NWPB Presents: Ghost Herd — Behind the Scenes
About the event
It started as an American success story. The Easterday family took a couple hundred acres of farmland in rural Washington state and grew it into a farming and ranching empire worth millions. Then, it all came crashing down. Ghost Herd—a new investigative podcast—tells the story of Cody Easterday, the man at the center of one of the largest cattle swindles in U.S. history. Easterday invented a “ghost herd” of 265,000 cattle that only existed on paper and swindled companies out of $224 million. It’s a story of family and fraud, but also about the value of dirt and the shifting powers in the American West.
Join Ghost Herd reporter Anna King at the Murrow Symposium to hear stories about the podcast’s creation and how she persevered to uncover the truth of the Easterday swindle.
About Anna King:
Award-winning journalist Anna King shines a national spotlight on the complex stories of the Northwest—from complex nuclear waste cleanup, to mysterious cattle mutilations. Her work appears on Northwest Public Broadcasting, the Northwest News Network, National Public Radio and its member stations across the country. King earned the David Douglas History Award from the Washington State Historical Society in 2016 for her “Daughters of Hanford” series and museum show. Her work has been recognized nationally and she has earned two Gracie awards, a Sigma Delta Chi medal and an RTDNA Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting on her news series Ghost Herd.
About Ghost Herd:
Ghost Herd is a joint production of KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio and KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio, both members of the NPR Network. The six-episode run is out now on all major podcasting platforms. Visit the website for more details: ghostherd.org/