By Richard Tofel

As we did four years ago, we asked Richard Tofel, ProPublica's president and author of a book on President Kennedy's inaugural address, to provide instant analysis of today's speech. Here are his thoughts:

In 2009, in the flush of his first election, Barack Obama declared...

By Stephen Engelberg

Mexico's regional newspapers are publishing more stories about murders linked to the drug trade, but they remain reluctant to write what they know about the organizations responsible for the killings.

A new study by our colleagues at Fundación MEPI, an investigative journalism center...

By Mike Webb, ProPublica.

Yesterday, Peter Sleeth was a guest on PBS NewsHour to discuss his ProPublica/Seattle Times investigation into how the U.S. military mismanaged crucial war records from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and why that makes it more difficult for veterans to collect disability...

By Marshall Allen, ProPublica.

I was recently browsing through the nearly 200 stories we've compiled with our Patient Harm Questionnaire, when I was reminded again of a troubling truth. Many of the people who suffer harm while undergoing medical care do not file formal complaints with regulators....

By Stephen Engelberg and Kim Barker

The emergence of nonprofits as the leading conduit for anonymous spending in this year's presidential campaign is often attributed to the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which opened the money spigot, allowing corporations and unions to...

By Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein and Marshall Allen

NYU's Langone Medical Center announced this week that it was adopting new procedures after the death of a 12-year old boy from septic shock. The hospital's emergency room sent Rory Staunton home in March and then failed...

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica.

Did the fracking debate dredge up 'Dallas' -- the redux -- or was this soap opera's resurgence just another convenient mirror in which to reflect how central the nation's debate over energy has now become in our culture?

Either way, the show's creators seem...

By Jeff Larson and Al Shaw, ProPublica.

Political campaigns are using increasingly sophisticated methods to target messages to voters, methods that are not at all transparent. We need your help to uncover and understand them.

Back in March, we noticed that the Obama campaign was sending out

By Lois Beckett, ProPublica.

Instead of picketing outside company headquarters, an advocacy group is using Facebook ads to try to influence people whose profiles identify them as employees of Freddie Mac or JPMorgan Chase.

The anti-foreclosure ad campaign, which launches today, asks Freddie and Chase employees...

By Lois Beckett, ProPublica

An investigative series [1] by the New York Times and a performance piece by Mike Daisey [2] featured on This American Life [3] have put the spotlight on Foxconn [4], the Taiwanese company whose massive Chinese factories manufacture some of...

By Richard Tofel, ProPublica

Holiday time is the season for giving of all sorts -- including supporting organizations and causes that make a difference. We hope that, as the end of the year approaches, you'll consider a tax-deductible donation to ProPublica.

There are lots of ways we...

By Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica

Politico's story on possible sexual harassment [2] by Herman Cain may be the biggest investigative scoop of the campaign season. But it would be hard to deduce that from the facts as published.

The story lacks the key details needed to judge whether the...

By Tracy Weber, and Charles Ornstein, ProPublica

Your doctor gives you an expensive new drug to control your cholesterol, or recommends a certain brand of artificial hip, or says you need a stent to open a clogged artery.

He's the expert. But how do you know his...

By Nicholas Kusnetz, ProPublica

Natural gas - often touted as an abundant, comparatively clean source of domestic energy - has come under intensifying public scrutiny in recent months, with federal regulators and reporters challenging some of the industry's rosy business projections.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is probing...

By Sharona Coutts, and Al Shaw, ProPublica

The U.S. Department of Education recently released the largest and most comprehensive snapshot of the educational opportunities afforded to millions of students across the country. The new data include information on which students are taking advanced courses often tied to...

By Lois Beckett, ProPublica

Outgoing Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairwoman Sheila C. Bair's revealing exit interview by the New York Times' Joe Nocera [1] has generated plenty of buzz. But while the interview provided a comprehensive look at Bair's role from 2006 to 2011, what caught our...

By Paul Kiel, ProPublica

Four years into the foreclosure crisis, banks say they've made major improvements in how they handle struggling homeowners. They've promised, for example, not to foreclose on homeowners who are being considered for mortgage modifications. But that's still happening.

Consider the cases of Laurie Pinkerton and...

By Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica

HBO's Too Big To Fail -- I just caught up with it last night, thanks to HBO On Demand -- is extraordinarily revealing about the financial crisis. Only its revelations are almost entirely inadvertent.

The movie is set up in the Hollywood conventional way: A...

By Tracy Weber, ProPublica

The week's news about the sexual conduct of politically powerful men gives me a queasy feeling of déjà vu.

As the French agonize over whether Dominique Strauss-Kahn's star power quashed past allegations, I can respond cynically: Yes, that probably happened. But we should not...

By Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica

Today's publication of our story on the threat posed by fire to nuclear power plants offers readers a rare opportunity. Two excellent journalists, working independently of each other, have produced a detailed investigative story on the same subject.

Susan Q. Stranahan, a former...