Ask The Post

This Week: Larry Roberts , deputy assistant managing editor for investigations, was  online Wednesday, June 21 at Noon ET to field your questions about The Post's investigative reporting.

The transcript follows.

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Larry Roberts: Hello and welcome to the chat. Our investigative unit is a group of reporters and editors assigned full-time to longer-term projects and investigations on local, national and international topics. Of course, investigative reporting also takes place regularly on other staffs of the newspaper, including National, Business, Metro and the sunday magazine. I look forward to your questions and comments.

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Rockville, Md: Mr. Roberts: Congratulations on the four Pulitzer prizes earned by the Post this year, including a couple for important investigative work. My question is, do you think all the economic pressures on newspapers will allow such work to continue? Or will even papers like yours feel compelled to spend their dwindling resources on fast-food journalism?

Larry Roberts: Hello Rockville and thanks. This is indeed a challenging economic time for newspapers. The things that pay for our journalism, like classified ads and retail advertising, are increasingly migrating online. But so are we, and it's our fervent hope and belief that our watchdog function will continue no matter how the delivery system evolves. Papers like The Post or the NY Times will never morph into celebrity news tabloids, online or offline.

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San Francisco, Cali: Good morning, Mr. Roberts, and thanks for taking my question. What is happening with the investigation into "Watergategate," the juicy story about defense contractors hosting card games with hookers for CIA agents and GOP Congressmen at the Watergate Hotel? Please say this story isn't old news!

Larry Roberts: Hi, San Fran. Catchy name for a scandal, Watergategate. By no means is it old news. There's an ongoing federal and congressional investigation, which stems from the bribery case against former congressman Duke Cunningham. Just last week new questions arose about how the Department of Homeland Security awarded a lucrative contract to a limo company that allegedly transported escorts for Cunningham and possibly other officials. Stay tuned.

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Providence, RI: How do you decide which stories to cover nd which not to? Undoubtedly, you are presented with many more leads of scandals, corruption, and violations of public trust than you can possibly investigate. How do you decide where to expend your investigative resources? For example, how did you decide that the Jack Abramoff story (for which you won a Pulitzer Prize last year) was worth covering before you knew where it would lead? Could a reasonable editorial decision at the outset have been to pass on that story when presented with the early accustions and evidence (or lack thereof)?

Larry Roberts: Smart question, Providence. We do in fact get many more leads than we can follow. We base our judgments on what has the best chance of producing revelations that are important for our readers to know. Abuse of power and matters of critical public policy probably top the list. The Abramoff scandal seems like a no-brainer in retrospect, but in its early stages the scope and details were quite murky and, yes, they could have been overlooked if not for the efforts of our excellent reporters.

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Anonymous: I'm confused about your role and title, do you investigate the Post? or the rest of the world? Are you the Bradlee/Bernstein/Woodward of today, and if so where have you been during this Bush administration - the Iraq WMD, administration of Post-invasion Iraq, Katrina, the Corp of Engineers, etc.? I'm not being mean, I just think we read and hear sound bites and slogans and we haven't had enough investigative journalism of this Administration. I read so many Post reporters on the Post blog say, the American people supported the war and didn't want to hear/read the negative reporting? Since when was that a deciding factor about whether to pursue a story or not?

Larry Roberts: Where have we been? On WMD I encourage you to go back and read articles by Bart Gellman, Walter Pincus, Joby Warrick. On post-invasion Iraq, read Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Anthony Shadid, Ariana Cha, among others. On Katrina and the Corps, look for articles by Michael Grunwald and Susan Glasser, among others. I don't mind constructive criticism but please do your homework first.

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Bethesda, Md: I imagine one of the key ingredients to investigative reporting is the ability to keep a low profile and work "silently, behind the scenes". If so, I congratulate you on your efforts. Aside from Dana Priest's sporadic slip-ups (those CIA prison scoops) I can assure you that very few Post readers have even suspected the newspaper has -had- an investigative reporting unit since the current Administration entered office. So keep your heads down, and keep up the "stealth" work. See you again in a few years.

Larry Roberts: An impressively sarcastic version of the above question. See my above answer.

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Brighton Mich: The predominant organizational bias of the Wash. Post towards the Dem Party is backed by statistics and evident each day in the selective nature and political slant contained .

Is there any effort to achieve a more balanced perspective or will the general populas be forced to increasingly choose which bias source to read per party affiliation or for many , a combination of sources both L and R bias to read to obtain truth and complete factual information .

best regards

Larry Roberts: Here's a point of view from the other side, which thinks the Post is too hard on the Republicans. I fear that the proliferation of opinion blogs and opinion cable "news" has made it harder for many people to see the truth -- which is that the news pages of good newspapers remain committed to objectivity and fairness. Despite our imperfections, we usually achieve it.

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Arlington, Va: I was absolutely awed by the work that went into the Abramoff story but am wondering why there doesn't appear to be a follow-up on Grover Norquist who, according to the series, seemed to have laundered $600,000 and took $100,000 of the top for his trouble. He is still working DC as an ardent anti-tax advocate without people mentioning his buck shifting sideline.

Larry Roberts: The Abramoff scandal hasn't been played out yet. The federal investigation is continuing, as is ours, and I'm sure you'll see further coverage in a number of areas.

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Arlington, Va.: Bethesda and Anonymous raise an important point. I think most readers know that you are doing some investigative reporting, but the balance has definitely shifted from previous administrations. This is particularly clear regarding the Iraq war, and I fear that journalists are subtly intimidated by those in power. This could be an explanation for a phenomenon many moderates as well as liberals observe frequently in these chats.

Larry Roberts: Look, there are always things we wish we could have done better. For example, we and the rest of the press wish we'd be more effective at penetrating the pre-war intelligence prior to the invasion of Iraq. But it would be a mistake to believe that intimidation by those in power is the cause. That usually has the opposite effect on journalists. Our obstacles are almost always time, resources and the difficulty of getting reliable sources on sensitive subjects.

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Franconia, NH: In responding to "Anonymous" why did you fail to mention the Abramoff stories that the Post did last year? The Pulitzer committee thought that was pretty good investigative reporting.

Larry Roberts: Yes, thanks, the Abramoff articles have led to multiple guilty pleas and indictments, including the conviction yesterday of a White House official, as well as a Pulitzer.

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Arizona Bay, Ariz: By cable "news" shows you don't happen to mean programs like The O'Reilly Factor or HANNITY & colmes do you? Those 2 programs are what any and every news organization should set their sites on being.

Larry Roberts: Another point of view.

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Alexandria, Va: Hi Mr. Roberts,

If there is a scandal that is brought to your attention, but you already have a specific department that handles it, ie, sports. How do you decide if it is a sports story handled by the sports department or an investigation handled by your department?

Larry Roberts: We work closely with other departments, so in the example you mention it wouldn't be at all unusual for us to pair a sports reporter with one of our investigators. That allows the paper to take advantage of one reporter's deep knowledge of a subject and another's deep investigative skills.

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Orange, Va: Have y'all ever commited a substantial amount of a resources to a specific investigation and then backed off on printing anything having discovered there was nothing really newsworthy on that particular issue.

Larry Roberts: Not all tips lead to real stories. So it happens, yes, but usually the reporter and editor realize early on that the investigation isn't going to produce news.

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Reston, Va: Larry,

If I learned one thing from my college journalism course, it's that a journalist's most vital assest is his ability to gather information quickly and accurately. Can you offer any practical advice on how one can sharpen his/her perception and observational instincts?

Larry Roberts: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice.

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Connecticut: You bring up the issue of blogs...Has the Post (or the industry in general) thought of ways to differentiate professional journalism?

Personally, I think there is a role for both, but I also think it is important for readers to differentiate what/who they are reading, evaluate the arguments, identify the sources.

Even from reputible new magazines, I have found a need to differentiate the quality of the on-line articles and the publication-quality articles. Given the volume of editorial mistakes in the former, one has to question the quality of the article.

Larry Roberts: Excellent points, and you raise one of the more vexing questions facing journalism at the moment. First, almost all blogs are opinion or agenda-based, so there's a danger that readers will come to see all of them -- even those produced by organizations with traditional news standards --as biased. Second, while I don't think newspapers or magazines should change their standards for news appearing online, their non-news blogs already are looser than what appears in print. I don't think we've yet come up with a way to differentiate ourselves from the larger blogosphere while also preserving our traditional journalistic values.

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Princeton, NJ: The Post doesn't appear to do many economic investigations. For example

1. The Marriage Tax Penalty Fraud

2. The farms lost to estate tax fraud. In fact there are a bunch here-"double taxation," small businesses, etc.

3. The stupid assumptions made by the SSA in its 75 year Social Security projections, e.g. 1.78% average growth

4. And most importantly, the vast superiority of a single payor health care system over our present one.

Larry Roberts: These are good suggestions. Our National and Business staffs do excellent daily and enterprise coverage of these issues. But you're probably right that there's room for some deeper investigations, too.

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Larry Roberts: We're out of time. A lot of great questions today, sorry I couldn't get to them all. Hope to see some of you next time.

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