The Story Behind the Story
We are surrounded by information, yet many people feel less informed than ever. Why? After more than four decades in journalism, Russ Baker has come to believe that understanding events requires looking beyond headlines, talking points, and conventional wisdom. Through stories from his career and lessons learned covering powerful institutions and public figures, Baker will explore how narratives are formed, how public understanding is shaped, why some questions get asked while others do not, and what citizens can do to think more independently in an age when information is abundant but trust is scarce.

Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and publisher. He is the editor-in-chief of WhoWhatWhy, an independent nonprofit news organization he founded to provide trustworthy journalism that informs and deepens our understanding of our world.
Russ has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and The Village Voice. Over many years, he regularly broke significant stories, including those that raised early doubts about the justification for the invasion of Iraq; exposed the UN’s failure to pursue war criminals in former Yugoslavia; laid bare corruption in the New York City police union; documented predatory practices in the credit card industry and in Scientology. He also covered such seminal events as the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. He is the author of the bestselling dynastic history of the Bush clan, Family of Secrets, with detailed examinations of the CIA and the oil and military contracting industry and new insight into Watergate and other American controversies.
Russ writes a weekly Substack column, Going Deep with Russ Baker, that deals primarily with current political and power issues.  He has been working for two decades on his next book, an open-minded, forensic dig into the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which promises major new revelations.
 

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