Mr. Steele is one-half of a remarkable investigative journalism team that first achieved fame at the Philadelphia Inquirer and now toils for Time magazine.
He and longtime colleague Donald L. Barlett have painstakingly examined American business and government for three decades, and they are considered among the preeminent investigative reporters of this era.
They twice won Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting--in 1975 for a series, "Auditing the Internal Revenue Service," and in 1989 for a 15-month investigation that looked into the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Both awards came when they wrote for the Inquirer, where they worked for 27 years.
The team also has won four George Polk awards and two Loeb awards.
Their most recent Polk award came in 1999 in the category of national reporting for a four-part series about corporate welfare that ran in Time in November 1998. The articles debunked the notion that corporate welfare and incentives always generate jobs and benefit the economy.
It was Time's first-ever investigative series, and it generated hundreds of letters to the magazine. They interviewed several hundred people in 24 states for 18 months for the series, which revealed, "The federal government shells out $125 billion a year in corporate welfare. ... Companies get government money to advertise their products; to help build new plants, offices and stores; and to train their workers. ..."
But their main conclusion questioned the entire notion of corporate welfare; Mr. Steele says the most surprising thing he learned was that it does not always create more jobs.