Dave Lindorff

Lindorff graduated from Wesleyan University in 1972 with a BA in Chinese language. He then received an MS in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1975. A two-time Fulbright Scholar (Shanghai, 1991-2 and Taiwan, 2004), he was also a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University in 1978-79.

In 2019, he was a winner of an "Izzy" for "Outstanding Independent Journalism" awarded by the Park Center for Independent Media. The prize, honored his career work as an investigative journalism and especially his December 2018 Nation cover story "Exclusive: the Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed," which showed how the Pentagon has been simply making up the numbers in over two decades of annual financial reports submitted to Congress in "support" of ever higher funding requests for each next year's budgets.

He is also founding editor of the collectively run journalism news site ThisCantBeHappening!, along with six other journalists: Laurie Dobson, John Grant, Jess Guh, Alfredo Lopez, Ron Ridenour and Linn Washington, Jr., along and resident poet Gary Lindorff. The news site since its founding in June 2010 has won seven Project Censored awards for its coverage (six of them for Lindorff's articles), and was labeled a "threat" in a memo TCBH! obtained through a FOIA filing with the Dept. of Homeland Security which was sent to all US Fusion Centers warning that ThisCantBeHappeing.net had published an article by Lindorff exposing the central role played by DHS in orchestrating the nationwide city-by-city violent police crackdown on the Occupy Movement in late 2011. Lindorff responded by including on the site's home page Masthead the phrase: "The only news organization in the US to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security"

A former bureau chief covering Los Angeles County government for the Los Angeles Daily News, and a reporter-producer for PBS station KCET in Los Angeles and its Emmy-winning investigative news program "28-Tonight," Lindorff was also a founder and editor of the weekly Los Angeles Vanguard newspaper, established in 1976, where he won the Grand Prize of the Los Angeles Press Club for his reporting as well as an award for Best Article in a Weekly. Lindorff also worked at the Minneapolis Tribune (now the Star Tribune), the Santa Monica Evening Outlook and the Middletown Press in Connecticut.

Lindorff [4] wrote an exposé showing how colleges refuse to provide official/sealed transcripts to former students “late in their payments” or “in default”, thereby ensuring those students cannot transfer to another school in the U.S. until the initial school is satisfied with its debt collection.[5] Lindorff has called the practice “extortive”.[4]

He is the author of four books, the most recent being The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office, written with attorney Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights, as well as Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.[6] That work, published in 2003 by Common Courage Press, Lindorff's book "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu JamalMumia Abu-Jamal.,[7][6] was reviewed by Steve Weinberg (the son of a cop) in the Philadelphia Inquirer (a paper that has been no supporter of Abu-Jamal!) who called it: “The most thorough book yet by an author without direct involvement in the murder case.” Another reviewer, M.A. Foley, wrote in "Choice" magazine: “The death row case of Mumia Abu-Jamal remains contentious. Lindorff removes much of that contention….No one can walk away from this book believing that justice has been done, on behalf of either the slain officer or the convicted Abu-Jamal. Summing it up: Highly recommended." Crime magazine wrote: "New favorite: A groundbreaking review of the case involving Mumia Abu-Jamal, while Charles M. Young, in "Z Magazine, wrote: "A relentless and resourceful reporter...a vast symphony of facts that establishes a number of compelling themes in search of a grand finale compatible with justice."

Lindorff has long been active on journalistic issues and was a founder of the National Writers Union in 1983, serving for many years in leadership positions in that union. He was also active in the Hong Kong Journalists Assn. during his five years in Hong Kong, when he was a correspondent for Businessweek magazine.

• Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains, Bantam, 1992, ISBN 0-553-07552-7
• Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Common Courage, 2003, ISBN 1-56751-229-1
• This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy, Common Courage, 2005, ISBN 1-56751-298-4
• The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (with Barbara Olshansky), Thomas Dunne, 2006, ISBN 0-312-36016-9

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