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Over here at the SPCJ (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Journalists), we love to highlight journalism done by the young pups in the business, from a wonderful investigative site in Nebraska to a feisty startup in Washington, DC. But the past few days, we’ve seen tremendous reporting from top mainstream outlets, so we want to offer our praise to them—because big old dogs also like a scratch behind the ears now and then.

• We’ll start with Bloomberg News, which uncovered a transcript of the meeting that Steve Witkoff, who is President Trump’s golf pal and itinerant diplomat, had with Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s top foreign-policy adviser. Witkoff spent much of the time explaining how Putin can flatter Trump by praising his diplomatic skills, as evidenced by the Gaza deal: ”I would make the call and just reiterate that you congratulate the president on this achievement, that you supported it, that you respect that he is a man of peace and you’re just, you’re really glad to have seen it happen.” Ushakov takes Witkoff’s advice to heart: “Hey Steve, I agree with you that he will congratulate, he will say that Mr. Trump is a real peace man and so-and-so. That he will say.” Witkoff also offers his plan for carving up disputed territory: “Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere.”
  
  For anyone who wonders how the US will manufacture a peace deal in Ukraine, the transcript was a revelation. We got to peer inside the diplomatic process, in a way that is usually reserved for State Department cables that are declassified only decades after the event. And while we’d like to be able to congratulate the reporter(s) by name, the byline says only this: “By Bloomberg News.” That is likely due to the need to protect sources, or methods, or both. If so, that’s an understandable trade-off, given the importance of the scoop. So that was a great bit of reporting, whoever you are. 

• Next up is the Wall Street Journal, which published an extraordinary, five-byline deep dive on the efforts by Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner to arrange billions of dollars in business deals with Russia at the same time that the US is supposed to be nurturing a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine. Witkoff spoke on the record to the Journal, characterizing the talks over oil, gas, and rare-earth minerals as “a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.” Some of the possible beneficiaries include huge companies like ExxonMobil. But there are also lesser-known businesspeople trying to get a piece of the action, such as Gentry Beach (yes, his real name), a Trump donor and a college pal of Donald Trump Jr.’s. Beach hopes to acquire a 9.9 percent stake in a Russian Arctic gas project. He told the Journal that he is “extremely grateful” for what Witkoff and others are doing to end the war. (And those WSJ bylines are Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson.)

• And a laurel for the Washington Post’s Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima, whose scoop about Pete Hegseth’s leave-no-survivor edict has shaken up the White House, the Pentagon, and Capitol Hill. The duo reported that the secretary of defense supported a second strike on an alleged drug boat last September, killing two survivors of the first attack who were clinging to the smoldering wreck. “The order was to kill everybody,” one source said. Call it a war crime or call it murder (since there has been no declaration of war against drug traffickers), the second strike appears to violate core principles of military justice and common humanity. 

We also want to credit The Intercept’s Nick Turse, who first reported that there was a second strike—and did so the week after the September 2 attack. Officials told The Intercept that the boat operator realized they were under surveillance and “appeared to have turned back toward shore, after which it was subjected to multiple strikes.”

Both of these stories depend on unnamed sources, so readers might wonder how credible they are. One neat trick I use in such cases is to examine the responses from those who are accused of malfeasance. Sometimes, officials give detailed answers, refuting essential points of the story; that can spur legitimate doubts about the reporting. But more often, they respond by obfuscating or ignoring the gist of the story, which is what happened in this case. A Pentagon spokesman told The Intercept, “This strike sent a clear message: if you traffic drugs toward our shores, the United States military will use every tool at our disposal to stop you cold.” Similarly, Hegseth posted a tweet several hours after the Post’s story ran in which he didn’t address, much less deny, the allegations that he was behind that second strike: “As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors,” he wrote. “Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both US and international law.” He followed that up with a snickering tweet the next day that had Franklin the Turtle, a children’s-book character, blasting drug dealers’ boats out of the water.

Some people you interview, they tell you the truth right away. Others fudge the facts here and there. A few will drop a lie in from time to time.

And then there’s George Santos. 

The felonious former congressman once claimed that he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but he never did. He said he was a star volleyball player, but that was a lie. He said he had an MBA, and that was false. He said he was of Jewish ancestry, and then later claimed he was “Jew-ish.” (Meaning what? He doesn’t put lox on a cinnamon-raisin bagel?)

Tara Palmeri faced this problem recently. Palmeri is now an independent journalist, after years at Politico, ABC News, the New York Post, and Puck, where she was billed as “Washington’s most feared and fearless politics reporter.” 

Last week, she posted a forty-minute interview with Santos on her YouTube channel, which has 125,000 subscribers. She asked him about everything from how he managed to get Trump to commute his seven-year prison sentence (“I don’t know, I was in prison, I saw it on TV”) to whether he regrets his conduct (“Of course I’m repentant. I hurt friends, I hurt family members”). He also congratulated himself for his generosity, saying he had just gone to a soup kitchen and “dropped off fifty fucking turkeys.” 

We can debate the utility of interviewing Santos in the first place, but if you’re going to venture into that murky swamp, you’d better be prepared for what awaits. Palmeri wasn’t consistently ready, with one particularly unfortunate result. Midway through the interview, Santos whined that “the media got so much wrong.” He had one reporter in mind: Jacqueline Sweet, who broke many stories about Santos in 2023, including one about his stealing around three thousand dollars from a GoFundMe set up for a dying dog that belonged to a disabled veteran. After casting multiple, unverified aspersions about Sweet, Santos claimed (without offering evidence) that she’d had an inappropriate relationship “with one of my senior staffers to try to get information from my office, and writing sensational things without any corroboration, any proof.”

Now, those are really serious allegations about any journalist, but especially for women. A common trope in Hollywood, or in a Fox News studio, is that female reporters get scoops by sleeping with sources. So you might expect Palmeri to push back, or to at least ask Santos for evidence. She didn’t. She nodded her head a few times, then moved on to her next question: “Do you have any desire to be known as an honest person?”

I asked Palmeri what happened here. She said that she wasn’t even aware that Santos made these accusations until I contacted her two days after the video was posted. “I didn’t remember him saying these things,” she said, adding that “it must have slipped through the cracks. It was an oversight. This was unintentional.” Palmeri also said she had never heard of Sweet, which is odd, given that Sweet’s reporting was widely praised amid the onslaught of Santos coverage after his 2022 election victory. Almost any pre-interview check of Santos’s background would turn up links to Sweet’s stories, which ran not just on a local Patch site but also in Politico and Mother Jones. And Sweet herself has been targeted by a top aide to Santos, something that was documented at the time. 

Shortly after we spoke, Palmeri sent me a text: “It was a chaotic live interview, and I was trying to fact-check as best I could while running the entire production myself. That’s the reality of being an independent journalist—I don’t have producers in my ear like on live TV, supporting me behind the scenes.”

I then asked Palmeri why she didn’t just trim Santos’s comments about Sweet, or remove the video altogether. “Standard practice with live videos is to add a pinned comment or include a clarifying note in the description,” she responded. She did pin a comment on her YouTube page: “George Santos made these allegations; we have seen no evidence to support them.” I’m not sure what good that did. I understand the reluctance to cite Santos’s original claim, but this is so vague as to be entirely meaningless. As one viewer commented, “Why would you publish allegations you’ve seen no evidence to support??”

I also spoke to Sweet, who denied Santos’s claims as “categorically false.” She said that she “found that piece of the video to be extraordinarily reprehensible.” She also expressed concern about the possible impact: “It bothers me that there’s now a veneer of credibility on what he said.… It’s unethical. It’s deeply unethical.”

Video interviews do present fact-checking difficulties that their print counterparts don’t. But the YouTube version could easily have been edited to eliminate Santos’s uncorroborated allegations. And yes, interviewing Santos is difficult, since he lies the way the rest of us breathe. Given that, what’s the value of asking him questions like “Who are your top five favorite presidents?” (His response: “Honest Abe is the best president this country has ever had.”)

I’ll give the last word to Sweet, who has often worked without a backup of editors or producers: “I just don’t think independent investigative journalism is for everyone. It’s very hard.… It’s scary to be on your own.”

And finally, this: “I just want to work.”

It was a happy day in Hershey, Pennsylvania, when officials announced that Raymond Hohl would be taking over as director of the Penn State Cancer Institute. He had a sterling reputation as an oncologist and as an administrator, and he seemed like the right person to lead the center as it strove to attain national recognition, along with hundreds of millions of dollars.

That was in 2014. Since then, Hohl has faltered on multiple levels. The first was his clinical care. Some of his patients received too much chemotherapy, while others had gaps in their charts because he hadn’t documented their visits properly. A patient of his received treatment for a type of lung cancer that they didn’t have. At one point, a surgeon wrote to her department chair: “I refuse to allow any more [patients] to be harmed by him.”

His administrative performance was no better. Staffers complained of a “low safety” culture at the institute, and said they feared retaliation if they reported problems. Meanwhile, turnover soared and morale sank.

This came to light thanks to Spotlight PA’s Wyatt Massey and Charlotte Keith, who spoke with more than thirty current and former institute employees and dug through hundreds of pages of emails, reports, patient records, and audits. 

On Thursday, November 20, their investigation went live.

On Friday, November 21, they wrote a follow-up with this headline: “Director of Penn State Cancer Institute resigns 1 day after Spotlight PA investigation about chemo errors, ‘toxic’ leadership.”

You can’t beat that for immediate impact.

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