Inside PBS Blog

The most compelling voice in last night's "Frontline/World" investigation into human smuggling along the Mexican border was just that - a voice.

Viewers never got to see "Rafael," the smuggler profiled in the report, because he agreed to go on camera on one condition: Producers couldn't show his face. No matter. Even though he spoke from the shadows, Rafael illuminated the mindset of migrants desperate to come to the United States. "[Human smuggling] will stop only when there's no borders," Rafael said at the end of last night's report, which can be streamed here. "Unless you can stop poverty or hunger, it will never stop because people will always want to help their families." So how did Lowell Bergman, the reporter who led last night's "Frontline/World" investigation, find Rafael? "I really can't answer that," Lowell told me when I reached him on the phone yesterday. "It was through trusted individuals."

Lowell has been reporting on crime and corruption along the border for almost 40 years, so finding smugglers willing to share their stories wasn't all that tough. What proved more difficult: getting Michael Chertoff to talk. The nation's homeland security chief wouldn't agree to a sit down with "Frontline/World," although Lowell and his camera crew got him to answer a question at a press conference. "I was kind of surprised he wouldn't talk about this," Lowell says, noting that two other administration officials, Chertoff predecessor Tom Ridge and Vice President Cheney, have given Lowell interviews in the past. Lowell had hoped someone from the administration could answer a key question: How many immigrants cross the Mexican border illegally each year? "When I interviewed the local officials, they said you have to go to Washington for that. I would ask, 'What's the U.S. estimate for how many people cross the border?' And they don't have one." The months-long "Crimes at the Border" investigation was the latest collaboration between "Frontline/World," the New York Times and journalism students at UC Berkeley, where Lowell teaches. Lowell is a reporter for the Times as well as a Frontline producer, and the collaboration was designed to bring to bear the complementary strengths of broadcast and print on important stories. And now the Web extends the same investigations online. In addition to last night's broadcast, the Times published a companion piece yesterday, and the "Frontline/World" site offers extended interviews, essays and other features.

Questions of the day: How balanced do you think the "Crimes at the Border" investigation was? Do you trust sources that you cannot see? And have you ever used multiple media to take in the same story, such as reading the piece in the New York Times and watching the Frontline broadcast on the Web?