T. Christian Miller

T. Christian Miller
File:T. Christian Miller Mug.jpg T. Christian Miller
Born	1970 Baltimore, MD, USA
Nationality	United States
Education	University of California, Berkeley
Occupation	Journalist, author
Employer	ProPublica
Known for	Investigative journalism
Spouse(s)	Leslie L. Miller

T. Christian Miller is an award-winning investigative reporter, author, and war correspondent working for ProPublica. He has been called one of the country's premier investigative reporters. He has focused on how multinational corporations operate in foreign countries, documenting human rights and environmental abuses. Miller has covered four wars — Kosovo, Colombia, Israel and the West Bank, and Iraq. He also covered the 2000 presidential campaign. He is a pioneer in the field of computer-assisted reporting and was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2012 to study innovation in journalism.

Career and Biography

Miller grew up in Charleston, S.C. His mother, Linda Miller, was a member of the local school board who focused on integration issues. His father, Donald H. Miller, was a research biochemist at the Medical University of South Carolina who specialized in the investigation of the kidney function of the Atlantic stingray. Miller graduated from Bishop England High School.

Miller began his career in journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He majored in English and minored in French while becoming the University Editor of the Daily Californian, an independent campus newspaper. After college, he worked for the St. Petersburg Times, now the Tampa Bay Times.

In 1997, he went to work for the Los Angeles Times. While at that paper, he covered local, national and international news, opening the newspaper's first bureau in Bogota, Colombia. Miller was briefly held prisoner by the leftist Colombian guerrilla group known as the FARC, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, an episode later documented in a short animated news feature. Two of his reporters were later held captive by a second Colombian leftist group, the ELN, or Ejército de Liberación Nacional.

Miller's investigative reporting in Colombia uncovered that a contractor for an American oil company, Occidental Petroleum, had helped to coordinate the bombing of civilians by the Colombian Air Force of a small town in northeastern Colombia which left 17 dead. His coverage of the Santo Domingo bombing led to the U.S. suspending military aid to the Colombian Air Force and to a judgement by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemning the Colombian government.

Miller became a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times based in Washington, D.C. While there, Miller served as the only journalist in the U.S. dedicated exclusively to covering the Iraqi reconstruction. Miller published a book on the subject, Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq. One reviewer called it one of the "indispensable" books documenting the war, in a trilogy that included George Packer's Assassins' Gate and Thomas Ricks' Fiasco.

In 2008, Miller was one of the founding employees of ProPublica, an independent, non-profit start-up dedicated to investigative reporting. While at ProPublica, Miller has published investigative projects with many of the country's leading news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Salon, National Public Radio, This American Life, ABC News 20/20 and PBS' Frontline.

Miller is a leading figure in innovation in journalism, especially in transparency, trust and data-driven journalism. He delivered the U.S. Army Creekmore Lecture in 2007, and has taught at the University of Southern California, Columbia University, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the College of Charleston. He spent a year at Stanford University as a Knight Fellow, studying transparency and new models of journalism.

Currently, Miller works for ProPublica and is a board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, or the IRE, the nation's largest organization of investigative journalists.

Honors and Awards

Miller has won numerous local, national and international awards. In 1999, he won the John B. Oakes Award for Environmental Journalism for his coverage of runaway growth in the Santa Monica Mountains. In 2004, he was awarded the Livingston Award for international reporting, one of the most competitive and prestigious reporting prizes in American journalism, for his coverage of children and war. In 2005, he won an Overseas Press Club award. In 2009, he won an Investigative Reporters and Editors award. In 2010, he won a George Polk award with Daniel Zwerdling of National Public radio for his work covering traumatic brain injuries in the U.S. military. In that same year, he was also given the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting on private contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2015, Miller, Marcela Gaviria, and colleagues from ProPublica and Frontline were awarded two News & Documentary Emmy Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Center For Justice and Human Rights award for their work documenting the support given by the Firestone Company to Charles Taylor, Liberia's former president and a convicted war criminal, during that country's civil war.