New York Times reporter Stephen Labaton, who co-wrote the first controversial reports about presidential candidate John McCain's relationship to a female lobbyist, will discuss the increasingly important role of the Internet and investigative reporting in political campaigns during a talk March 17 at Duke University.
His talk, "The New York Times and John McCain: a Reporter's Perspective," will begin at 6:30 p.m. in Fleishman Commons at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. The public is invited to attend. Labaton is this year's winner of the Futrell Award for Excellence in Communications and Journalism, given by the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke.
Labaton plans to discuss the recent McCain/lobbyist story as an example of the impact of the Internet on investigative reporting. Labaton was brought into the investigation in November 2007 because of his expertise on lobbying and telecommunication issues and his previous reporting on McCain's ties to lobbyists during the 2000 campaign.
Labaton has written extensively about the impact on worker and consumer safety of the Bush administration's sweeping deregulation of industry. He won the 2003 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism for his coverage of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which prompted chairman Harvey Pitt's resignation.
"The Internet has changed how we work," Labaton said. "It's now much harder to investigate a story without spreading rumors or tipping off the competition."
During the 1990s, while working on the story of Hillary Clinton's commodities trading, "I spent six weeks knocking on doors in Arkansas and no one else published a word," he said. "Now, there's a remarkable immediacy to the work. Within hours after I spoke with McCain's lawyers, both the CBS News and Washington Post websites had posts that the lawyers were preparing their answers for us."
Labaton will discuss how the Times' handling of the McCain story became part of the story and the newspaper's reaction to that development. In the days following the publication, the paper received more than 2,000 reader comments, many critical of the article.
A graduate of Duke, Labaton joined the New York Times in 1986 and became a legal affairs correspondent in New York in 1987. In 1990, he moved to the paper's Washington bureau, where he covered financial and legal affairs, and worked on campaign finance stories during the national elections.
The Futrell Award is granted each year to a Duke graduate for outstanding achievement in communications and journalism. Created in honor of Ashley B. Futrell Sr., publisher of the Washington, N.C., Daily News, the award is administered by the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. Previous winners include talk-show host Charlie Rose and Capitol Broadcasting President and CEO James Goodmon.