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“The question that has always troubled me as a reporter is that the government will tell you exactly how many people have died in combat in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they fail to keep track of the number of people who die when they come home.”
– Aaron Glantz, reporter for CIR

On Jan. 17, I interviewed CIR reporter Aaron Glantz in a 28-minute conference call with members of CIR, California Watch and The Bay Citizen.

We wanted to allow our members to hear directly from Aaron about his ongoing investigation into the state of veterans affairs across the U.S.

To hear the audio, click on the link below:

Some of the topics you’ll hear Aaron discuss:

• His time spent reporting in Iraq
• What led him from covering the impact of the war on Iraqi citizens to investigating the treatment of U.S. veterans back home
• The most important sources of information for his reporting: veterans, their relatives and people involved with the Department of Veterans Affairs
• How his reporting is creating a national dialogue about the government’s treatment of veterans, including the 2.4 million who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars

I hope you will share this recording with your friends, family and followers. This is the first in a series of short updates intended to take you behind the scenes – and expand the impact – of our investigations.

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Robert J. Rosenthal

Robert J. Rosenthal is the chief executive officer at The Center for Investigative Reporting. Rosenthal was the executive director of CIR from January 2008 to spring 2017. When he joined CIR, it had a staff of seven and when he left, it had a staff of nearly 70 and was recognized as one of the leading nonprofit newsrooms in the country. He is an award-winning journalist and worked for some of the most respected newspapers in the country, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle. Rosenthal worked for 22 years at The Inquirer, starting as a reporter and eventually becoming its executive editor in 1998. He became managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2002 and left in 2007. During this time, he led the investigation into the murder of journalist Chauncey Bailey. That work became known as the award-winning Chauncey Bailey Project. Before joining The Inquirer in 1979, Rosenthal worked for six years as a reporter at The Boston Globe and three and a half years at The New York Times, where he was a news assistant on the foreign desk and an editorial assistant on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pentagon Papers project. As a reporter, Rosenthal won numerous awards, including the Overseas Press Club Award for magazine writing, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for distinguished foreign correspondence and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Third World reporting. He was a Pulitzer finalist in international reporting and was a Pulitzer judge four times. He has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Rosenthal is also currently advising or on the board of multiple journalism nonprofits. In 2018, Rosenthal was named a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists for his “extraordinary contribution to the profession of journalism.”