids at staff.  Gay acknowledges he did some of those things but says the prison put him in circumstances that made his mental illness worse – then punished him for the way he acted. With help from Chicago-based lawyers, Gay appealed to the local state’s attorney. What happens when a self-described “law and order” prosecutor has to decide between prison-town politics and doing what he believes the law requires?  Finally, host Al Letson speaks with Ear Hustle co-creator and co-host Earlonne Woods about the power of local prosecutors and the complicated politics of prison towns. This episode is a partnership with the podcast Motive from WBEZ Chicago.  Support Reveal’

Corinne Adams’ son Charlie came home from school  with notes from his teacher saying he was doing great in reading. He seemed to be able to read the little books he was getting at school. But during the pandemic, Corinne had to give him a reading test at home, and she realized her son couldn’t read. He’d been memorizing books that were read to him but he didn’t know how to read new words he’d never seen before. Corinne decided to teach him herself. It’s a surprisingly common story. And kids who aren’t on track by the end of first grade are in danger of never becoming good readers. Two thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient readers. The problem is even worse when you look beyond the average and focus on specific groups of children: 83% of Black fourth graders don’t read proficiently. American Public Media reporter Emily Hanford digs into a flawed theory that has shaped reading instruction  for decades. The theory is that children can learn to read without learning how to sound out w

From Russia to Sweden and the United States, there’s a growing network of White nationalist groups that stretches around the world. The reporting team at Verified: The Next Threat investigates how these militant groups are helping each other create propaganda, recruit new members and share paramilitary skills. We are updating this episode, which first aired in July, to reflect recent activities by the Russian Imperial Movement and other white supremacist groups around the world.  We start with a group called the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM. Its members are taking up arms in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which they say is a battle in a much larger “holy war” for White power. Scripps News senior investigative reporter Mark Greenblatt interviews a leader of the group who says RIM’s goal is to unite White nationalists around the world. The group even runs training camps where White supremacists can learn paramilitary tactics. Russia’s White nationalists are making connections with extremists in the Unite

Dr. Gary Davis, an Ivy League-trained Black physician from Tulsa, Oklahoma, had a literal dream that the cure for AIDS would come from a goat. In the new podcast Serum, a reporting team at WHYY and Local Trance Media delve into the unusual story of a Davis’ quest to develop the cure. At the height of the AIDS epidemic in the early ’90s, Davis derived a serum from goat blood that he believed could help cure HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He brought his research to the FDA to start a clinical trial – but just hours before it was supposed to start, it was shut down. Davis had powerful critics and ardent supporters. Some sued in court to be allowed to try Davis’ treatment, while others chose to ask for forgiveness rather than permission to get their hands on it. What was the true potential of Davis’ serum – and who are the people who say it saved their lives? Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/weekly C

After the Civil War, a new form of slavery took hold in the US and lasted more than 60 years. Associated Press reporters Margie Mason and Robin McDowell investigate the chilling history of how Southern states imprisoned mainly Black men, often for minor crimes, and then leased them out to private companies – for years, even decades, at a time. The team talks with the descendant of a man imprisoned in the Lone Rock stockade in Tennessee nearly 140 years ago, where people as young as 12 worked under inhumane conditions in coal mines and inferno-like ovens used to produce iron. This system of forced prison labor enriched the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad company – at the cost of prisoners’ lives.  At the state park that sits on the former site of the Lone Rock stockade, relics from the hellish prison are buried beneath the soil. Archeologist Camille Westmont has found thousands of artifacts, such as utensils and the plates prisoners ate off. She has also created a database listing the names of those sent

Some of the most enduring photos of the civil rights movement were taken by Ernest Withers. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Withers earned the trust of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. But as it turns out, he was secretly taking photos for the federal government as well. This week, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Wesley Lowery brings us the story of Withers in an adaptation of the podcast “Unfinished: Ernie’s Secret,” from Scripps News and Stitcher. Lowery starts by explaining how Withers earned his reputation as a chronicler of the civil rights movement. We tour a museum of Withers’ photographs with his daughter Roz, who deconstructs his famous “I Am a Man” photo of striking sanitation workers. Civil rights leader Andrew Young explains that without Withers’ photographs, they wouldn’t have had a movement. We then learn that after Withers’ death, a Memphis reporter named Marc Perrusquia followed up on an old lead about the photographer: that he was secretly working for the FBI. Perrusqu

The United States has pledged to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, but Russia’s war in Ukraine set off a bonanza for liquefied natural gas, or LNG. Today, we look at how energy companies and the Biden administration are backsliding on promises to move away from oil and gas.   In response to Europe’s need for natural gas as it lost access to Russian supplies, America’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, Cheniere Energy, is expanding its facilities in Corpus Christi, Texas. Reporter Elizabeth Shogren talks with local residents who are organizing to fight the expansion and discovers that many LNG contracts are not with Europe after all.   During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to end drilling for oil and gas on federal land and offshore waters. And on his first day in office, he froze new drilling leases. But the administration backtracked and instead has increased the number of leases it’s offering to oil and gas companies. Host Al Letson gets a report card on Biden’s climate pol

The bipartisan Congressional committee investigating the January 6th insurrection recommended that former president Donald Trump face criminal charges for sparking the attempted coup. We look back at the case of Guy Reffitt, the first person to be prosecuted for his role in the violent insurrection.  On Jan. 6, 2021, teenager Jackson Reffitt watched the Capitol riot play out on TV from his family home in Texas. His father, Guy, had a much closer view: He was in Washington, armed with a semiautomatic handgun, storming the building.  When Guy Reffitt returned home, Jackson secretly taped him and turned the recordings over to the FBI. His father bragged about what he did, saying: “I had every constitutional right to carry a weapon and take over the Congress.” Guy Reffitt was the first person to stand trial for his role in the riot, and the case has divided his family.  This week, Reveal features the story of the Reffitt family by partnering with the podcast Will Be Wild from Pineapple Street Studios, Wondery

The pandemic isn’t past tense. While COVID-19 vaccines have made it possible to gather with friends and hug loved ones again, the world is still living with the virus – and too many people are still dying because of it. More than a million people in the United States have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, including about 250,000 people in 2022. To reflect on the lives the world has lost, we’re revisiting an episode that follows a young doctor through her first year of medical residency during the height of the pandemic.  Kaiser Health News reporter Jenny Gold spent eight months following Dr. Paloma Marin-Nevarez, who graduated from the Stanford University medical school in June 2020, right before the virus began its second major surge. She was one of more than 30,000 new doctors who started residencies in 2020. Just weeks after graduating, Marin-Nevarez began training as an ER doctor at Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, one of the areas in California hardest hit by the pandemic.  Marin

In 2010, Milique Wagner was arrested for a murder he says he had nothing to do with. The night of the shooting, Wagner was picked up for questioning and spent three days in the Philadelphia Police Department’s homicide unit, mostly being questioned by a detective named Philip Nordo.  Nordo was a rising star in the department, known for putting in long hours and closing cases – he had a hand in convicting more than 100 people. But that day in the homicide unit, Wagner says Nordo asked him some unnerving questions: Would he ever consider doing porn? Guy-on-guy porn?  Wagner would go on to be convicted of the murder in a case largely built by Nordo — and Wagner’s experience has led him to believe Nordo fabricated evidence and coerced false statements to frame him. For years, Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Chris Palmer and Samantha Melamed have dug into Nordo’s career, looking into allegations of his misconduct. In this episode, they follow the rumors to defense attorney Andrew Pappas, who subpoenas the priso

The killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 marked the beginning of a new chapter of the struggle for civil rights in America. A mostly White jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the teen’s murder, in part because Florida’s stand your ground law permits a person to use deadly force in self-defense – even if that person could have safely retreated. Nationwide protests after the trial called for stand your ground laws to be repealed and reformed. But instead, stand your ground laws have expanded to 38 states. Reveal reporter Jonathan Jones talks with Byron Castillo, a maintenance worker in North Carolina who was shot in the chest after mistakenly trying to get into the wrong apartment for a repair. While Castillo wound up out of work and deep in debt, police and prosecutors declined to pursue charges against the shooter, who said he was afraid someone was trying to break into his apartment. Researchers have found that states that enacted stand your ground laws have seen an increase in homicides – one study estimated t