Cash Cows & Cowboy Starter Kits

When The Washington Post took on the multibillion-dollar system of federal agricultural subsidies, a reporting team interviewed hundreds of sources, pored over thousands of documents and analyzed a database of 217 million payment records.  The result?  The paper identified over 15 billion taxpayer dollars spent on what it called "wasteful, unnecessary or redundant expenditures."

Thursday, May 1, 2008: Who really benefits from the Farm Bill? Watch this web-exclusive video featuring Congressman Ron Kind (D-WI), Texas farmer Ed Gangl, and the investigative team at The Washington Post.

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Monday, April 21, 2008: Listen to the latest edition of The Exposé Sessions - Tom Casciato's streaming audio interviews with some of America's top journalists. In this session:

Thursday, April 10, 2008: This week on Exposé: a new episode online and on Bill Moyers Journal (check local listings). Washington Post reporters unravel the tangled system of farm subsidies. Read the paper's original reporting, a series of articles which identified more than $15 billion of wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars over a five-year period of the program. Meet the reporters who brought their extraordinary investigative and computer-assisted reporting skills to the project. And hear from the Exposé producer who traveled to Texas to meet a real farmer struggling to make it under the current system.


Next on The Exposé Sessions: James O'Shea, former editor, Los Angeles Times.