Florence Graves

Florence George Graves is an American journalist and the founding director of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

She is an award-winning investigative reporter and editor whose work focuses on exposing abuses of government and corporate power, and on revealing inequities between the powerful and the powerless. She also is a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center.[1] As an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, she and a colleague broke the Senator Bob Packwood sexual misconduct story,[2] which led to an historic three-year Senate investigation followed by a Senate Ethics Committee vote to expel him and then his forced resignation. She has received a number of prestigious fellowship awards, including from the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute, the Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship [3] in 1993 and the Pope Foundation.

In the 1980's, Graves founded the award-winning and nationally circulated political and investigative journal, Common Cause Magazine.[4] It became the largest circulation political magazine in the country (250,000), and the only one whose primary focus was investigative reporting. A 2003 article in Folio magazine said, “If Common Cause Magazine threw a reunion, it would look like a convention of today’s top investigative reporters. With a brand of muckraking that belonged more to the era of Ida Tarbell than of Rupert Murdoch, the magazine attracted and nurtured journalists who had a zeal for exposing the abuses of the powerful.” [5]

Her work there led to congressional hearings[6] and to reforms in public policies, and has received such prestigious awards as the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award[6] and the 1987 National Magazine Award for General Excellence,[7][8] the highest award given in magazine journalism.