Margaret Ebrahim

Senior Editor
Phone: (202) 577-5411
Mebrahim94@gmail.com

Margaret Ebrahim is a senior editor at the Investigative Reporting Workshop. For more than a decade, Ebrahim has been an award-winning investigative producer and journalist focusing on accountability journalism in the nation’s capital and beyond.  

Ebrahim was a producer for the CBS News program 60 Minutes II and the ABC News Brian Ross investigative unit. She also produced documentaries for the HDNet news and documentary program Dan Rather Reports, and she was a reporter on the multimedia investigative unit at the Associated Press.

Ebrahim has been awarded numerous citations for excellence in journalism. At 60 Minutes II, she won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for an investigation into children in India forced to make specialty cigarettes bound for the United States. At ABC News, she was part of a reporting and producing team that won a George Polk Award in Journalism and an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award as well as a News and Documentary Emmy Award for a report on Americans who purchased the organs of Chinese political prisoners before they were executed so they could get organ transplants in Chinese hospitals. As a Washington producer with Dan Rather Reports, Ebrahim was nominated in 2008 for two Emmy Awards for Business & Financial Reporting.

While Ebrahim pursued a Masters of Arts in U.S. Foreign Policy at American University in Washington, D.C., she helped to build one of the nation’s first non-profit, investigative journalism groups, the Center for Public Integrity, alongside the organization’s founder Charles Lewis. While she was at the Center, she won the group’s first award in 1996 from the Society of Professional Journalists for “The Fat Cat Hotel,” an examination of the connection between overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Clinton presidency and financial contributions to the Democratic Party as well as the Clinton re-election campaign.   Ebrahim graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans with a Bachelor’s degree in both Latin American Studies and Spanish.

Senior Editor Mishi Ebrahim talks about the challenge of putting a human face on an investigative report.

Stories written by Margaret Ebrahim

The story behind 'Lost in Detention' (October 14th, 2011)

Incubating new economic models for journalism.

Latest from iLab

Citizen journalists work undercover in North Korea to show daily life

Japanese journalists have been training citizens in North Korea to take audio and video recordings of everyday life in an effort to document the hardships, including food shortages, prevalent there. Meet the man behind the training, Jiro Ishimaru.

Most Recent Posts

New rules still don't cover immigrants

A zero-tolerance policy and a set of new rules to protect against sexual assault and rape in prisons nationwide were announced Thursday by the Justice Department. The new rules come nearly a decade after Congress mandated new rape protections for those behind bars under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003. But the new regulations won't immediately impact the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration detention centers, as it still has 120 days to write its own rules to comply with PREA and another 240 days to finalize them.

Knight moves to support donor transparency

The Knight Foundation has taken a major step in promoting transparency by requiring journalism and nonprofit grant seekers to disclose more information about their donors.

'Honor and privilege' to work with Mike Wallace

Charles Lewis, executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, remembers Mike Wallace. Lewis worked alongside Wallace at "60 Minutes."

Sunshine Week: A commitment to open government

Next week is the annual Sunshine Week observance, reminding us of the importance and value of open government.

NICAR Conference: Focus on products, tools, utilities

An overview of the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference.

Workshop Partners

We publish online and in print, often teaming up with other news organizations. We post quarterly updates to our BankTracker project, in which you can view the financial health of every bank and credit union in the country, with msnbc.com, and we co-publish stories in our What Went Wrong project with The Philadelphia Inquirer and New America Media. Learn more on our partners page.

America What Went Wrong

Donald Barlett and James Steele are revisiting America: What Went Wrong, their landmark 1991 newspaper series, in a new project with the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Over the next year, the project team will examine how four decades of public policy has shaped America's ongoing economic crisis.