Jason Leopold

Jason Leopold is an investigative reporter who currently works as a senior editor and reporter for Truthout.org, and is also the author of the 2006 Los Angeles Times bestselling memoir News Junkie. He began his journalistic career in 1992, writing obituaries for The Reporter Dispatch newspaper in White Plains. He became the crime and courts reporter for the Whittier Daily News in 1997 and then moved onto City News Service where he covered court trials. Following City News, Leopold spent six months working as a stringer for the Los Angeles Times Orange County edition and was then tapped to help the paper launch Our Times, a regional supplement to the Los Angeles Times, Leopold spent two years covering California’s electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. A Factiva search shows that Leopold has written more than 350 wire-service dispatches and investigative stories on the issue. He also was the first to report that energy companies were engaged in manipulative practices in California’s newly deregulated electricity market. Mr. Leopold has also reported extensively on Enron. He was one of the first small group of journalists to interview former Enron President Jeffrey Skilling following Enron’s bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Before working at Truthout he was a freelance investigative reporter covering foreign and domestic policy. In the summer of 2002 he was West Coast editor of Footwear News.

Mr. Leopold has broken numerous stories on the financial machinations Enron engaged in and his investigative pieces on the company have been published in The Nation, Salon.com, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal The San Francisco Chronicle, CBS Marketwatch, Entrepreneur, Utne Reader and other publications. Mr. Leopold was also a contributor to CNBC and National Public Radio and had also been the keynote speaker at more than two-dozen energy industry conferences around the country. Mr. Leopold has been writing about foreign and domestic policy online for publications such as Alternet, CounterPunch, Common Dreams, ZNet, Z magazine, The Raw Story, Counterbias, Scoop and Truthout.org.

Awards

Leopold received a Project Censored award in September 2006 for a story he wrote on Halliburton in 2005 that received little attention from the mainstream media [1] That story was the number two most underreported story in Project Censored Top 25 list of underreported stories for 2005. Leopold also won a Project Censored award in 2004 for a story he wrote about a secret meeting Arnold Schwarzenegger's had with Ken Lay prior to the film star's tenure as Governor of California. In 2001, Leopold's former employer, Dow Jones Newswires, named Leopold Journalist of the Year for his groundbreaking work on the California energy crisis.

Controversies

During a heated exchange with a reporter in the newsroom of the Los Angeles Times over deadline, according to his book News Junkie, Leopold threatened to "rip a reporter's head off" and was fired because of the paper's zero tolerance policy against violence and threats of violence. Despite claims that Dow Jones was about to fire him, Leopold left the paper to start writing a book on the California energy crisis, according to News Junkie, and memos from his editor's wishing him luck that was included in his book.

In his 15 year career, Leopold's detractors have zeroed in on three controversial pieces of investigative journalism in the hundreds of stories in his body of work in an attempt to discredit him, most notably, his article on Karl Rove's indictment.

Salon.com article

In 2002, Salon.com retracted an article by Leopold which had implicated Bush administration official Thomas White in the Enron scandal; the editors of Salon.com said that it could not authenticate an email that said White was aware of the financial machinations of the division he ran. They also noted that several paragraphs of the article, amounting to 480 words, were verbatim copies of material that had appeared in Leopold's 5,000 word story. Although Leopold did provide attribution to the FT article Salon maintained he did not provide the paper with enough attribution. [2] [3]

"News Junkie"

Prior to writing News Junkie, Leopold's book was titled Off the Record. The book's release was cancelled following reported legal threats from Steven Maviglio, the press secretary to former Governor Gray Davis, who Leopold wrote invested in energy companies possibly using insider information. [4] When Leopold found a new publisher for his book, with the new title News Junkie, Maviglio dropped his legal threats because of the overwhelming number of documents used in News Junkie to support the allegation. Maviglio is featured prominently in the first chapter of News Junkie. Moreover, Leopold revealed many secrets of his life as a journalist such as a prior drug addiction, bouts with mental illness and suicide attempts, breaking journalistic rules, and lying to employers about a criminal conviction that took place when Leopold was in his 20s and working in the record business. (Leopold was convicted in 1996 for grand larceny). [5]

Karl Rove indictment

May 13, 2006, Mr. Leopold reported on the website Truthout.org that Karl Rove had been indicted. [6] The story spread quickly throughout the The investigation closed with no indictment of Mr. Rove.

Bibliography

• News Junkie, 2006 (ISBN 0-9760822-4-1). The film and television rights to the book "News Junkie" have been optioned by entertainment investors Josh C. Kline and Mattthew Gorelik.

External links

• www.jasonleopold.com