If media outlets measure their success by public influence, then ProPublica is having a banner year. Since the investigative nonprofit published the first of five stories about Justice Clarence Thomas’ social connections, popular news outlets and the Democratic Party have made the series the most-discussed “scandal” of 2023.
Thomas’ friend Harlan Crow has become internet clickbait, which amounts today to a household name, and Democratic lawmakers have argued Thomas should resign. Through it all, another figure, whose past and present are equally important to the series, has remained remarkably free from scrutiny: Stephen Engelberg, the longtime New York Times reporter, founding managing editor, and then editor-in-chief of ProPublica who oversaw the Thomas investigation.
This is a major elision. If Thomas’ career tells one kind of 30-year story, of a black conservative jurist in Washington, D.C., Engelberg’s tells another: a story in which, unlike Justice Thomas, his alleged transgressions are directly tied to his work. Since 1992, even in the judgment of some of his peers, Engelberg made his reputation by turning investigative reporting into an exercise in false insinuations and reputational slander at the expense of asking who’s abusing power and where power lies.
The two series that marked and failed to derail Engelberg’s pre-ProPublica career, Whitewater and the case of Wen Ho Lee, were early journalistic forays down this compromised path. Like the Thomas series, they were headline-grabbing investigations with outsized effects marred by questionable assertions that Washington players used for their own ends. They open
