Fellows & Editors
Todd Bensman
- Trip:
- Fellows Fall 1998
- Affiliation:
- Dallas Morning News
- Country:
- Namibia
- Year:
- 1998
Todd Bensman is a senior intelligence analyst/special coordinator for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. Previously, he was an investigative projects reporter for The San Antonia Express-News and covered Mexico’s civil drug war, illegal immigration and border security. He has traveled often throughout Mexico, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In 2007, he traveled to Syria and Jordan for a series of stories tracing the routes of Iraqi war refugees to Texas. In 2009 Bensman and Guillermo Contreras of the San Antonio Express-News won the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence for a three-part series tracing the trail of high-powered guns smuggled from the United States into Mexico and the mounting body count in Mexico’s drug cartel war. In 2008 Bensman won a pair of international reporting awards; the 2008 National Press Club's Edwin M. Hood for Diplomatic Correspondence and the 2008 Inter-American Press Association for best in-depth report.From 2003 to early 2006 he served as an investigative producer for the CBS-owned Dallas, Texas station, KTVT-11. Prior to that he worked for nearly ten years as a staff reporter for The Dallas Morning News. He joined the paper in 1993 and covered federal law enforcement agencies. From early 1992 to late 1993, he lived in Eastern Europe, in Prague and then Zagreb, covering the breakup of Czechoslovakia, the war in Soviet Moldova and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. He also spent 10 months covering the war in Bosnia. In 1991, he reported on the Gulf War as a freelance correspondent, covering scud missile attacks in Israel and refugee issues in Jordan and Egypt. He began his journalism career in Arizona in 1987 with the Scottsdale Progress, covering education for 18 months before joining the Mesa Tribune. In 1989, he took a job with The Anchorage Times in Alaska, covering the city government and statewide events. Bensman holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a bachelors degree in mass communications from Northern Arizona University.
Post-IRP Stories
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July 16, 2011 | https://internationalreportingproject.org/about/news_detail/1240/
IRP Fellow Todd Bensman wins 2009 National Press Club award
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July 14, 2009 | http://www.toddbensman.com/Bensman/Breaching_America_series.html
Examining Illegal immigration from the Muslim World
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July 14, 2009 | http://www.toddbensman.com/Bensman/Irans_Push_Into_Nicaragua.html
Irans push into Nicaragua
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July 14, 2009 | http://www.toddbensman.com/Bensman/Gunrunning_to_Mexico_series.html
Gunrunning to Mexico series
Stories
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Thousands Sold into Servitude in Lesotho as ‘Herder Boys’
THABA SEKA, Lesotho - Fall, 1988 -- In a vast, treeless wilderness of green mountains and broad, empty valleys, an unwashed waif of a boy squats alone in a ravine, watching over a...
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Proposed Dam Threatens To Wash Out African Subsistence Tribe’s Way of Life
EPUPA FALLS, Namibia - Fall, 1998 -- Sacred fires still hold powerful spiritual sway here, and ancestral graves of stacked bull horns are worshiped. Lean, tough men wearing animal hides and sheathed knives...
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Forgotten Victims: African Tribe Wants Apology
OKAHANDJA, Namibia, Fall, 1988 -- In Europe, banks and governments are owning up to their complicity in Nazi crimes against Jews with reparations and apologies. In Asia, Japan finally apologized for its brutal...
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Cuba Uses Humanitarian Aid in Fight for Foothold in Africa
LUANDA, Angola Fall, 1998 -- Fidel Castro is deploying a new sort of soldier across the African continent, to lands where his armies not so long ago fortified socialist struggles in battle against...
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