Steele, James B. 1943–

views updated

Steele, James B. 1943–

(James Bruce Steele, Jr.)

PERSONAL: Born January 3, 1943, in Hutchinson, KS; son of James Bruce and Mary (Peoples) Steele; married Nancy Saunders, June 25, 1966; children: Allison. Education: University of Missouri at Kansas City, B.A., 1967.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o Time, Inc., Room 45-54, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Writer, biographer, and journalist. Kansas City Times, Kansas City, MO, copy boy, 1962, reporter, 1962–67; Laborers' International Union of North America, Washington, DC, director of information, 1968–70; Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, PA, investigative reporter, 1970–97; Time, Inc., New York City, editor-at-large, 1997–. Has appeared on numerous television talk shows, including Good Morning America, Today Show, and Larry King Live.

AWARDS, HONORS: (All with Donald L. Barlett) American Political Science Association award for distinguished reporting of public affairs, 1971, for a series on abandoned housing; George Polk Memorial awards for metropolitan reporting, Long Island University, 1971, 1973, 1991, 1999, 2000, and 2001; Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service in Journalism award, 1971, for newspaper series on the Federal Housing Authority, and 2001, for investigative reporting on Native American gaming and casinos; Heywood Broun Award for public interest reporting, and Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, both 1973, both for newspaper series "Crime and Injustice"; American Bar Association Gavel Award, John Hancock Award for business reporting, and Business Journalism award from the University of Missouri at Columbia, all 1973, all for newspaper series "Oil: The Created Crisis"; Pulitzer prizes for national reporting, 1975, for newspaper series "Auditing the IRS," and 1989, for work on the Tax Reform Act of 1986; Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism, University of Missouri, 1983; George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, National Council of Teachers of English, 1988 and 1992; inclusion among the top hundred works of American journalism, New York University, 1999, for America: What Went Wrong?; Goldmith Prize for investigative reporting, Harvard University, 2000, for series "What Corporate Welfare Costs"; recipient of two National Magazine Awards for magazine work.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION; WITH DONALD L. BARLETT

Oil: The Created Crisis (pamphlet), Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), 1973.

Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes, Norton (New York, NY), 1979.

Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America, Norton (New York, NY), 1985.

America: What Went Wrong?, Andrews & McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 1992.

America: Who Really Pays the Taxes?, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1994.

America: Who Stole the Dream?, Andrews & McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 1996.

The Great American Tax Dodge: How Spiraling Fraud and Avoidance Are Killing Fairness, Destroying the Income Tax, and Costing You, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2000.

Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business—and Bad Medicine, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2004.

Howard Hughes: His Life & Madness, Norton (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including New Republic and Nation.

SIDELIGHTS: As one half of what James H. Dygert described in his book The Investigative Journalist as "perhaps the most systematic and thorough investigative reporting team in the U.S. today," James B. Steele is well known for his work with fellow journalist Donald L. Barlett. Since teaming up in 1970, the pair has uncovered fraud in the Federal Housing Administration's (FHA) subsidy program for rehabilitating and selling slum houses; disclosed inequities in Philadelphia's criminal courts; and, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles, demonstrated that the Internal Revenue Service enforces tax laws more stringently on middle-income and poor taxpayers than on the wealthy. Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winners Barlett and Steele remained at the Philadelphia Inquirer for almost three decades before assuming positions as editors-at-large at Time magazine.

Prior to collaborating with Barlett at the Inquirer, Steele worked as a reporter for Missouri's Kansas City Times and then as an information director of a labor union in Washington, DC. These jobs taught him the skills needed by investigative journalists. According to Leonard Downie, Jr. in The New Muckrakers, at the Kansas City daily Steele was, in his own words, "schooled in the use of records to verify facts for stories like obituaries [and] taught respect for facts and shown how they could be found in records of all kinds." Lessons from this early training were reinforced during his tenure in Washington, DC, where, according to Downie, "he learned in detail just where information could be found in the federal bureaucracy."

The two men began working at the Phildelphia Inquirer on the same day in 1970, and since their first joint assignment (documenting abuses in the FHA subsidy program) reliance on the facts has been their trademark. They are among a "new breed of muckraker," contended Downie, who relies on the public record for evidence rather than solely on stories from informants. According to Steele: "The challenge is to gather, marshal, and organize vast amounts of data already in the public domain and see what it adds up to." He insists that investigative reporters must be systematic and review their assumptions as they go; they must constantly evaluate the evidence they turn up and determine if it is adequate to prove their thesis.

Overall, Steele takes satisfaction, he told Downie, in "spending months on a subject and having it all come together at the end…. No matter how much you know, there is always more to find out." One of his favorite projects was investigating billionaire Howard Hughes's dealings with the U.S. government. After months of reviewing contracts, trial records, partnership agreements, financial statements, and other materials, Barlett and Steele had amassed ten thousand pages of notes and documents. They published their initial findings in a series of articles for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975, but when more material became available after Hughes's death, the reporters took the opportunity to collaborate on their first book, Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes. It is "the best big business-big government biography of 1979, maybe of the decade," declared a Washington Post Book World reviewer, while a critic for the New York Times Book Review opined: "Of all the books written about Howard Hughes, Empire is easily the best…. From the mountain of subpoenaed files and depositions, and from interviews, the authors have assembled the first fully documented, cradle-to-grave account of a unique American life."

Steele and Barlett also received praise for their 1985 work Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America. Evolving from a 1983 investigative series for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the book covers failed attempts to safely store nuclear waste. According to Victor Gilinsky's critique in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "the authors have dug up interesting material" for their "important" story.

In the 1990s, Barlett and Steele published their "America" series: America: What Went Wrong?, America: Who Really Pays the Taxes?, and America: Who Stole the Dream? America: What Went Wrong? investigates the increasing hardships faced by America's middle class—hardships caused, according to Barlett and Steele, by the advantages given to the upper class. Originally published as a series in the Philadelphia Inquirer (a series that generated the largest response to a story in the paper's history), the work, which garnered the duo the first of several George Polk Awards for economic reporting, was published in an expanded form in the "America" trilogy.

Many critics joined the reading public in its enthusiastic response to the "America trilogy." "Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele don't patronize readers by oversimplifying these matters," remarked James D. Atwater in a New York Times Book Review critique of America: What Went Wrong? "The good news is," Atwater concluded, "that Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele have incisively and vividly defined the problem facing the nation, and proved again that there is an audience for a message that cannot be captured by sound bite, a photo opportunity, or even a bumper sticker."

America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? and America: Who Stole the Dream? were also well received upon their release in the mid-1990s, though some disagreed with the authors' proffered solution to the problem of tax inequity. Reviewing the former book, a Publishers Weekly critic called it "a dream for those who've never quite grasped what government, corporations, and the wealthiest few are doing—and a nightmare for those who have and want to keep that knowledge to themselves." Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, called the work "superb investigative journalism." Andy Apathy, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, faulted America: Who Stole the Dream? for failing to include a discussion of the role U.S. military involvement plays in developing countries for the benefit of multinationals and also for "failing to point out our own complicity." Apathy pointed to the relationship between the "'good buys' we demand as consumers and the 'goodbyes' we fear as employees."

While most critical reaction to their "America" series was positive, negative response came from several in the journalism world, who viewed Steele and Barlett's factoid-based analysis with suspicion. Charges were made that the pair started with a hypothesis, and then sifted among the relevant facts for those supporting their position. Defending what he terms the pair's "expert journalism" technique, Columbia Journalism Review essayist Steve Weinberg commented: "Have their critics analyzed seventy years of income tax data, as Barlett and Steele did? Have they visited factories in dozens of states, documenting the broken careers and families of thousands of workers? Have they read corporate filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission from every business [they mention in their books]? Such research does not guarantee truth, but it certainly gives a reporter the authority to challenge conventional wisdom."

In 2000 Steele and Barlett published The Great American Tax Dodge: How Spiraling Fraud and Avoidance Are Killing Fairness, Destroying the Income Tax, and Costing You. The work focuses on widespread tax fraud and the complicity of the government in taxation inequity between the rich and the middle and lower classes. This work was also well received by critics. Library Journal reviewer Patrick J. Brunet called the work a "responsible and well-argued effort on a topic of great civic importance." A Publishers Weekly critic concurred, concluding of The Great American Tax Dodge: "This important, incendiary book may spark a national debate."

Steele and Barlett confront another topic of significant national interest in Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business—and Bad Medicine. In what Reviewer's Bookwatch contributor Norman Goldman called a "riveting expose of the critical state of the health system in the United States," Steele and Barlett carefully chart how U.S. health care degenerated from a system based on compassion and caring to one fueled primarily by profit. They describe how "health care in modern America has become a racket: A few profit handsomely while doing the rest of us significant harm," observed Scott Duke Harris in Mother Jones. Steele and Barlett present an assortment of alarming statistics. For example, the United States spends a greater percentage of its gross domestic product on health care than Canada, Japan, Germany, France, and other developed nations spend to cover every citizen in the country. They point out that tens of millions of Americans are dramatically underinsured for their health care needs, and that more than forty-four million Americans do not have any health insurance at all. In six chapters, they also "deliver legitimate arguments illustrating how an assortment of factors have crawled into the system with calamitous effects," noted Goldman. These include gross overcharging of uninsured patients (hospitals routinely charge uninsured patients five to ten times more for the same services than they charge insured patients, the authors report); offering disingenuous or outright false reasons for patients to not buy their drugs from Canada or countries where they are dramatically cheaper; allowing politics and business concerns to overshadow basic health care needs; perpetuating systems of favors and cronyism that often lead to fraud; and more. Steele and Barlett do not simply present criticism, however; they also offer suggestions for repairing the deeply damaged health care system. They suggest the creation of a taxpayer-supported, board-governed independent agency that would set U.S. health policy and ensure that medical care was available to everyone in America. Providing health care to all, Goldman noted, is "something most civilized nations do."

Steele has joined Barlett in attributing much of his success to the support he received from the Philadelphia Inquirer. There the two men were free to investigate whatever subject seemed pertinent to them, had open-ended work schedules, could travel if necessary, and had access to computers and other resources. In addition, the paper never killed one of their stories under pressure, even when it meant losing advertisements. This being the case, Downie reported that Steele claims not to tire of his work. Regarding the future, Steele has said: "There are always more records and more in them to find out…. The work is never done."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Downie, Leonard, Jr., The New Muckrakers, New Republic (New York, NY), 1976.

Dygert, James H., The Investigative Journalist, Prentice-Hall (New York, NY), 1976.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 1994, Ray Olson, review of America: Who Really Pays the Taxes?, p. 1138.

Columbia Journalism Review, January-February, 1997, Steve Weinberg, "In Defense of 'Expert Journalism,'" p., 18.

Library Journal, July, 2000, Patrick J. Brunet, review of The Great American Tax Dodge: How Spiraling Fraud and Avoidance Are Killing Fairness, Destroying the Income Tax, and Costing You, p. 111.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 24, 1985, Victor Gilinsky, review of Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America.

Mother Jones, November-December, 2004, Scott Duke Harris, review of Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business—and Bad Medicine, p. 93.

National Catholic Reporter, February 7, 1997, Andy Apathy, review of America: Who Stole the Dream?, p. 34.

New York Times Book Review, March 22, 1981, review of Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes, p. 35; April 5, 1992, James D. Atwater, review of America: What Went Wrong?, p. 9.

Publishers Weekly, February 21, 1994, review of America: Who Really Pays the Taxes?, p. 247.

Reviewer's Bookwatch, December, 2004, Norman Goldman, review of Critical Condition.

Washington Post Book World, December 2, 1979, review of Empire.