Reveal

This month, atrocities in Ukraine have triggered new allegations of war crimes. While people around the world call for accountability, we look into why those who are suspected of committing war crimes in the past often walk free. Reporter and host Ike Sriskandarajah spent the past six months investigating the U.S. government's failure to charge accused perpetrators of the worst crimes in the world...

Up and down the West Coast, cities are struggling with homelessness. Here's a hidden side: arrests. In Portland, Oregon, unhoused people made up at most 2% of the population in recent years, but over the same time, they accounted for nearly half of all arrests. Cities have long turned to police as the answer to make homelessness disappear. But arrests often lead back to the streets – or worse.  Re...

In 2021, the Biden administration approved $4 billion in loan forgiveness for Black farmers and other farmers of color, as part of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. The aid was supposed to make up for decades of discrimination. However, White farmers have sued, and that aid has yet to be paid out as the issue makes it way through the courts.  Eddie Wise is one farmer who claimed to face d...

More than a year after the 2020 election, roughly a third of Americans continue to believe, without evidence, that the results of the election were illegitimate. And now, GOP candidates are tapping into the “Big Lie,” campaigning for office on the promise to change how future elections are run. We zero in on Michigan, a key swing state where Republicans are aiming to shape the future of elections....

Bitcoin is a novel form of currency that bypasses banks, credit card companies and governments. But as Reveal’s Elizabeth Shogren reports, the process of creating bitcoin is extremely energy intensive, and it’s setting back efforts to address climate change. Already, bitcoin has used enough power to erase all the energy savings from electric cars, according to one study. Still, towns across the Un...

For decades, Doctors Without Borders has been admired for bringing desperately needed medical care to crises around the globe and pioneering modern-day humanitarian aid. It’s an organization with radical roots, promising to do whatever it takes to deliver life-saving care to people in need. But now, it’s struggling to address institutional racism. The organization, also known by its French acronym...

The war in Ukraine is not new. Ukrainians have been living through “the long war” of a threatened – and brutally real – Russian invasion for decades. We hear from 60-year-old Irina Dovgan, who refused to leave her home, with its blooming garden and many pets, when separatist fighters took over her region in 2014. She became an international symbol of the invasion after Russian-backed forces arrest...

A nanny in Nashville was having a picnic on a bike path with the kids she was caring for when a man emerged from his house and started cursing at them. The woman began recording and threatened to call the police. But it turned out the angry man wasn’t afraid because he was part of the police – a captain with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. The nanny’s video went viral. It put a cop i...

Sugar is a big part of Americans’ daily diet. But who harvests some of that sweet cane?  Reporters Sandy Tolan and Euclides Cordero Nuel visit Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic who do the backbreaking work of cutting sugarcane for little pay. They live in work camps, or “bateyes,” that are part of a vast sugar plantation owned by the Central Romana Corp. The company is the Dominican Repub...

Washington, D.C.: The Difficulties of Firing Police Officers A group of hackers attacked the Metropolitan Police Department in 2021, leaking 250 gigabytes of data and confidential files. Buried in tens of thousands of records, Reveal reporter Dhruv Mehrotra found a disturbing pattern. Records of disciplinary decisions showed that an internal panel of high-ranking officers kept some troubled office...

To see what the future of abortion could be in the United States, look to Texas. Across the country, conservative foes of abortion rights have pushed “heartbeat bills” that would ban abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, when an embryo's cardiac activity can be detected. Journalist Amy Littlefield and a team of law and journalism students from UC Berkeley investigate how this law went from...

If we want to quickly combat climate change, we need to deal with “the other” greenhouse gas: methane. Methane leaks are heating up the planet and harming people who live where gas drilling takes place.  Reporter Elizabeth Shogren introduces us to a NASA scientist who’s devoting his career to hunting down big methane leaks. Riley Duren and his team have figured out how to spot methane pollution fr...

The final chapter of our three-part investigation into the abduction of 43 Mexican students in 2014 looks at how an unexpected turn in Mexico’s politics leads to a new investigation with Omar Gómez Trejo as special prosecutor. With the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president, Mexico’s investigation into the missing students is reopened, and Gómez Trejo gathers evidence to indict membe...

The second chapter of our three-part investigation into the abduction of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014 digs into the government cover-up of the crime. Weeks after the disappearance, the Mexican government released its official story: Corrupt police had taken the students and handed them to members of a local gang. The gang had killed the students, then incinerated...

It has been over seven years since 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Guerrero, Mexico, were taken by armed men in the middle of the night. They were never seen again. Their disappearance sparked mass protests, as the 43 became symbols of Mexico’s unchecked human rights abuses. In recent decades, tens of thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico, and almost no one has...

In December 1944, Frank Hartzell was a young soldier pressed into fierce fighting during the Battle of the Bulge. He was there battling Nazi soldiers for control of the Belgian town of Chenogne, and he was there afterward when dozens of unarmed German prisoners of war were gunned down in a field.  Reporter Chris Harland-Dunaway travels to Belgium to tour Chenogne with Belgian historian Roger Marqu...

From anti-vaxxers to QAnon, we look at how misinformation spreads online – and the lives it disrupts.  Reporter Stan Alcorn digs into the origins of “Stop the Steal.” In 2016, it was the name of a right-wing activist group that spread the idea that the United States’ democratic institutions were rigged against Donald Trump. In 2020, it re-emerged as a hashtag attached to baseless Republican claims...

Donate now to support Reveal’s journalism . ••• An audio drama inspired by Reveal’s 2017 investigation into a deadly explosion at a Mississippi shipyard, produced by our partners at documentary theater company StoryWorks. This deconstructed mystery is based on real accounts, real events and real people. This episode was originally broadcast in December 2019. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.p...

Donate now to support Reveal’s nonprofit journalism.   In Portland, Oregon, unhoused people make up at most 2% of the population, but they account for nearly half of all arrests. Cities have long turned to police as the mechanism for making homelessness disappear. But arrests don’t solve a housing crisis.  Reveal looked at six major cities up and down the West Coast and found that people living on...

Donate now to support Reveal’s journalism . ••• In the mid-’90s, two high-end New York art galleries began selling one fake painting after another – works in the style of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and others. It was the largest art fraud in modern U.S. history, totaling more than $80 million. Our first story looks at how it happened and why almost no one ever was punished by author...

Donate now to support Reveal’s journalism . ••• The final episode of Mississippi Goddam shares new revelations that cast doubt on the official story that Billey Joe Johnson accidentally killed himself. This week marks the 13th anniversary of Johnson’s death. His family is still seeking justice. Our reporting brought up questions that the original investigation never looked into. Host Al Letson and...

Donate now to support Reveal’s journalism . ••• Black communities around Mississippi have long raised concerns about the suspicious deaths of young Black men, especially when law enforcement is involved. Curley Clark, vice president of the Mississippi NAACP, calls Billey Joe Johnson Jr.’s case an example of “Mississippi justice.” “It means that they still feel like the South should have won the Ci...

Donate now to support Reveal’s journalism . ••• Amazon gathers a lot of information about its customers, from what they read and watch to what they search for and buy. And the company says customers trust it to keep their data safe. But internal memos and people who have worked inside Amazon paint a different picture. Reveal found Amazon’s intense focus on growth left the company vulnerable to ser...

Donate now to support Reveal’s journalism . ••• Billey Joe Johnson Jr. and Hannah Hollinghead met in their freshman year of high school. Hollinghead says Johnson was her first love, and in many ways, it was a typical teen romance. Friends say they would argue, break up, then get back together again. Some people were far from accepting of their interracial relationship. On Dec. 8, 2008, they were b...

Donate now to support Reveal’s journalism . ••• Special Agent Joel Wallace of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation was called in to investigate the death of Billey Joe Johnson. He worked alongside two investigators from the George County district attorney’s office. Wallace said that arrangement didn’t happen very often. And he now questions why they were assigned. “If you've got me investigatin...