Dave Lindorff is an American

investigative reporter Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years rese ...

, filmmaker, a columnist for ''

CounterPunch ''CounterPunch'' is a left-wing online magazine. Content includes a free section published five days a week as well as a subscriber-only area called CounterPunch+, where original articles are published weekly. ''CounterPunch'' is based in the Un ...

'' and a contributor to '' Tarbell.org,'' ''

The Nation ''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper t ...

,'' ''FAIR'' and ''

Salon.com ''Salon'' is an American politically progressive/ liberal news and opinion website created in 1995. It publishes articles on U.S. politics, culture, and current events. Content and coverage ''Salon'' covers a variety of topics, including re ...

''. His work was highlighted by Project Censored 2004, 2011 and 2012. Born in 1949, Lindorff lives just outside Philadelphia.

Career

Lindorff graduated from

Wesleyan University Wesleyan University ( ) is a private liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831 as a men's college under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the col ...

in 1972 with a BA in Chinese language. He then received an MS in Journalism from the

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is located in Pulitzer Hall on the university's Morningside Heights campus in New York City. Founded in 1912 by Joseph Pulitzer, Columbia Journalism School is one of the oldest journalism ...

in 1975. A two-time

Fulbright Scholar The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people o ...

(Shanghai, 1991–92 and Taiwan, 2004), he was also a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in 1978–79. In 2019, he was a winner of an "Izzy" for "Outstanding Independent Journalism" awarded by the Park Center for Independent Media. The prize, honored his career work as an investigative journalist and especially his December 2018 ''

Nation A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective identity of a group of people understood as defined by th ...

'' magazine cover story, "Exclusive: the Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed," which showed how the Pentagon has been simply making up the numbers in over two decades of annual financial reports submitted to Congress in "support" of ever-higher funding requests for each next year's budgets. He is also founding editor of the collectively run journalism news sit
ThisCantBeHappening!
along with six other journalists: John Grant, Jess Guh, Alfredo Lopez, Ron Ridenour, and Linn Washington, Jr., political cartoonist Dave Kiphuft and resident poet Gary Lindorff. The news site, since its founding in June 2010, has won seven

Project Censored Project Censored is an American nonprofit media watchdog organization. The group's stated mission is to "educate students and the public about the importance of a truly free press for democratic self-government." Project Censored produces an ann ...

awards for its coverage (six of them for Lindorff's articles, the other to Washington for his work), and was labeled a "threat" in a memo ''TCBH!'' obtained through a FOIA filing with the

Department of Homeland Security The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the U.S. federal executive department responsible for public security, roughly comparable to the interior or home ministries of other countries. Its stated missions involve anti-ter ...

, which was sent to all U.S. Fusion Centers warning that ThisCantBeHappeing.net had published a
article by Lindorff exposing the central role played by DHS in orchestrating the nationwide city-by-city violent police crackdown on the Occupy
Movement in late 2011. Lindorff responded b
including on the site's home page Masthead
the phrase: "The only news organization in the US to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security". A former bureau chief covering

Los Angeles County Los Angeles County, officially the County of Los Angeles, and sometimes abbreviated as L.A. County, is the List of the most populous counties in the United States, most populous county in the United States and in the U.S. state of California, ...

government for the ''

Los Angeles Daily News The ''Los Angeles Daily News'' is the second-largest-circulating paid daily newspaper of Los Angeles, California. It is the flagship of the Southern California News Group, a branch of Colorado-based Digital First Media. The offices of the ''D ...

'', and a reporter-producer for

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...

station

KCET KCET (channel 28) is a secondary PBS member television station in Los Angeles, California, United States. It is owned by the Public Media Group of Southern California alongside the market's primary PBS member, Huntington Beach–licensed KOCE ...

in Los Angeles and its Emmy-winning investigative news program "28-Tonight," Lindorff was also a founder and editor of the weekly '' Los Angeles Vanguard'' newspaper (as was TCBH member Ridenour), established in 1976, where he won the Grand Prize of the

Los Angeles Press Club The Los Angeles Press Club is an American journalism organization founded in 1913. It honors journalists through its annual National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and SoCal Journalism Awards. The Board of Directors includes the organi ...

for his reporting as well as an award for Best Article in a Weekly. Lindorff also worked at the ''

Minneapolis Tribune The ''Star Tribune'' is the largest newspaper in Minnesota. It originated as the ''Minneapolis Tribune'' in 1867 and the competing ''Minneapolis Daily Star'' in 1920. During the 1930s and 1940s, Minneapolis's competing newspapers were consoli ...

'', the ''Santa Monica Evening Outlook'' and '' The Middletown Press'' in Connecticut, which was his first professional journalism job. Lindorff wrote an exposé showing how colleges refuse to provide official/sealed transcripts to former students "late in their payments" or "in default", thereby ensuring those students cannot transfer to another school in the U.S. until the initial school is satisfied with its debt collection. Lindorff has called the practice "extortive". He is the author of four books, the most recent being ''The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office'', written with attorney

Barbara Olshansky Barbara Olshansky is an American human rights lawyer. ''The Case for Impeachment'' Olshansky is author with Dave Lindorff of ''The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office''. Olshansky and Lindo ...

of the

Center for Constitutional Rights The Center for Constitutional RightsThe Center for Constitutional Rights
(CCR) is a

, as well as ''Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal''. That work, published in 2003 by Common Courage Press, was reviewed by Steve Weinberg (the son of a cop) in ''

The Philadelphia Inquirer ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'' is a daily newspaper headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The newspaper's circulation is the largest in both the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley metropolitan region of Southeastern Pen ...

'' (a paper that has been no supporter of

Mumia Abu-Jamal Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook; April 24, 1954) is an American political activist and journalist who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. While on death ...

!) who called it: “The most thorough book yet by an author without direct involvement in the murder case.” Another reviewer, M.A. Foley, wrote in ''Choice'' magazine: “The death row case of Mumia Abu-Jamal remains contentious. Lindorff removes much of that contention.... No one can walk away from this book believing that justice has been done, on behalf of either the slain officer or the convicted Abu-Jamal. Summing it up: Highly recommended." ''Crime'' magazine wrote: "New favorite: A groundbreaking review of the case involving Mumia Abu-Jamal, while Charles M. Young, in '' Z-Magazine'', wrote: "A relentless and resourceful reporter ... a vast symphony of facts that establishes a number of compelling themes in search of a grand finale compatible with justice." He is co-producer along with Mark Mitten of '' A Compassionate Spy,''Abele, Robert
"‘A Compassionate Spy’ Film Review: Steve James Doc Examines a WWII Scientist’s Moral Espionage: Venice Film Festival 2022: The ”Hoop Dreams“ director sheds a light on Ted Hall, who shared atomic secrets with the USSR, but places his acts in the context of the USA’s post-war nuclear ambitions,"
''The Wrap'' (September 2, 2022). a feature-length documentary film directed by two-time

Academy Award The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment ind ...

-nominee Steve James, about the youngest physicist on the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...

, 18-year-old Theodore (Ted) Hall, hired at Los Alamos to work on the implosion system for the plutonium bomb used in the

Trinity Test Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert abo ...

on July 16, 1945, and a month later on Nagasaki. The film traces Hall's path from Harvard junior physics major to project scientist and, with the help of a video Hall made a year before his death, at the urging of his British attorney, allows him to explain his reason, nine months after he began working on the bomb project, for volunteering as a Soviet asset at Los Alamos: preventing the US from emerging from World War II with a monopoly on nuclear weapons. As a spy at Los Alamos. Hall, the film shows, gave detailed plans for the plutonium bomb to the Soviets which were critical to Soviet scientists' being able to develop an atom bomb of their own, reportedly a virtual copy of the Nagasaki bomb, by Aug. 29, 1949, something that probably saved the USSR from a planned early-1950s preemptive nuclear blitz with the over 400 atom bombs the US expected to have by that time. The film, which features extensive interviews of Hall's widow Joan, 93 at its first public screening, and their 51 years of marriage with that secret to keep. The film had its premiere at Italy's

Venice Film Festival The Venice Film Festival or Venice International Film Festival ( it, Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia, "International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art of the Venice Biennale") is an annual film festival h ...

on September 2, 2022, where 1000 viewers filling the Lido Hall rose to applaud for five minutes at its conclusion. The US premiere was a day later at the

Telluride Film Festival The Telluride Film Festival (TFF) is a film festival held annually in Telluride, Colorado during Labor Day weekend (the first Monday in September). The 49th edition took place on September 2 -6, 2022. History First held on 30 August 1974, t ...

in Colorado, which offered screenings in four full theaters (two added to accommodate festival-goer demand). Hall is also the subject of a book Lindorff is currently writing, with the working title ''Spy for No Country'', to be published by Prometheus Books in 2023. Lindorff has long been active on journalistic issues and was a founder of the

National Writers Union National Writers Union (NWU), founded on 19 November 1981, is the trade union in the United States for freelance and contract writers: journalists, book and short fiction authors, business and technical writers, web content providers and poets. ...

in 1983, serving for many years in leadership positions in that union, both as a fledgling national organization, as part of the steering committee of the New Your City local, and years later as part of the steering committee of the Philadelphia local. He was also active in the

Hong Kong Journalists Association The Hong Kong Journalists Association ( Chinese: 香港記者協會) is a Hong Kong association that represents journalists in Hong Kong. Established in 1968, the association acts as a trade union for journalists by seeking to improve work ...

during his five years in Hong Kong, when he was a correspondent for ''

Business Week ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...

'' magazine.

Books

* ''Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains'', Bantam, 1992, * ''Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal'', Common Courage, 2003, * ''This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy'', Common Courage, 2005, * ''The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office'' (with Barbara Olshansky), Thomas Dunne, 2006,

Articles

* "Brothers against the Bureau: Ted Hall, the Soviet Union's youngest atomic spy, his rocket scientist brother Ed, and the untold story of how

J. Edgar Hoover John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation ...

's biggest

bust was shut down", ''

'', vol. 314, no. 1 (January 10–17, 2022), pp. 26–31. * "Coastal Landfills are No Match for Rising Seas," ''

'', August 9–16,2001 * "Exposed: The Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed," ''

''. Cover story on January 7, 2019

References

External links

ThisCantBeHappening!
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lindorff, Dave 1949 births American investigative journalists American male non-fiction writers American political writers Wesleyan University alumni Knight-Bagehot Fellows Living people People from Connecticut