National Public Radio's Daniel Zwerdling has been breaking stories and informing the American public for three decades. His 2004 report on the treatment of detained immigrants earned him the Edward R. Murrow, the Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Robert F. Kennedy awards for investigative reporting. Here Zwerdling discusses the process of choosing his stories, the relationship between journalists and the Bush Administration, and what he learned as an eighth grade reporter.

EXPOSÉ: In "An Inside Job," you describe your investigative process and we see the evolution of a major story in the works. In your 30-year career, what have you determined are the earmarks of a big story? And what do you learn from the investigations that do not develop into full stories?

Zwerdling: Before I start digging into a potential story, I ask myself a couple of simple questions: should people across America care about this issue? And if so, why? I find myself hearing and reading too many sensational stories these days which make me feel, "Yeah, but ...so what?" And I don't want to waste NPR's listeners' precious time and money (our listeners support public radio, after all) investigating an issue which they might react to in the same way. So when I heard that a young immigrant named Richard Rust died in mysterious circumstances after the Department of Homeland Security detained him, I asked myself, "That's a tragedy for his family, but does his death raise important issues that touch everybody?" The more I investigated, the more the skeptical voice in my head answered, "Yes." Such as: do government officials treat immigrants with fairness, respect and dignity, the way our country is supposed to? Would you want loved ones or friends who are immigrants treated that way? Are government officials at Homeland Security and the Bureau of Prisons accountable to us taxpayers, who pay their salaries?

Occasionally, I spend time digging into a potential story, and then when I ask myself, "Should everybody care?" I reluctantly answer, "Nope." And I toss my notes in the trash and move on to another issue.

EXPOSÉ pays tribute to your profession by presenting the reporter's point-of-view on stories that made a major impact on society. Do you recall the moment you realized that investigative journalism was your calling? What other careers, if any, did you consider?

I dreamed briefly of politics, but gave it up after I lost the election for student government president in eighth grade. So I threw myself into the school newspaper - and wrote a stinging (and pompous) editorial criticizing the administration for not letting students eat lunch or hold dances in the school's courtyard. The principal almost relented and opened the courtyard, not quite - but it gave me a tantalizing sense that journalists could affect public policy. I had better luck a few years later, when I wrote an exposé for my college paper about a powerful developer who charged students a fortune to live in his apartment buildings, and then used his political clout to fend off hundreds of safety code violations. As a result of the story, the city council investigated the developer and the building code department.

"Good reporting is about hope, it's about the fact that we hope that if we educate enough people about what's going on with this particular issue that people will start to change things and make them better."
--NPR reporter Daniel Zwerdling

You've served as an investigative correspondent for National Public Radio since 1980, through four presidential administrations. Can you describe the way the relationship between journalists and the government has changed in the past 25 years?

Officials in every administration manipulate facts and twist the truth (and sometimes, just plain lie) whether they're Democrats or Republicans. They want every story to make them look good, just like the rest of us want photographs to make us look younger. But every journalist I know says that they've never had so much trouble getting information from government officials as they do under the Bush administration. And officials who've worked in the government for decades tell me that they've never been so scared of getting fired - or even prosecuted - for talking with journalists.

Before joining NPR, you reported for print publications including The New Republic and The Washington Post. What are the unique challenges - and rewards - of working in radio? And how does that translate to your work as a television correspondent on "NOW with Bill Moyers" [2002-2004] on PBS?

I still love writing for print, and I feel incredibly lucky that I got to work on TV with Bill Moyers. But radio has won me over. There's something about a pure voice leaping out of the radio which can grab us and shake us more than print or even pictures. Doing radio stories is harder than writing for newspapers and magazines, because there are so many more steps involved. Once we've done the basic research and interviewed sources over the phone, we're really just beginning -- because now we have to convince our sources to talk into a microphone, which intimidates a lot of people and makes them sound boring, or worse, it can make them clam up. Then we have to transfer hours and hours of interviews onto a computer; cut up the interviews into sound bites; assemble them like a montage; write and record a script; and finally, "mix" all the elements together in a studio, just like a music producer mixes the instrumentals and vocal tracks on a pop song. Reporters at NPR do all or most of those tasks themselves. But it's worth it: when a story works, listeners remember it for years.

For you, what's the most significant investigative story of your career?

One of the stories that haunts me most was about the modern slave trade - because it reminds me that stories can help and hurt people, both. In 1990, I met young girls in a prison in Pakistan who had been kidnapped and sold to men as fulltime maids and sex slaves. Some weren't even teenagers yet; I can still hear the high-pitched voice of a little kid who was probably not even 12. Why were she and the other girls in prison? Under Pakistan's laws at the time, females who had sex out of wedlock had committed a crime - and when slaves escaped their masters and ran to the police and told them what had happened, they were admitting that they had been having sex out of wedlock, right? So, police arrested the girls instead of the men who had kidnapped them. As a result of the story, international human rights groups pressured the government of Pakistan to release at least some of the slaves. That was good news, but here's the haunting part: I learned a year later that prison officials turned over the little girl to... the man who had kept her prisoner.

Find out more about Daniel Zwerdling here