Drew Griffin was an award-winning American correspondent for the investigative unit of cable news channel CNN/U.S. Based in CNN's world headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, Griffin joined the network in May 2004 after working as an investigative reporter for CBS 2 News in Los Angeles for ten years.
Griffin's wide-ranging expertise included coverage of politics, as well as sports, corporate, and government investigations.
In 2015, Griffin earned a Peabody Award for investigating delays at Veterans Affairs hospitals. Griffin's investigation revealed that at least 19 military veterans had died because of appointment delays, and thousands more were experiencing extremely long waits for treatment. As a result of the coverage, led by Griffin and CNN, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned, and other managers were fired. Congress also passed legislation allowing veterans to seek care outside of the VA.
Griffin's other recent investigations have included how gerrymandering and so-called "Super Pacs" impact the election process and how some medical residents cheat on the medical board certification tests for radiologists.
In September 2005, Griffin traveled to New Orleans to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His reporting about the looting by some New Orleans police officers led to a police force investigation. He also broke stories surrounding nursing home deaths in the wake of Katrina.
Griffin's work as an investigative reporter took him across the world, enabling him to cover a famine in Somalia, illegal drift net fishermen in Singapore, and Los Angeles gang members in El Salvador. He interviewed U.S. and Russian presidents. Griffin reported from New York City for CBS 2 News after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and from Israel to cover the war on terrorism.
In December 2005, Griffin won a national Emmy Award for business and financial reporting for his reports on a fault in Ford vehicles that allegedly caused them to catch fire. He earned his second national Emmy in 2006 for the CNN Presents documentary "How to Rob a Bank" and a third in 2007 for "Hidden Spending," an Anderson Cooper 360° segment about congressional spending. In 2007, the Atlanta Press Club named him Journalist of the Year in the category of national television reporting, and the National Press Foundation gave him its Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for "Distinguished Coverage of Congress."
Before joining CNN, Griffin's series of stories on the breakthrough research in reversing Alzheimer's disease earned him the Associated Press Television-Radio Association Bill Stout Award for Enterprise Reporting. Griffin has also won three Los Angeles Emmys, nine Golden Mikes, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for exposing an underground medical network in Los Angeles, a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for exposing fraudulent soliciting at Los Angeles International Airport, and numerous other investigative reporting awards from the Associated Press, the L.A. Press Club, and the Radio and Television News Directors Association.
Griffin began his reporting career as a reporter/cameraman for WICD-TV in Champaign, Ill. Since then, Griffin has worked in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Washington. He became an investigative reporter when he joined KIRO-TV in Seattle. He joined CBS 2 News in Los Angeles in January 1994, where he worked as a reporter and anchor and helped create the station's investigative reporting team.
Griffin earned a bachelor's degree in communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
