Smugglers and Guards
As investigative reporting budgets shrink while multimedia storytelling expands, I wonder if we'll see more joint efforts like the one between PBS' Frontline World and The New York Times that ran yesterday. "Mexico: Crimes at the Border" by Lowell Bergman and Andrew Becker for Frontline and "Border Agents Lured by the Other Side" by Randal C. Archibold and Becker for the Times are fascinating looks at the booming business of human smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border and the corruption it engenders. The stories take us to Tijuana to give us a smuggler's account of how the business works, and to San Diego, where a Customs and Border Protection inspector is caught allowing illegal immigrants into the country in return for sex and money. As usual, Frontline does an outstanding job with its Web presentation, offering us an interactive graphic of how smugglers operate, an interactive map of common border crossing points, a timeline of U.S. border policy and profiles of arrested customs officers and border agents. www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/mexico704/ and www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/us/27border.html?_r=1&oref=slogin