Michael Gallagher (journalist)

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For other persons named Michael Gallagher, see Michael Gallagher (disambiguation).

Michael Gallagher (born c. 1958) was an investigative journalist for Gannett News Service. He joined the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1995, and reported and wrote an award-winning series the next year about problems with the cleanup of a uranium-processing plant.

On May 3, 1998, The Enquirer published an eighteen-page section, "Chiquita Secrets Revealed" on Chiquita Brands International, the Cincinnati-based fruit company formerly known as the United Fruit Company and then controlled by Carl Lindner. The articles, written by Gallagher and Cameron McWhirter, charged the company with mistreating the workers on its Central American plantations, polluting the environment, allowing cocaine to be brought to America on its ships, bribing foreign officials, evading foreign nations' laws on land ownership, forcibly preventing its workers from unionizing, and a host of other misdeeds. Chiquita denied all of the allegations, suing after it was revealed that one of the newspaper's reporters had hacked into Chiquita's voice-mail system. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate—the elected prosecutor having ties to Lindner. On June 28, 1998, The Enquirer retracted the entire series of stories, published a front-page apology, and paid the company a multi-million dollar settlement. (The Columbia Journalism Review would report both $14 million and $50 million for the amount.) One of the reporters, Gallagher, was fired and prosecuted and the paper's editor, Lawrence K. Beaupre, was transferred to an administrative position at Gannett's headquarters amid allegations that he ignored the paper's usual procedures on fact-checking in order to win a Pulitzer Prize.