Donald L. Barlett, an award-winning investigative journalist whose partnership with a fellow reporter, James B. Steele, at The Philadelphia Inquirer exposed numerous cases of corruption by public officials and in one instance laid bare how a growing wage gap and federal tax law were shrinking the nation’s middle class, died on Saturday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 88.
His death, from a series of illnesses, was confirmed by his son, Matthew, on Wednesday.
Over four decades, Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele’s investigative prowess, rooted in deep, systematic research and complex analysis of issues and institutions that profoundly affected Americans, resulted in two Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting (they were finalists for the award six times), six George Polk awards and various other honors.
They delved into the genesis of the oil crisis in the early 1970s, inequities in the operations of the Internal Revenue Service and dysfunction in the troubled U.S. health care system. Their exposés, which could take months or years to produce, were made possible by the full support of The Inquirer, which gave them the time and resources they needed.
Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele’s multipart series on the middle class, in 1991, attributed its shrinking to a widening gulf in income between the top and bottom wage earners and changes in federal tax law that favored the wealthy. It won several awards and was expanded into a book, “America: What Went Wrong?” (1992), which sat atop the New York Times best-seller list for weeks.
When he ran for president in 1992, Bill Clinton waved a copy of the book at his rallies and told audiences that it had changed his thinking about the crisis of the middle class.
Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele never achieved the outsize celebrity of some of their peers, but they were lauded within the profession.
In a 1976 book, “The New Muckrakers,” Leonard Downie Jr., a journalist and longtime executive editor of The Washington Post, wrote that the pair’s reporting “represents a significant step beyond traditional muckraking.”
“Rather than depending on clandestine meetings with mysterious anonymous sources and purloined secret documents,” he wrote, “it relies on what is already available somewhere on the crowded public record. Instead of just reporting still unproven accusations and focusing on individual corruption, it reveals with expert analysis and thorough documentation what has systematically gone wrong with the powerful, complex institutions that affect so much of life today.”
David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer-winning former reporter for The New York Times and a former president of the organization Investigative Reporters and Editors, said of Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele in an interview: “They are far and away the best investigative team of all time. There are lots of great investigative reporters, but nobody has their sustained track record.”
When Mr. Barlett arrived at The Inquirer in September 1970, he was already an experienced investigative journalist. Mr. Steele started work at the newspaper on the same day, though the two covered different beats. They began talking one day about a story that Mr. Steele was working on, about possible fraud in a Federal Housing Administration program aimed at rehabilitating and selling low-income housing. They decided, without consulting their editors, to visit City Hall and check the deed and mortgage records.
Combing through handwritten ledgers, they uncovered enough unusual activity involving the housing program to raise red flags — something was clearly awry in the way properties were being purchased and flipped by unscrupulous developers.
After suggesting to The Inquirer’s executive editor that there might be a good story buried in those ledgers, they were assigned to work on it together. The project took much of the next year, and the resulting series uncovered widespread corruption and fraud in the program. The series won several national journalism awards.
The two spent the next 40 years producing award-winning investigative series for The Inquirer and later Time magazine and Vanity Fair.
Mr. Barlett, a low-key, often prickly introvert who was seven year older than Mr. Steele, couldn’t have been more different from his longtime partner.
“Nobody could figure out how the two of us ever worked together,” Mr. Steele said in an interview for this obituary this year. Outgoing and affable, Mr. Steele handled speeches and appearances on their behalf. But professionally they had much in common.
“We both loved to expose hypocrisy of public officials,” Mr. Steele said. “We had spent enough time in journalism to know how many stories existed behind the headlines.”
Mr. Steele said Mr. Barlett possessed a quality critical to investigative journalism: fortitude. “Don was a very patient person; setbacks didn’t get to him,” he said. “He was a very low-key guy, but he had a very short fuse when it came to hypocrisy of people in power.”
Donald Leon Barlett was born on July 17, 1936, in DuBois, in west-central Pennsylvania, to James and Mary (Wineberg) Barlett. His father was an insurance salesman while his mother ran the home.
In 1955, Don Barlett dropped out of Penn State University after a year to become a general assignment reporter for The Reading Times in Pennsylvania. Leaving that job to join the U.S. Army in 1958, he became a special agent for the Army Counter Intelligence Corps, serving for three years, before returning to journalism.
After stints as a reporter in Cleveland, Chicago and Akron, Ohio, Mr. Barlett landed at The Inquirer in 1970.
His first marriage, to Shirley Jones, ended in divorce. In addition to his son, Matthew, from his first marriage, Mr. Barlett is survived by his wife, Eileen M. Reynolds, whom he married in 1998; a stepson, Thomas Reynolds; a brother, Richard; and a sister, Sandra Kulokowski. Mr. Barlett’s stepson Sean Reynolds died in 2001.
At The Inquirer, Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele’s investigative work was known for its resourcefulness. Starting in 1972, while investigating Philadelphia’s criminal court system, the two spent months compiling details from more than 1,000 cases of violent crime in the previous year to illuminate how unfairly the courts were meting out justice.
As part of that project, they enlisted a computer-savvy colleague who helped them use an IBM mainframe computer to comb through the mountains of data. It was a pioneering use of computer technology at the time, and it helped produce a seven-part series in 1973 about the failures of the city’s criminal justice system.
“What impressed many readers was the level of sophistication in the findings, which of course were only made possible by the computer analysis,” Mr. Steele wrote in a 2015 article for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference.
In 1979, the two switched gears and collaborated on a lengthy and well-received biography of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.
Their first Pulitzer Prize came in 1975, for their series “Auditing the Internal Revenue Service,” which exposed unequal application of federal tax laws. Their second was awarded in 1989, for a 15-month investigation of inequities in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 that, as the Pulitzer citation said, “aroused such widespread public indignation that Congress subsequently rejected proposals giving special tax breaks to many politically connected individuals and businesses.”
Looking back on their partnership in an interview on C-SPAN in 2013, Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele praised their editors for encouraging them always to dig deeper into a story. But sometimes, Mr. Barlett said, the editors would get more than they wished for.
“Because we just kept producing more and more and more,” Mr. Barlett said. “Later, one of our editors said of us: ‘Don’t ask them any questions. It will generate another 50 inches of copy.’”
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