Washington and Lee University will host David Barstow, a senior writer at The New York Times and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, on Oct. 31 at 5:30 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater on the W&L campus.
Barstow joined The New York Times in 1999, and he has been a member of the paper’s investigative unit since 2002. He has recently been in the news for his special investigation article about President Trump in the New York Times titled “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father.” In the article, the Times was able to get the president’s father’s tax records to tell an investigative narrative.
He is also the recipient of numerous awards including three Polk Awards, the Goldsmith Prize, the Alfred I. DuPont Silver Baton, the Barlett and Steele Gold Medal, a Loeb Award, the Sidney Hillman Award, the Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Reporting, two Sigma Delta Chi awards for distinguished service, the Peabody Award and multiple others.
In 2013, he and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for “Walmart Abroad,’’ a series that exposed Walmart’s aggressive use of bribery to fuel its rapid expansion in Mexico. In 2009 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for “Message Machine,’’ his series about the Pentagon’s hidden campaign to influence news coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004 he and Lowell Bergman were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service for articles about employers who committed egregious workplace safety violations that killed or injured hundreds of American workers.
Before joining The New York Times, Barstow was a reporter for The St. Petersburg Times in Florida, where he was a finalist for three Pulitzer Prizes. Before that, he was a reporter at the Rochester Times-Union in New York and the Green Bay Press-Gazette in Wisconsin. Barstow, a native of Concord, Mass., is a graduate of Northwestern University. He was inducted into the Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2015, and he has lectured on the craft of investigative reporting and the importance of a free press in Austria, Australia, India, Ireland, Mexico, Moldova, Russia, South Africa and Switzerland.
In 2016, an article he co-authored was made into the movie “Deepwater Horizon” starring Mark Wahlberg about the final hours aboard the BP oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 crew members and causing the nation’s largest oil spill.
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Chris Graham
