Secrets, Lies, and Democracy: Why It’s Time to Take a Stand

Join us for a conversation with veteran journalist Miranda Spivack, who has long written about government secrecy and the harm it inflicts on the nation. She will talk about her new book, Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back, winner of The New Press's Studs and Ida Terkel Prize for highlighting issues and communities that are often overlooked by the mainstream media.

The book is a practical playbook for aspiring activists ready to take action against the challenges coming out of D.C.

Miranda has worked for The Washington Post, The Hartford Courant, and other newspapers. Her work also has appeared in The New York Times, The Sacramento Bee, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, and USAToday.

Miranda Spivack's "State Secrets" series for revealnews.org forms the basis of her book Backroom Deals in Our Backyards about the underreported rise in state and local secrecy, seen through the eyes of five accidental activists who are confronted with barriers to information but find a way to overcome them and bring important change to their communities. The book was published in May by The New Press. The series was a winner of the Society for Professional Journalists' 2017 Sunshine Award.Miranda spent 20 years as an editor and reporter for The Washington Post, where as an editor on the Metro Desk, she designed a groundbreaking plan for local news coverage that resulted in deep coverage of under covered communities in the District, Maryland and Virginia. While at the Post, Miranda won several journalism awards, including First Place for Local Government Reporting in 2013 from the Maryland, Delaware, DC Press Association. Her stories, which she often finds by showing up, frequently look beyond the headlines to unearth issues that have not been surfaced, or have been overlooked.

A chance meeting at a planning board meeting, where she had shown up to cover a different issue, led to a series of stories in The Washington Post about special privileges granted to a wealthy landowner who did not want to abide by local water and sewer regulations. Her stories on immigration for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting exposed a massive backlog in the processing of citizenship applications, just as the Trump administration in 2017 was getting ready to put in place massive restrictions on immigrants, including thousands already in the country legally and holding proper papers. She published the Clean Slate series in The Sacramento Bee and other McClatchy papers about the risks and rewards of the massive national efforts to seal or expunge criminal records.

Since leaving The Washington Post, she has been a Journalism Fellow at the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida; a Fulbright Scholar in North Macedonia, where she taught journalism; the Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University; and an advising editor to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in Sarajevo. In 2019, she organized a curriculum and recruited and coached trainers for a project to train prospective journalists in North Macedonia, and worked as a journalism trainer for Internews. She frequently speaks to journalist organizations and other groups about open government issues and challenges. As a member of the DC Open Government Coalition, she is spearheading a training program for residents who are baffled by the complex array of requirements needed to extract information on government actions from their local governments.

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