Eric S. Lipton (born August 13, 1965) is a reporter at The New York Times based in the Washington Bureau. He has been a working journalist for three decades, with stints at The Washington Post and the Hartford Courant, and he is also the co-author of a history of the World Trade Center.
Lipton joined The Times in 1999, covering the final years of the administration of New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, as well as the 2001 terror attacks. Since 2004, he has been based in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he is an investigative reporter who now writes about the Trump administration, as well as lobbying and corporate agendas in Congress. His previous assignments included the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, as well as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Lipton has won or participated in three Pulitzer Prizes, among numerous other journalism awards.
Career and awards
Prior to working for The New York Times, he spent five years each at The Washington Post, the Hartford Courant, and the first two years of his newspaper career at the Valley News in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Lipton is a 1987 graduate of the University of Vermont where he received a BA in philosophy and history as well as working at The Vermont Cynic.
In 2018, he and a group of other New York Times reporters won the John B. Oakes Award for Environmental Reporting from Columbia University for a series of stories about the Trump administration's effort to rollback environmental protections.
In 2017, he was part of a team of 11 reporters at The Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for its coverage on Russia’s covert projection of power, including the story examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In 2015, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism for a series of stories about lobbying of state attorneys general and Congress. That series of stories also was awarded the 2015 prize for large circulation newspapers by Investigative Reporters and Editors. And he was among a group of reporters that earned the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting.
One of the three stories in the series about state attorneys general focused on Scott Pruitt, then the Attorney General of Oklahoma, detailing for the first time the secretive alliance Pruitt had with oil and gas companies and other energy producers. These companies were sending tens of millions of dollars to the Republican Attorneys General Association that Pruitt helped run at the same time as Pruitt was helping the companies fight Obama-era environmental regulations, by suing to block these rules in federal court at least 14 times. Lipton found that Pruitt had taken draft letters written by the energy companies, put them on his state government stationary and sent them in to officials in Washington. When Pruitt was later nominated to serve as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump, this story became a central focus of his confirmation hearing.
In 1992, he won a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism, at the age of 26, for a series of stories he co-authored at the Hartford Courant on the Hubble Space Telescope with Robert S. Capers. The stories examined the team of scientists who built the main mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope, considered one of the most complex scientific devices at the time of its launch. Facing financial pressures and other challenges, the team built a misshapen main mirror for the space telescope, a flaw that was ultimately corrected but caused embarrassment and questions about the status of United States space science.
In 2021, stories Lipton and other reporters from The New York Times wrote over the prior year about "how the Trump administration consistently failed to respond properly or adequately to the coronavirus threat, including downplaying its seriousness," were named as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in National Reporting.
Lipton was also a finalist in 1999 for the Livingston Award for young journalists while working as a reporter at The Washington Post, for a series of stories examining the trash industry in New York City, which then shipped most of its waste via truck to landfills in Virginia. In 2008, he was the recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Vermont.