About

Jason Dearen is an award-winning investigative journalist whose accountability reporting and narrative writing have prompted new legislation, changes to federal policy and a criminal indictment. As a member of the Associated Press national investigations team, he produced print, radio and documentary projects focused on public health, the environment, domestic extremism, immigration and the criminal justice system.

Dearen’s current project — an investigative collaboration between PBS FRONTLINE, the AP and local newsrooms at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and AL.com — is a print and documentary series examining the impact of toxic chemicals used in manufacturing on water systems across the U.S. Southeast.

Dearen’s investigative series chronicling a murder plot in Florida that exposed ties between the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement led to the AP’s first collaboration with Hulu. He served as a producer on the Hulu documentary, “Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan” (George Stephanopoulos Productions/ABC News/AP), which won the 2024 News and Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Crime and Justice Reporting.

Dearen and his AP reporting partner adapted their investigation of a legal loophole that allowed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to conceal child sex abuse cases into a podcast for Reveal/The Center for Investigative Reporting. The program, “Hidden Confessions of the Mormon Church,” aired nationally on NPR and won the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award for Radio.

As an independent journalist, Dearen authored the critically acclaimed book Kill Shot: A Shadow Industry, A Deadly Disease (Penguin Random House, 2021), which shed light on the compounding pharmaceutical industry and its weaknesses through the true-crime story of America’s deadliest drug contamination outbreak.

A 2018 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT/Harvard, Dearen has also received a Sloan Foundation Grant for the Public Understanding of Science and served as an Environmental Law Media Fellow at Vermont Law School. His individual and collaborative print work has garnered honors from Investigative Reporters & Editors, the Online News Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press Managing Editors and the Society of Environmental Journalists, and has received a George Polk Award.

A native of Southeast Los Angeles and first-generation college graduate, Dearen earned a B.A. in English Literature from San Francisco State University and an M.S. from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.