ABC 15’s Dave Biscobing talks about his ‘dream job’
Dave Biscobing is an award-winning investigative reporter for ABC 15 in Phoenix, but when he talks about his work he sometimes sounds like a meteorologist.
“To me it’s like a snowball effect,” Biscobing said of investigative work. “In our newsroom, me and some of our managers, we refer to it as creating our own weather. At some point you start doing stories of major significance, and those stories, those reports and those investigations continue to bring in more stories and reports and investigations. You’re literally creating a weather pattern.”
The team Biscobing leads won a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award earlier this summer — its second Peabody in two years. The 2022 award was for the station’s “Politically Charged” investigation into corruption in the Phoenix Police Department and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
The 2021 award was for the station’s investigative series “Full Disclosure,” which exposed problems with Arizona’s “Brady” lists, which track police officers with histories of dishonesty, false arrests, crimes and concerns about integrity.
Biscobing’s work has also won three national Emmy Awards, a duPont-Columbia Award and the U.S. Hillman Prize, among others.
It’s refreshing. Sometimes TV news stations will tout their investigative work and it turns out they got someone a rebate on a toaster oven. Biscobing specializes more in corruption, misdeeds, the kind of behavior institutions and powerful people understandably don’t want anyone to find out about.
Biscobing is from Milwaukee but went to Arizona State University
ABC 15 has focused on investigative work, and it’s become a priority.
“Internally we call it a pillar,” Biscobing said. “It is a foundational piece of what we do. We believe it is vitally important for us to be a station that investigates corruption, wrongdoing and to hold our officials and institutions accountable. I know that sounds like corporate-speak but it is a pillar of what we do. It is an intense focus.”
It has been for a while for Biscobing. He’s from Milwaukee, but went to Arizona State University with a plan. (This does not prevent him from rooting for the University of Wisconsin.)
“Why I picked ASU was not only did they have a good journalism school, it was in a big city,” Biscobing said. A quaint college town has its charms, he figured, but not the opportunity for internships and jobs that Phoenix does.
“To me, it seemed like a smart move, and I think it did pay off.”
Biscobing landed an internship at the East Valley Tribune, which led to a fulltime job there. He worked a public safety beat.
“Just the tone and tenor of my reports there had a little more bite to them,” he said. “Very quickly in my career I realized that’s the position I want — I want to be an investigative reporter.”
He just wasn’t going to do it at the Tribune. Biscobing left the paper in 2008 for ABC 15. His timing was good.
“A month after I left they laid off half the staff,” he said. “I might have been done, right then and there. Sometimes we get lucky. My career I think is a product of both hard work but also we all get lucky. Sometimes we step into the right position at the right time.”
The false claim that launched Biscobing’s career
Biscobing looks back to a 2011 story he did at ABC 15 as the real jumping-off point. Phoenix police had claimed there was an average of almost one kidnapping a day.
“I thought to myself, as a much younger reporter, if that was happening there would literally be like military installations on street corners,” he said. “There’s no way that’s true.”
He looked into it. A panel found that there was no orchestrated attempt to inflate statistics, but an investigation found several failures in record keeping and reporting.
“From that point forward I realized there might not be a lot that I actually will ever believe at face value anymore, and that’s kind of served me right,” he said.
The method is straightforward. “The theory for me is just never stop asking for more,” Biscobing said. “Based on that very simple principle I’m astounded by what I find.”
Local news is ‘where you can have the most impact’
As newsroom resources have dwindled, the opportunity for improper and illegal behavior going unchecked increases; it’s one of the great dangers to democracy. But it also creates opportunity for those who challenge it.
“There’s a lot that’s going wrong,” Biscobing said. “When they see someone who’s finally willing to do it, to ask some tough questions, get in people’s faces and not just take excuses, they come forward. Our story list is a mile long. Once you get started you really just can’t stop. I think that’s reflective of that.”
The whole creating your own weather pattern thing, again — when it rains, it pours.
“What I lose the most sleep over are the stories I can’t get to,” Biscobing said. “There’s so much that we hear about that we don’t have the bandwidth to get to ourselves. … I know there’s so much more that we could be informing the public about.”
It sounds as if he’ll have the opportunity to. Biscobing has no plans to leave anytime soon.
“We don’t know what the future holds, but I can’t see myself doing any other job than being an investigative reporter in a local news market,” he said. “It’s where I think you can have the greatest impact. This is my dream job.”