In this special edition of We Mean Business, Ananya Bhargava interviews Jodie Fleischer, the managing editor of investigative content and collaboration for Cox Media Group. She is a member of the 2024 Barlett and Steele Gold Award-winning team in the Regional/Local Category. Their investigative series, “Overpayment Outrage,” is a collaboration of eight local TV news stations across seven states. With the assistance of KFF Health News, the team helped uncover the immense toll Social Security repayment demands have on some of the nation’s most vulnerable families. Fleischer discusses the behind-the-scenes of this investigation, including how it began and what it took to make the collaboration happen.
Visit KFF Health News to read their written investigative work or businessjournalism.org/awards to view all the 2024 winners.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Ananya Bhargava: Welcome to a special edition of We Mean Business, where we dive into the stories behind the Barlett & Steele Award winners. Join us as we uncover the winners’ investigative processes, the challenges they conquered, and the powerful impact of their reporting. The Gold Barlett and Steele Award in the Regional/Local Category goes to an outstanding collaboration that resulted in quick, significant changes in the system. The collaboration of eight local TV news stations across seven states, with the assistance of KFF Health News, helped uncover the immense toll Social Security repayment demands has on some of the nation’s most vulnerable families – the very people the Social Security system was designed to protect. I am here with Cox Media Groups’s Jodie Fleischer to learn more about how they did it.
Jodie Fleischer: So my name is Jodie Fleischer, and I am the managing editor for investigative content and collaborations for Cox Media Group. So my role in this project was kind of a dual role, in that, you know, my career for the last two decades has been as an investigative reporter. And I did do some investigative reporting, kind of more of the national scope and big picture for this and co-byline the print articles with KFF Health News that were pushed out to media outlets around the country. But my new role with Cox Media Group is as managing editor for investigative content and collaborations. And so the whole point behind my role was really looking for investigative stories and issues and things that are impacting people in our local communities all across the country, and kind of harnessing the power of local investigative reporting in each of those cities together into a national scope. And so part of my role really was tailored to a project like this and was created specifically for this kind of reporting. Where we had one station that in 2020, our station in Atlanta WSB, did a story, just kind of a one-off story, about two families that were dealing with this problem.
And in one case, it was a little boy who had lost his mom to a drunk driver, and the Social Security Administration was trying to claw back benefits that they had paid to this little boy. And in another, it was a woman who got a bill for her father’s overpayment from 40 years earlier. And so they did this story about those two families in 2020 not realizing kind of the bigger scope of how many people across the country are being impacted. And so in 2022, when my role started, one of the producers there actually pitched an idea for a follow-up to that story with another family specifically in like the disability space. And while they were talking, I started looking up some of the national data and what little I could find, and saw the billions of dollars and some of the OIG reports that had come out and I was like, “You guys, this is a way bigger deal than this one family like we need to dig into this across the country.” And so that was really the impetus for the whole project was, let’s figure out how many people this is happening to and where, and kind of the bigger scope of the problem.
Bhargava: We sort of touched on how this collaboration started, but would you like to expand on how it managed to get to eight cities, like that’s a lot. So how did it really expand to such a national scale?
Fleischer: So our company has eight local TV stations in seven states, and part of my role is visibility with all of the investigative teams and what they’re working on, and kind of organizing projects that they all work on together. And so when we realized the scope of this issue, we kind of brought the story to all of the other stations and said, “We think this is something everybody should dig into together.” And at that point, I sought out KFF Health News as a partner, and we brought, we approached them and and they were all in on the story from the beginning and really interested in partnering with us. And what was great about that partnership was it didn’t just have the local community impact in each of our eight cities, but KFF’s nonprofit model of pushing out content that they share, out to all of their partners across the country, I think really helped elevate the impact of the stories. And so we were able to take the local people who we interviewed and families who invited us into their living rooms, and instead of just putting it on the news in that local city, we were able to get national coverage through KFF, pushed out to all of their partners. And it got the attention of, you know, Good Morning America, and you know other national outlets that picked up the story as well.
Bhargava: Since you were heading more of the collaboration aspect of this, did working across eight cities affect the pace of the investigation? A nd how did you ensure smooth communication and consistency in the whole reporting process?
Fleischer: So that’s always a challenge when you have so many people participating in a project, I would say, between myself and KFF, we were in constant contact for months and months and months, where we were talking multiple times a day and emailing even more frequently than that. You know, just basically non-stop communication. And with our teams, you know, over the course of of doing the Freedom of Information Act requests and the research and kind of pushing out the background, I would send like group emails with all of the information, and then we had some Teams meetings where we would get everybody together to kind of talk about ideas and what elements people had and wanted to share, things that people still needed, challenges people were having, that we were trying to help find people to talk to in their markets, and that kind of thing, who were willing to go on camera and talk about this issue. But, yeah, constant communication is really a challenge when you have so many people involved. And so I was really, on our side anyway, I was the conduit between each of our stations. We had regular meetings and emails, and they would come to me if they had an issue, and then also facilitating that information up to KFF and back and forth. Like, you know, it’s a lot of constant contact.
Bhargava: And so I think we already touched on a couple of the challenges. But what were the main challenges you faced during the investigation and reporting process? And then also, how did you navigate them?
Fleischer: I think the biggest initial challenge was finding people who were impacted, who were willing to talk about it on camera. You know, it’s one thing to talk to a print reporter but to welcome a TV camera and lights and people into your home to sit and talk potentially, to millions of people about what’s happening financially and you know, in terms of life struggles and the impact on your life, it’s a really personal thing, and I think that that was the biggest struggle. There were a lot of people we reached out to initially, who were afraid that the Social Security Administration would retaliate against them and cut off all of their benefits if they said something negative against the administration.
And so I think that was the biggest challenge, was really finding the right people to be able to convey their stories, who are willing to do that. Now, I will say, after the first series of stories aired, we heard from tons of people in all of our markets who were willing to talk and wanted to talk and wanted to share their stories. I think a lot of people were scared because they didn’t realize how many people this was happening to. They thought it was just them, and they thought they were in this alone. And that can be really scary when that check is all you have to live on, and it pays your rent and it pays your utilities, and it buys your groceries and it puts gas in your car. And as we saw throughout the course of the investigation, people were facing homelessness because of this. And it’s a scary thing to be like, “Yeah, come on into my living room and talk to me about this,” or “Yeah, put my face and my name out on television for the world to see.” But I think once those first few people did it, and everyone saw the impact of that, the people who came later in the stories were much more willing and eager, I think, to participate. And in the end, we heard from over 700 people around the country who shared their stories with us.
Bhargava: Following up on that, so how did you manage the balance between reporting on those individual stories and then also tackling those larger, systemic issues that were at play?
Fleischer: I mean, I think that was also a really good testament to the partnership between our stations and KFF Health News, because where TV excels at telling the real human impact emotional story, I think KFF reporters kind of speak the language of Congress and like the federal agencies and like the technical side of things. And so we worked as much as we could of that into our TV stories, but if you read the print articles that accompanied our television stories, they really dug into the nitty gritty of the systemic problems from a financial aspect and the business side of things. Which was important, because I think, as we started getting traction with members of Congress and with the agency itself, we were able to do that because we had that reach of the partnership.
Bhargava: I know in the updates as you continued the investigation, and during the hearing, where there was some misinformation that was said during the hearing, you actually followed up on that, and fact-checked it through a FOIA. So could you talk a bit more about any highlights that you had, like, during the more information and evidence gathering process, and then also any challenges you faced there?
Fleischer: Yeah, I mean, that was really hard to convey in the stories themselves, because it was so complicated. And I think that to really understand that, you have to kind of go to the back story of dealing with the agency in the beginning. They were just really not willing to give out information, and a lot of what we had in reports came from like audits and an Office of Inspector General reports and things that came out over the years, and some of the agency’s own reporting, but the agency refused over and over again to tell us how many people were impacted. And the biggest thing that struck me was it’s literally a federal agency that assigns a unique identifying number to every American. So to say to us, “Oh, well, we can’t tell you how many of those Americans we sent these notices to in a given year,” seemed crazy. And we didn’t know at the beginning whether they were just refusing to tell us, or whether they genuinely didn’t know the answer to the question. And so when we got to that hearing, and by the way, they had rejected a prior FOIA a year earlier where we asked for ZIP-code-level data of all the notices. Because we thought, “Okay, well, if they’re mailing them to people, they should be able to tell us how many in each ZIP code.” And we really wanted to have state-by-state data and so we thought that would be a way to get at that. But they flat out rejected the FOIA. We appealed, they’ve still never responded to the appeal to this day.
So and that all happened, you know, a year prior to us publishing our first stories on this. So in October, when we had the hearing and a member of Congress who we had been talking to and interviewing, he represents part of one of our local markets in Ohio, said, “Well, if they’re not telling you, I’m going to ask the question in the hearing.” And he did and that was when she answered about a million people each year. And she read the numbers twice, and both times she said the same numbers. And what caught our attention was, and I didn’t hear it in the moment, and I was in the room for the hearing, but it was so under her breath, almost inaudible, that we didn’t hear it until we watched the recording back the next day, and she kind of qualified it. She was like, “That’s under Social Security.” And we were like, “Well, the whole program is Social Security. What else could she be talking about?” And when we read her written testimony, it said she defined the Social Security program in her written testimony as the OASDI, like the old age survivors, disability insurance benefits. It’s like one part of the program, but there’s this whole other bucket of payments and people that are not included in that. And so when I looked at the written transcript and it said, “That’s the Social Security program,” we immediately, and we, in this case, was myself and the KFF reporter David Hilzenrath, who, you know, had many, many late night conversations trying to game out what we you know, how these numbers should be interpreted because SSA wasn’t answering our questions. And when we listened back to the recording, both of us, and I remember it was a very late night conversation, and we were pairing the transcript of the video with the written statement, and we were like, “It has to mean she left out the other half of the program.” And so we asked SSA the next day in an email, and multiple times after that, and they would never answer the question. And so we filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the piece of paper she read from, and we sent a photo of it, we sent a video clip of her reading from it. There was no way that they could say, “We don’t have that document, or we don’t know what you mean,” because we literally showed them a picture of her reading from it. And when they sent us the paper, there was the other half of the numbers on the next line, right below the numbers she read. And we knew it was double. You know, 2 million people a year were getting these notices. And it was interesting because they provided that back to us in December, seven weeks after the hearing, but they had not gone back to Congress and said, “Hey, we misspoke. We only gave you half the numbers,” and so the members of Congress didn’t realize until we reported on it.
Bhargava: I think you basically answered my next question was, what was the most surprising thing? And I think this was definitely the biggest shock of the investigation. Was there anything else maybe in the beginning that you found shocking or surprising when you were really digging into this issue?
Fleischer: I think that I was equally as shocked by the fact that it turned out to be 2 million people a year hit with these overpayments, as I was with the fact that the agency didn’t know that until we started asking. For them to come out and acknowledge later that their systems were not designed to keep the data that way and that they physically couldn’t pull that information was really surprising to me. Like you would think that an agency that deals with that much money would have the ability to track that. Or the interest in knowing not just how many dollars each year, but how many people each year. And I think that’s really the focus that has changed with the new Social Security Commissioner, who has come in. Is he has made an effort to make it a very people-forward organization and he said that in interviews with us, and in his own testimony to Congress, that that was really the kind of travesty of all of this, was that the people were not being centered, and I think they are, to some degree now.
Bhargava: You already touched on how a lot of people came forward after seeing the stories of other people because they didn’t feel as alienated in the issue anymore. So that is like a huge impact that it had on the public. Are there any other impacts on the public, or we also touched on legal impacts, any other impacts that you would like to highlight about this entire collaboration?
Fleischer: Well, I think one of the most heartening thing that’s happened for our reporters who worked on the project is the people who they interviewed, a lot of them have had their benefits restored after their reporting and like that’s why you do what you do. You know it’s, it is part of being a reporter is not just exposing problems, but trying to find solutions for people and to help make the situation better. And so I think for many of the individuals who we focused our stories on, for them to have had these overpayments of tens of thousands of dollars suddenly erased by the agency was really heartening, you know, in terms of why we do what we do every day. But then for the agency to come forward and change its policies, that’s the biggest impact, because that’ll affect millions of people going forward. The default is no longer going to be to just withhold somebody’s whole check if they don’t work out a deal with them. Now it’s 10%, so at least it gives people a chance to still pay their bills while they’re negotiating with the agency. And, you know, the shifting of the burden of proof to the agency instead of putting it on the beneficiary. You know, you asked about challenges a lot of times, the folks who we’ve been dealing with in these situations are disabled, either physically or mentally or both, and they don’t necessarily have someone who can advocate for them, and can keep track of all their records for them, and can call the agency and sit on the phone for hours and hours and talk to the representative and figure out how to navigate. You know, lawyers are not readily available, because this isn’t a lucrative thing for a lawyer to pursue. So a lot of times, folks are trying to go to Legal Aid or, you know, they don’t really have help in fighting this, and so it really was up to the agency to fix it from a policy standpoint, because a lot of these folks had nowhere else to go. They had no recourse until we shed light on the problem and Washington started paying attention.
Bhargava: In your view, what do you think the role of investigative business journalism is in society? So you mentioned the impact that it can have and how you can sort of advocate for the people who can’t advocate for themselves. But what else would you like to add here?
Fleischer: I mean, I think it’s interesting, because when we were talking about business journalism, we were like, well, do we really even fit in that bucket, right? Is this business journalism? Because business you think about a company, or you think about, you know, maybe taxes, or, you know, social security payments, I think though, for most Americans, are not just an important and critical part of their lives, but it’s their sole source of income in, you know, retirement or life in general. And so I think when you talk about the financial impact that these payments have on people, they’re consumers of, you know, the services from the government and the money involved. The fact that billions of dollars of overpayments were happening each year, I mean, this is taxpayer money that was being paid out that the agency then said shouldn’t have been paid out. You know, you’re talking about a program that millions and millions of Americans rely on, and all of us will, at some point, use in our lives. And so I think the magnitude of it from a business standpoint, I don’t think people would necessarily, traditionally think of Social Security payments as business, but I think from an investigative reporting standpoint, it was critical. You know, I can’t think of any federal agency that affects more people. I mean, it’s literally every American.
Bhargava: Going on the lines of investigative journalism. Specifically, how would you say investigative journalism differs from other forms of reporting, and what unique challenges do you think investigative specifically presents?
Fleischer: So I think that basic reporting, and this is, you know, I do a lot of talking with students and mentoring of young journalists, and the way I tend to explain it, it’s, it’s kind of like the IRE definition of investigative is like “uncovering something that someone wants to keep hidden.” And in this case, you know, I don’t know that the Social Security Administration necessarily was trying to keep it hidden. It was that they didn’t know themselves. You know, I think they certainly weren’t advertising that it was impacting 2 million Americans each year. But I think that in terms of regular day-to-day reporting versus investigative reporting, I think at its base, investigative reporting looks at the why, the how, the whose fault is it, and how do you fix it. Whereas regular reporting is focused on like the who, when, where, what, and as reporters, I think that we are often so focused on the frenetic pace of journalism and of reporting and of Americans and their lives today, that we are so focused on the who, the when, the where, the what happened, that we don’t take enough time to focus on the investigative aspects of news stories, which is the why, the how, and the whose fault is it, and the what can you do to fix it. And I think that investigative reporting plays a more critical role in society now more than ever. Because people are not necessarily taking the time that they need to dig into the truth of things, and so the more that we can do as journalists to dig deeper and to uncover the story behind the stories. I think that’s really the only way you’re ever going to get through to Americans who are consuming the news. And they don’t even know, I think, to some degree, what they’re missing when they’re just digesting, you know, headlines in a news feed, scrolling on social media and you don’t get that from investigative reporting. You know, it’s, you can’t encapsulate it into a headline or into a easy sound bite, but I think that telling compelling stories will hopefully encourage people to take the time to watch them and to read them and to dig deeper.
Bhargava: That was Cox Media Group’s Jodie Fleisher, one of the Gold winners of the Barlett and Steele Regional/Local Category. To everyone listening, thank you so much for tuning in and for more information about the awards visit our website, businessjournalism.org.
