Howard Berkes

Howard Berkes was an NPR correspondent for 38 years. He spent 20 years covering the American West and a decade focused on rural America. Berkes also covered eight Olympic Games, and retired in 2019 after eight years as an NPR Investigations correspondent. He earned more than 40 journalism awards for investigative, science, business, sports, breaking news, health, rural and feature reporting, and was awarded a Nieman Foundation Journalism Fellowship at Harvard University in 1997. Berkes’ award-winning investigations include Coal’s Deadly Dust, a film for Frontline and a radio series for NPR, that exposed the failure of federal regulators to protect coal miners from toxic silica dust. In 1986, Berkes and his NPR colleague Daniel Zwerdling, provided the first detailed account of the 11th hour effort by Morton Thiokol booster rocket engineers to stop the fatal launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Other investigations documented Olympic corruption, states slashing Workers’ Compensation benefits, the failure to regulate air pollution, a spike in preventable and horrific worker deaths in grain bins, the resurgence of black lung disease among coal miners, and the regulatory and company failures that preceded the deadliest coal mine explosion in the U.S. in 40 years. In 2020, Berkes helped create Public Health Watch, an independent investigative reporting nonprofit focused on public, environmental and occupational health. Berkes has also served as a member of the guest faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and has trained hundreds of journalists in audio production and investigative reporting workshops.