Award-winning investigative reporter Dave Lindorff has been raking the journalistic muck now for 38 years, since he started out reporting the goings-on of three small towns at the mouth of the Connecticut River for the Middletown Press in 1972.
A regular columnist for Counterpunch.org, he has also written for such diverse and seemingly mutually exclusive publications as BusinessWeek, the Nation, Extra!, Treasury & Risk, and Rolling Stone. In the late 1970s, he co-founded an award-winning alternative weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard, and later ran a bureau covering Los Angeles County government for the Los Angeles Daily News. In the mid-’90s he spent several years as a correspondent in Hong Kong and China for Businessweek.
Co-author, along with Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin’s Press, June 2006 and paperback 2007), he is also the author of three earlier books: This Can’t Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy (Common Courage Press, 2004), Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For Profit Hospital Chains (Bantam, 1992), and Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003).
Lindorff opted for a journalism career late in his final semester at Wesleyan University, where he had majored in Chinese language, when, on a whim, he signed up for a journalism class offered by the editor of the local paper, the Middletown Press. Doing a homework reporting assignment on a routine truck crash story, he stumbled upon a secret underground office for the Midldetown city government to use in the event of nuclear war, set up behind a blast door under a new fire department building. Appalled at the sight of labeled desks for officials like “tax collector,” “assessor,” and “welfare director” in this subterranean tomb, he wrote a story about the discovery, received an A, and promptly decided, “This is the job for me!” He’s been reporting on the madness ever since.
In addition to writing, Lindorff is a folk musician (guitar, washtub base and saw). You can hear some of his songs on his myspace page
[img_assist|nid=16|title=Dave Lindorff|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=460|height=640]