Charles Piller

speaker

984 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 17 Apr

Charles Piller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Passion Struck with John R. Miles · Alzheimer’s Research, Doctored Data, and the Human Cost | Charles Piller – EP 722 · 29 Jan 2026 podcast

I have been interested in this for a very long time, and at the risk of dating myself, I'm old enough to have been inspired by some of the investigative reporting way back in the Watergate era.

I was a kid then, but I was paying attention to what was going on.

and to me my inspiration has been the idea that through illuminating issues we can help inform the public and give people a better frame of reference for understanding our world and so i have been working in investigative reporting for a very long time i've done other kinds of journalism as well including technology reporting business reporting

And what has inspired me to do this is the hope and the thought that some of my articles could help people move in a direction of improving society and basically interrupting some corruption that might be causing harm to people.

And so that's been my inspiration, both when I worked for newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee, and now

writing almost exclusively for Science Magazine about issues of scientific research.

Sure.

I think one of the things that I face all the time is that we live in a complex world where more than one thing can be true at once.

There are contradictions that are often brought into high relief by investigative reporting.

Let me give you an example, not at the very beginning of my career, but this was about 20 years ago when I was working at the Los Angeles Times and I did a multi-part investigation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

and some of the difficult contradictions in their work.

This is an institution that's done great good in the world, in my opinion, has contributed to research that has helped turn back some terrible diseases and has been very generous in their support of important scientific research.

But at the same time, I found in my reporting that the organization was also making investments in

companies that were engaging in practices that directly contradicted their good works from their philanthropic efforts.

And so what my stories were trying to do is to explain that we live in this complex world where people can

be engaged in beneficial efforts, but also at the same time be doing things that contradict their work and that people need to look at those nuances and to understand how they shape our world.

Sure.

I think the similarities are that, and this is something I have to remind myself about because a lot of my work looks at problems, corruption, challenges, and difficulties in big systems and in big bodies of work, bodies of research.

And consequently, I have to guard against getting a kind of cynical attitude about it.

I think people of good intentions can make mistakes.

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