Howard Berkes spent 38 years as an NPR reporter and correspondent, earning more than 40 national journalism awards for investigative, science, business, health, rural, sports, feature, online and breaking news reporting.
He also has trained and mentored hundreds of reporters in more than a dozen workshops and seminars and has served as a member of the guest faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida.
In 1997, Berkes was awarded a Nieman Foundation Journalism Fellowship at Harvard University.
The fellowship came 20 years after his career began at NPR affiliate KLCC in Eugene, Oregon, where Berkes was an unpaid news volunteer. While working a full-time job elsewhere, Berkes arrived at KLCC at 6 am to “rip” and rewrite newswires and pull news spots from NPR newscasts for a morning news show. Berkes later began to report news stories while pulling NPR news spots for a noon newscast. Eventually, Berkes became the anchor of a daily evening newscast, and quit his day job to focus on his volunteer radio work full-time.
To support himself, Berkes began producing news spots for NPR newscasts and stories for NPR’s news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
An NPR editor, Anne Gudenkauf, became a mentor and provided both NPR assignments and feedback on writing, editing and production. She challenged Berkes to write visually, and to use natural sound to evoke scenes and action. The first NPR quick-turnaround deadline assignment came early in 1980, when some of the ransom money paid to missing skyjacker D.B. Cooper was found along the banks of the Columbia River near Portland, Oregon. The resulting sound-rich story, with compelling scenes and voices, had Berkes hooked on radio as a storytelling medium.
The big career break came a few months later, when the Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington State began a series of eruptions. Berkes jumped on the story, filing dozens of news spots for newscasts about the early small eruptions and warnings from scientist and officials. He also filed stories for and was interviewed by NPR shows. He flew over the volcano as it spit ash and smoke into the sky and in April of 1980, Berkes joined a press pool of reporters guided by geologists to the scientists’ observation area at timberline on the mountain. Cantankerous lodge owner Harry Truman, who had refused to evacuate a danger zone, jumped out in front of the caravan and provided a profanity-laced description of near-constant earthquakes and ashfall. At timberline, as the volcano shook with earthquakes and rained down volcanic ash, Berkes interviewed scientists about their measurements, which indicated deformation of the mountain as pressure built from rising magma.
A few weeks later, on May 18, the mountain erupted, killing 57 people, many who were in areas considered safe, and the mountain and surrounding Douglas Fir forests and river valleys were transformed into an otherworldly hellscape. Berkes became NPR’s volcano reporter, and flew in a caravan of helicopters with President Jimmy Carter as he gaped in awe at ice blocks as big as houses floating down rivers choked with old-growth timber, volcanic mud, massive boulders, and an occasional house and logging truck.
When the flying caravan landed at a remote airstrip, Berkes, his microphone out, was the first to reach President Carter. He and the President were quickly surrounded by other reporters and Secret Service agents. Carter struggled to describe what he saw, as did Berkes in his live interviews on NPR and in his stories.
Mount St. Helens continued to erupt throughout 1980 and Berkes continued to cover the volcano for NPR. At the end of the year, NPR offered Berkes the chance to join the first group of reporters hired for a national reporting team. The creation of Morning Edition in 1979 led to a sudden demand for more stories and reporters as NPR’s airtime for news more than doubled.
Berkes was assigned to cover the eight Rocky Mountain States and setup a one-man “bureau” in a small mining cabin in an inner-city canyon in Salt Lake City. He put together a makeshift studio in a tiny room barely bigger than a closet, cobbling together four second-hand reel-to-reel recorders and a home-made mixing board for editing and mixing.
Berkes began to report stories NPR hadn’t had much of before, on public lands and National Parks, cattle grazing, endangered species, the militia movement, neo-Nazi groups, Native Americans, western culture, water issues, the Mormon Church, polygamy, environmental threats, and the region’s breaking news. He spent weeks traveling the blue highways and ranch roads of the west, sometimes camping overnight, for major series on the proposal to build a nuclear missile weapons system (the MX) across thousands of square miles of desert basins and ranges, and on the legacy of disease and distrust left by a nuclear weapons testing program that sent radioactive fallout across the region.
The first national journalism award came in 1984. The Society of Professional Journalists honored Berkes with its Distinguished Service Award for Radio Reporting for his coverage of flooding and mudslides in a Utah town.
In 1986, Berkes teamed with colleague Daniel Zwerdling for exclusive and award-winning reporting on the eleventh-hour effort to prevent the fatal launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Berkes and Zwerdling reported the first detailed account of a pre-launch effort by engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol to keep Challenger grounded. Their reporting earned several national journalism awards and appeared to help shift the course of the investigation of the Challenger disaster.
Berkes kept in touch with the two Morton Thiokol booster rocket engineers who were anonymous sources for the Challenger story. Roger Boisjoly agreed to a public interview in 1987 and told Berkes about the anger and frustration he suffered due to the Challenger tragedy. Berkes kept in touch with the other NPR Challenger source, Bob Ebeling, who was wracked with guilt. Ebeling said he should have done more to stop the launch.
In 2016, on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger tragedy, Ebeling finally agreed to go public and to be interviewed. He described 30 years of guilt, spurred by the failure of NASA officials and Thiokol executives to accept the recommendation of the Thiokol engineers to delay the launch. In conference calls the night before, the engineers presented data showing stiffening of o-rings in the joints of the shuttle booster rockets at cold temperatures and the forecast was for temperatures below freezing. The engineers officially called for a delay but were overruled by Thiokol executives who were pressured by NASA officials to launch anyway.
The Ebeling story shocked NPR listeners. Hundreds responded with words of encouragement and kindness. Other engineers told him he did what he could do and had no reason to bear the burden of guilt. NASA issued a statement praising Ebeling, and a NASA official and a Thiokol executive who had overruled Ebeling and his colleagues told him this was not his burden to bear. As Berkes reported in a follow-up story, that lifted Ebeling’s guilt, and he died a few weeks later, at peace his family said.
The Challenger stories and an unrelated investigation of worker deaths in grain bins inspired the production of two nationally-telecast documentaries and a dramatic film.
Berkes covered the Rocky Mountain States for two decades. He also began to cover the Olympics, first in 1984 for the Los Angeles Summer Games and then in 1988 for the Calgary Winter Olympics.
Then came news in 1998 of illicit payments to children of members of the International Olympic Committee. The payments were made by the Salt Lake City group seeking IOC votes for the city’s bid to host the 2002 Winter Olympics, and the succeeding group organizing those Olympics. The story was mostly local until an exclusive report from Berkes quoting a top IOC official characterizing the payments as bribery. Berkes then followed what became known as the Salt Lake Olympic bribery scandal to IOC reform meetings in Switzerland, congressional hearings in Washington, news conferences of investigative bodies in New York, and indictments and a trial in Utah.
He continued to break stories about the US Olympic Committee’s role in similar gift-giving and the failure of the USOC and IOC to recognize and curb corruption.
Berkes continued to cover Olympic politics and sports, and was part of “Team NPR” at the 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2010 and 2012 Olympics, for a career total of eight Olympic Games. He shared an Edward R. Murrow award for sports reporting for NPR’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
In 2003, Berkes became NPR’s first Rural Affairs Correspondent, and spent a decade focused on rural issues, policy, economics and culture in small towns from coast to coast. He pioneered the reporting of rural polling during presidential and mid-term elections, and documented the significance of the rural vote. He focused attention on the disproportionate rate of service, injury and death among rural military service members fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, a result of an all-volunteer military relying on Reserve and National Guard units often based in rural areas. In 2005 and 2006, he was part of the NPR reporting team that covered Hurricane Katrina, emphasizing impacts in rural areas, and exposing the failure of the American Red Cross to fulfill its relief mission.
In 2019, Berkes’ decade of rural reporting was honored with the Tom and Pat Gish Award for “courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism.”
Back in 2010, the rural beat became more investigative, when Berkes joined NPR’s Frank Langfitt in an investigation of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia, which left 29 coal miners dead. Berkes and Langfitt broke stories about the mine disaster’s causes and the safety failures of mine owner Massey Energy. After Langfitt left for a reporting assignment in Africa, Berkes continued the investigation for more than a year, documenting additional safety lapses at the company, an emphasis of production over safety, and failures of federal regulators to enforce safe conditions.
As his investigative reporting continued, Berkes became part of the NPR Investigations Team. He continued to focus on coal mine safety, with a multi-year investigation of the resurgence of black lung disease, the fatal lung ailment caused by inhalation of coal dust. A 2012 investigation with The Center for Public Integrity documented the resurgence and its causes. In 2016, Berkes learned that the resurgence was worse than reported earlier. He discovered and verified an epidemic of the worst and final stage of black lung, and began a survey of black lung clinics that ultimately counted 20 times the number of cases of advanced disease then the federal government had reported.
The investigation continued into 2018, with a look at why this resurgence of extreme disease was occurring.
After more than four dozen interviews with sick and dying miners, acquisition and analysis of 30 years of government coal dust exposure data, review of decades of documents and leaked memos, Berkes’ team found that both industry and government regulators knew that miners were being exposed to an increasing amount of silica dust in coal mines. They knew that silica was especially toxic. But they did nothing effective to protect miners from excessive exposure to silica.
A 2019 film on Frontline PBS, Coal’s Deadly Dust, focused on Berkes’ reporting and findings, and was nominated for two national Emmy Awards, a Writers Guild Award, and a Peabody Award.
Berkes also investigated the failure of government regulators to hold mining companies accountable when they violated safety laws and were fined. Berkes and his team conducted an unprecedented data analysis that showed mining companies that were not forced to pay safety fines, sometimes for decades, continued to put miners at greater risk of injury and death.
The reporting also focused on West Virginia’s richest man, mine owner Jim Justice, who would soon be elected governor. Berkes, Ohio Valley ReSource and West Virginia Public Broadcasting found that the Justice mining companies not only failed to pay mine safety fines, they failed to pay county, state and federal taxes.
Berkes focused on other aspects of workplace safety, with another NPR/Center for Public Integrity investigation of horrific “drowning” deaths in grain bins, and OSHA’s failure to enforce safety standards and severely punish violations, even violations that result in the deaths of underage, illegally employed workers.
Another joint investigation with ProPublica’s Michael Grabell documented a “race to the bottom” in workers’ compensation benefits in multiple states, a deep disparity in benefits paid by states, and the ruined lives of workers left without the benefits workers compensation promised. A follow-up investigation exposed Florida’s failure to stop insurance companies and employers from denying legitimate workers’ comp claims filed by undocumented workers. Berkes and Grabell showed that some employers and insurance companies, in order to avoid paying claims, reported workers to immigration authorities, and had some jailed and deported.
Berkes and Grabell also exposed an effort to circumvent state-regulated workers’ compensation plans, violate state requirements for benefits, and avoid state oversight. This so-called “opt-out” movement was actually initiated in Oklahoma but the Berkes/Grabell investigation and legal challenges prompted a state supreme court ruling declaring the “opt-out” system unconstitutional.
Berkes closed out his NPR career as an investigations correspondent. His reporting earned the IRE Medal (Investigative Reporters and Editors), the top investigative reporting award in the country, along with three other IRE awards, four Edward R Murrow Awards (in addition to two other Murrows for feature and sports reporting), among others.
Berkes' Olympic and investigative reporting have made him a resource to other news organizations, including The PBS Newshour, CNN, MSNBC, A&E's Investigative Reports, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the French magazine L'Express, Al Jazeera America and others.
In retirement, Berkes continues to mentor and train reporters, provides consulting to public radio newsrooms, judges journalism awards contests, and is vice chair of the governing board of a new investigative non-profit, Public Health Watch, which is focused on public, environmental and occupational health.
In 2023, Berkes came out of retirement temporarily to follow-up on his earlier black lung investigations. This reporting for Public Health Watch, and with Louisville Public Media and Mountain State Spotlight, exposed serious shortcomings in the effort by federal regulators to propose long-delayed limits on silica dust exposure in coal and other mines. The reporting prompted the federal mine safety agency to consider changes in its proposal, and resulted in deeper reporting for NPR, as well as an NPR podcast segment detailing the history of Berkes’ black lung investigations.