If you fill out the "Forgot Password" form but don't get an email to reset your password within 5-10 minutes, please email logistics@ire.org for assistance.
As part of IRE's 50th anniversary and spring member drive, we’re sharing some of the biggest moments in investigative journalism since 1975.
(April 8, 2025) — By the time Donald Barlett and James B. Steele published their landmark series on wealth inequality in 1991, they had already worked on a groundbreaking data project with Phil Meyer and won two Pulitzer Prizes for their investigative reporting.
But their nine-part Philadelphia Inquirer series “America: What went wrong?” was unique in that it captured — and questioned — the drastic transformation of an entire nation in real time. Barlett and Steele dug into how corporate greed and political deal-making over decades were contributing to the decline of America’s middle class.
They spoke about the series at the 1992 National Press Club luncheon.
During their remarks, Barlett noted that their colossal work started with a simple question: “What happened to the American worker?”
So, in 1989 and 1990, they traveled across the country and captured stories from a swath of middle-class Americans. A saw mill worker in Martell, California. A department store clerk in Charleston, West Virginia. A meat processing plant worker in Delia, Missouri. A middle-level manufacturing plant manager in Niles, Michigan. And on and on and on — until they noticed a pattern.
“We saw something we had never seen before in all the years in this business,” Barlett said. “The interviews were identical.”
Across the country, regardless of race, economic status, or college education, people were being increasingly forced to work lower-paying jobs, or losing their jobs altogether. They were losing health care benefits and pensions, or paying more for healthcare.
Digging into statistics helped them prove a story Americans are all too familiar with today: the country’s growing wealth gap and the shrinking middle class.
In those 1992 remarks, Steele goes on to note why the series struck a chord with readers across the country:
“It did so by using techniques and processes of journalism that supposedly nobody wants to read anymore,” Steele said. “This thing was long. 73,000 words in the original form. … It was filled with numbers. It dealt with the economy. Taxation. Fiscal policy. The federal deficit. All of these things that supposedly we hear over and over again that readers don't want to read about.”
“We believe people are capable of absorbing numbers, information of that sort,” Steele said. “But you can't just spew it out. You have to put it in some kind of a context.”
Monika Bauerlein, Chief Executive Officer of Mother Jones, reflected on the duo’s impact after the death of Barlett last year.
“When I started in journalism, smack in the middle of that early-’90s recession … Reporters exposed illegal acts, not ones that were merely unfair or inequitable,” Bauerlein wrote. “That’s what made Barlett and Steele’s reporting so unique, and so powerful. What happened to incomes in America was wrong, it was right there in the book title.
Not because it broke any laws (the point was that it was all perfectly legal!) but because it was unfair. Seeing that journalism could do that — could expose not just lawbreaking, but systemic injustice — was an aha moment for cub reporter me.”
Since the project, the duo went on to work together for more than 40 years. They also expanded on their original reporting, publishing another series with the Investigative Reporting Workshop in 2012 and an updated book, “America: What Went Wrong? The Crisis Deepens” in 2020.
After the 2012 series, they shared the following advice to journalists in an IRE contest entry:
“Try to take a long view of economic currents — not just what the latest quarterly data may show. Politicians, bureaucrats, corporate officials and special interests constantly misstate or gloss over complex issues, such as trade and taxes, by highlighting numbers that appear to support their position, when the data over the long term may give an entirely different picture. So go to the specific public documents to chart these trends for yourself. And always listen closely to people — what they see, hear or believe about the state of the economy. Quite often they have a better view of what’s going on than economists.”
The duo shared more tips for putting together an investigation at the 2009 IRE Conference in Baltimore. Listen to a recording of the session: Building the story: From getting started to knowing when to stop.
This recording has been made publicly available from the IRE Resource Center, which is home to thousands of journalism tipsheets, stories, audio recordings and other resources to help enhance your reporting. The Resource Center is available for free to IRE members, and it's just one of our many member benefits!
Learn more and join IRE today.
Looks like you haven't made a choice yet.
