Pulitzer winner Crewdson joining Project on Government Oversight

John Crewdson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of immigration in The New York Times, and whose work in the Chicago Tribune is the reason defibrillators are now standard equipment on all U.S. airlines, is joining the Project On Government Oversight as a senior investigator.

Crewdson has worked in Washington for the past 22 years as an investigative reporter for Bloomberg News and senior correspondent for the Tribune. At Bloomberg, his team’s coverage of the aftermath of the Citizens United ruling won the National Press Foundation’s 2011 Dirksen Award for distinguished reporting on Congress.

His special report in the Tribune on the lack of emergency medical equipment on commercial airliners sparked Congressional hearings and led the FAA to require U.S. airlines to carry portable defibrillators and emergency medical kits as standard equipment. The report was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism.

“John Crewdson’s investigations have shaken the halls of power and, in many cases, righted injustices,” POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian said in a statement. “His work exemplifies POGO’s mission of exposing corruption and exploring solutions.”

In some cases, Crewdson’s work has corrected history. While at the Tribune, he reported on the hundreds of Americans who have falsely claimed to have been awarded the Medal of Honor and debunked the National Institutes of Health’s claim to have discovered the virus that causes AIDS. The latter earned Crewdson the George Polk Award for Medical Reporting.

“For decades, POGO has been widely admired in Washington for its unrelenting determination to delve deeply into the machinery of government, uncover waste, fraud and corruption, and then force Congress and the White House to confront the problems it has exposed,” Crewdson said in a statement. “I look forward to contributing to that essential effort.”

Crewdson graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded a degree in economics with great distinction. He began his career by covering the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, where he broke stories about the Nixon administration’s illegal wiretaps and domestic spying. In 1981, he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting at the Times for his coverage of illegal aliens and immigration.