International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Florence George Graves, United States, is founding director of The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, which includes the Justice Brandeis Innocence Project. The Institute, which focuses on social and political justice and human rights issues, is the first independent investigative reporting center based at a university and one of the new nonprofit reporting models.

Florence George Graves, United States

Graves’ work, which centers on revealing abuses of government and corporate power and inequities between the powerful and the powerless, has led to congressional hearings and to reforms in public policies. The Institute has collaborated with many major news organizations, including The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, PBS NOW, The Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, and SLATE. In a1992 collaboration with The Washington Post, Graves and a colleague broke the Senator Bob Packwood sexual misconduct story, which lead to an historic three-year Senate investigation, a Supreme Court battle, a Senate Ethics Committee unanimous vote to expel Packwood, and finally his forced resignation. In 2006, Graves again collaborated with The Washington Post on a front-page story revealing the lack of Federal Aviation Agency oversight regarding unsafe manufacturing practices and thousands of questionable parts installed in Boeing jets.

She founded the Washington, D.C. based award-winning and nationally circulated muckraking political journal, Common Cause Magazine, then the largest political magazine in the U.S. and the only one at that time focused on groundbreaking watchdog reporting on Washington. Graves has received numerous major honors, including fellowships from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, Harvard’s Radcliffe Public Policy Institute, Loyola Law School, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation, and grant awards from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Her work has earned a number of national awards including the National Magazine Award for General Excellence and several Investigative Reporters and Editors awards.