T. Christian Miller

Career and biography[edit]

Miller grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. His mother, Linda Miller, was a member of the local school board who focused on integration issues.^[6] His father, Donald H. Miller, was a research biochemist at the Medical University of South Carolina.^[7] 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.^[8] After college, he worked for the St. Petersburg Times, now the Tampa Bay Times.^[9]


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,^[10] an episode later documented in a short animated news feature.^[11] Two of his reporters were later held captive by a second Colombian leftist group, the ELN, or Ejército de Liberación Nacional.^[12]


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.^[13] His coverage of the Santo Domingo bombing led to the U.S. suspending military aid to the Colombian Air Force^[14] and to a judgement by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemning the Colombian government.^[15]


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.^[16] Miller published a book on the subject, Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq.^[17]


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 various news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times,^[18] The New York Times,^[19] The Washington Post,^[20] Newsweek,^[21] Salon,^[22] National Public Radio,^[23] This American Life,^[24] ABC News 20/20^[25] and PBS' Frontline.^[26]


Miller is a leading figure in innovation in journalism, especially in transparency, trust and data-driven journalism.^[27] He delivered the U.S. Army Creekmore Lecture in 2007, and has taught at the University of Southern California, Columbia University, Stanford University,^[28] 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.^[29] Miller has served as treasurer and board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, or the IRE, the nation's largest organization of investigative journalists.