Veteran foreign correspondent Douglas Birch is joining the Center for Public Integrity’s national security reporting team. Birch has reported from more than 20 countries, covered four wars, a dozen elections, the death of a pope and the hunt for a malaria vaccine. He formerly served as the Moscow bureau chief for the Associated Press and spent 22 years at the Baltimore Sun.
“I can’t think of another journalist better than Doug Birch to help the Center dig into nuclear and proliferation dangers, investigate fraud and abuse in military spending, and explain how Capitol Hill makes defense-spending decisions,” said Executive Director William E. Buzenberg. “He’s an excellent addition to our already strong reporting team, led by National Security Managing Editor R. Jeffrey Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter.”
Birch was the AP’s diplomatic and military editor in Washington, following his work in Moscow from 2001 to 2005 and from 2007 to 2010. At the Baltimore Sun, he was an enterprise, feature and science writer. Birch was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002 for his series on the abuse of human subjects in drug trials. A graduate of Columbia University and its graduate journalism school, he was also a Knight science journalism fellow at MIT.
Birch lives in Baltimore with his wife, Jane, who works for a Baltimore charitable foundation. His daughter Alison is an architect living in Charleston, S.C. He begins at the Center on Jan. 22nd.
The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan and independent news organization specializing in investigative journalism on significant public policy issues. Since 1990, the Washington, D.C.-based Center has released more than 500 investigative reports and 17 books to provide greater transparency and accountability of government and other institutions.