The Irishman investigating some of the world’s worst crimes

Malachy Browne uses video and audio to piece together how major incidents really happened

Listen | 22:31
Blood and a lost shoe after the shooting in Las Vegas, 2017 where 60 concert goers were murdered. Photograph: Hilary Swift/The New York Times

Malachy Browne heads the New York Times’s visual investigations unit where he and his team investigate key events, from breaking news at home to war atrocities abroad, to piece together second-by-second what really happened.

The work exposes the truth of events, particularly ones that are shrouded in misinformation, conspiracy theories and official denials. He and his team have won two Pulitzer Prizes.

Investigations, presented on the New York Times website, range from uncovering the devastating sequence of events of the atrocity at Bucha in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to plotting exactly happened in 2017 when a gunman opened fire at a concert in Las Vegas killing 60 people.

On In the News he talks about these projects and more while explaining just how his team works, from 3D modelling and AI to painstakingly exploring satellite images and mining phone records, and how the Limerick man who began his career in Dublin before moving to New York works to stay one step ahead in a media landscape flooded with fake news.

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Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Declan Conlon.

Bernice Harrison

Bernice Harrison

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist and cohost of In the News podcast