David Rose (journalist)

David Rose (born 21 July 1959) is a British author and investigative journalist. He is a contributing editor with Vanity Fair and a special investigations writer for The Mail on Sunday. His interests include human rights, miscarriages of justice, the death penalty, racism, the war on terror, politics, energy policy and climate change. He is the author of six non-fiction books and a novel, Taking Morgan, a thriller set in Washington, Oxford, Tel Aviv and Gaza, published by Quartet in 2014. He was named News Reporter of the Year in the Society of Editors British Press Awards for 2015, though his journalism on climate has been criticised by climate scientists and environmentalists for an over-reliance on unsound and unscientific sources.

Rose was born in London on 21 July 1959. He read history at Magdalen College, Oxford, and took a first class honours degree in 1981.

Rose's first job was as a reporter with the London magazine Time Out, 1981–4. He then worked successively on the staffs on The Guardian, The Observer and BBC current affairs TV.

While at the BBC he researched, wrote and reported a major series on espionage during the Cold War, The Spying Game, exposing the octogenarian Melita Norwood as a Soviet spy who gave the Russians critical technology enabling them to build their first atomic weapon. Norwood admitted and justified her activity in an interview with Rose, saying she gave up the secrets she acquired through the course of her work at a top-secret British research establishment because she wanted to help the Soviet system. Rose left the BBC to become a freelance writer in 2000.

In 2002 he became a Vanity Fair contributing editor, and in 2008 a special investigations writer for The Mail on Sunday. He is a winner of the Royal Institute of International Affairs David Watt Memorial Prize. In 2013, a poll of investigative reporters organised by the UK Press Gazette named him among the top ten practitioners of his trade.

Investigating wrongful convictions has been a frequent theme of David Rose's career. After the trial of the three men convicted of murdering Police Constable Keith Blakelock in the Broadwater Farm riot in 1987, he wrote many articles challenging their convictions and life sentences, working closely with their lawyers. This led to their successful appeals in 1991, and became the subject of his book A Climate of Fear (1992). Rose has repeatedly drawn attention to the dangers of wrongful convictions for historic sex abuse, beginning with the BBC Panorama programme which he reported and wrote, In the Name of the Children (2000).

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