I’m thrilled to announce that Ken Bensinger is joining The Times to pioneer a new beat covering right-wing media as part of the democracy team on the Politics desk.
Ken comes to us from BuzzFeed News, where he was a charter member of its investigations team, reporting on campaign finance, the perils of Amazon’s delivery network and political disinformation. Early in the pandemic, his reporting pushed the Food and Drug Administration to reverse itself and allow KN95 masks into the country. And he uncovered the story of a Silicon Valley engineer paid $69 million for ventilators he never delivered.
After the Jan. 6 riot, he turned his sights on the Oath Keepers, delivering a groundbreaking profile of Stewart Rhodes, unpacking the group’s precarious finances and revealing that Sidney Powell had been quietly financing the criminal defense of some Oath Keeper defendants. And he delved into the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case in Michigan, poring over thousands of pages of court documents and sourcing up on the right to understand the rising threat of armed militant groups. But his reporting led him to challenge both the government’s official narrative and the F.B.I.’s playbook for tackling domestic terrorism. It revealed that the lead F.B.I. agent was running a secret security business — leading the D.O.J. to cut him and two other agents from its witness list — and that one of the primary informants was a recidivist felon whom the government eventually labeled a “double agent.”
That digging was terrific preparation for Ken’s new beat, filled as it is with people who reject mainstream narratives and question the institutions that hold up our democracy. Understanding the way information is developed, circulated and absorbed on the right is vital at this precarious moment, and requires a healthy measure of patience, empathy and understanding along with investigative chops, skepticism and toughness.
A Seattle native and Duke graduate, Ken has taken a somewhat circuitous path to The Times, from The Wall Street Journal, where he covered the art market, to Mexico City, where he freelanced and honed his now-fluent Spanish, to SmartMoney, where his first stab at investigative reporting was a 7,000-word takeout on how the old Zagat restaurant-review empire manipulated its rating system.
He went on to cover the auto industry at the Los Angeles Times, where he and a colleague were finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting, and won a Gerald Loeb Award, for their coverage of the Toyota sudden-acceleration scandal. Ken won a second Loeb in 2012 for a project on predatory subprime used-car lending that, among other things, told the tale of a Kia that was sold, repossessed and resold eight times by the same dealer. He also wrote memorably about a lifetime first-class ticket that American Airlines, perhaps unwisely, sold in the 1980s.
At BuzzFeed, he shared a National Magazine Award for a series on the H-2 temporary work visa program, which brings in thousands of laborers from around the world each year and is rife with exploitation, neglect and at times stomach-turning abuse. And a profile of an American soccer official led to a 2018 book about the FIFA corruption scandal, “Red Card,” which was named The Telegraph’s Football Book of the Year.
He starts Monday. Please welcome him.
—David
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August 18, 2022 at 07:30PM
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Ken Bensinger Joins Politics Reporting Team - The New York Times Company
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