Lee Zurik
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As the city of New Orleans's most honored investigative reporter, Lee has been uncovering and reporting impactful stories on WVUE since 2009. Following up his tenacious inquiries with detailed analysis and powerful storytelling, Lee delivers unprecedented accountability of government officials, private citizens and corporations. Lee has been honored with journalism’s top honors including two George Foster Peabody Awards, three Alfred I. duPont Silver Batons, twelve National Edward R. Murrow Awards, and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal. In addition to his work at WVUE, Lee is Gray Television’s Vice President of Investigations. In that role for WVUE’s parent company, he oversees Gray Television’s National Investigative Team – InvestigateTV. Lee is a New Orleans native and a graduate of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Permission to Practice: Doctors, patients say insurance prior-authorizations put profits over people
Updated: Mar. 20, 2023 at 12:53 PM PDT
|By Emily Featherston, Jamie Grey, Lee Zurik, Bailey Williams and Payton Romans
Insurance companies say these reviews lower costs and protect patients, but what requires advance permission varies plan to plan, and critics argue the policies get between a patient and their doctor.
Updated: Feb. 27, 2023 at 1:00 PM PST
|By Lee Zurik
The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to an attorney, but there’s a public defender shortage. The problem means delayed justice for victims and prolonged jail time for the accused not convicted of crimes. In some areas, vacancies are at an all-time high. It’s leaving both defendants and victims waiting for months, sometimes even years, for justice.
Updated: Jan. 30, 2023 at 11:22 AM PST
|By InvestigateTV staff and Lee Zurik
In a pair of investigations Andy Pierrotti looks at flawed forensics and wrongful convictions.
Updated: Jan. 23, 2023 at 12:45 PM PST
|By Jill Riepenhoff, Lee Zurik and Conner Hendricks
More than two decades ago, the death of a toddler in a recalled portable crib prompted Congress to pass a new consumer protection law. Yet today, children still are dying in unsafe products, recalls remain largely ineffective at ridding homes of dangerous products, and the CPSC website that was supposed to help creates a false sense of security, an InvestigateTV analysis of federal records shows.
Updated: Jan. 18, 2023 at 1:19 PM PST
|By Lee Zurik
For decades, service members and their families were essentially barred from suing the military for medical malpractice.
Updated: Jan. 9, 2023 at 2:06 PM PST
|By Lee Zurik
Joce Sterman exposes how the system meant to keep doctors in check is letting physicians keep their licenses even when they come to work impaired. Plus, non-profit hospitals claim they charge privately insured patients more to make up for losses on Medicare reimbursements, but a new report says some hospitals are making money off Medicare
Updated: Nov. 14, 2022 at 9:13 AM PST
|By Jill Riepenhoff, Jamie Grey and Lee Zurik
When a company learns a product it sells could be defective and dangerous, it has 24 hours to let the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission know about it. But it could take months or years for the public to find out about the company’s possible concerns, if they even come to light at all. InvestigateTV has been battling CPSC and companies to disclose information about the products companies have sounded the alarm on – an alarm that remains relatively silent.
Updated: Sep. 19, 2022 at 2:03 PM PDT
|By Jill Riepenhoff and Lee Zurik
For many college coaches, it pays to get fired. Over a 17-year period beginning in 2005, public universities have shelled out more than $1.1 billion in buying out the contracts of college coaches, according to an InvestigateTV analysis of NCAA financial data collected by Syracuse University. Most of that money was spent on football coaches who play at the highest level of Division I athletics. As football coaches' annual compensation now stretches into seven digits, massive severance payments also grow bigger and bigger.
Updated: Aug. 15, 2022 at 2:19 PM PDT
|By Jill Riepenhoff, Jamie Grey and Lee Zurik
After the deaths of 13 children over the last 12 years, this summer, Fisher-Price and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission warned parents not to let their children sleep in certain rockers the company has made since the 1990s. Now, InvestigateTV has discovered that during a 2021 Congressional hearing, the company dodged questions about whether it currently had products on the market linked to children’s deaths.
Updated: May. 23, 2022 at 3:34 PM PDT
|By Jamie Grey, Lee Zurik and Payton Romans
Sometimes a surgeon is the salesman. Across the country, there are physician-owned distributorships where doctors own part of a medical device company and then buy (or have their hospital buy) that hardware to use in their own surgeries.
Updated: May. 9, 2022 at 11:13 AM PDT
|By Jill Riepenhoff, Conner Hendricks and Lee Zurik
A new federal law takes effect in July that aims to clean up thoroughbred horseracing, which for years has been plagued by scandals, drugs and equine fatalities. Racing insiders have pushed for decades for such a measure and they welcome the new oversight.
Updated: Apr. 25, 2022 at 3:18 PM PDT
|By Emily Featherston and Lee Zurik
Diabetes patients say they're being priced out of being able to afford live-saving insulin. Who's to blame is a matter of who you ask.
Updated: Feb. 14, 2022 at 3:18 PM PST
|By Jill Riepenhoff, Lee Zurik and Jamie Grey
It takes years for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to remove dangerous products from the market because of its cumbersome rule-making process and ineffective recalls that don’t incentivize consumers to return or destroy dangerous items.
Updated: Feb. 14, 2022 at 3:09 PM PST
|By Jill Riepenhoff and Lee Zurik
The federal agency created to watchdog consumer products - from crock pots to xylophones - is muzzled by its governing law, which gives all the power to manufacturers, including those with dangerous toys, appliances and other items on the market. The Fisher-Price Rock N Play – an inclined sleep product that defied the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for safe infant sleeping – exposed all that is wrong with the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
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