Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award for Career Achievement from the Society of Professional Journalists.

His work for the Times included guiding its first documentary partnerships with PBS’s Frontline, covering the energy crisis in California and Al Qaeda before and after 9/11.

In 1983, Bergman joined CBS News as a producer for the weekly newsmagazine 60 Minutes and worked with its lead correspondent, Mike Wallace.

His five stories on California’s then-expanding prison system, including the supermax facility at Pelican Bay, revealed the conditions of solitary confinement and the staging of “gladiator” matches by correctional officers.

[4] According to Bergman, the film's success and its portrayal of 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace and producer Don Hewitt led to him being virtually blacklisting from the show.

This collaboration resulted in a series of stories, including coverage of California’s energy crisis, the country’s war on drugs, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the roots of 9/11, the credit card[6] and gold industries, the post-9/11 hunt for “sleeper cells”[7] in America, and recent Al Qaeda’s attacks in Europe.

Extensive websites, prepared in large part by students in Bergman’s seminar, accompanied many of these projects, including “Secret History of the Credit Card”,[6] “Al Qaeda's New Front”,[8] “The Enemy Within”,[9] “The Real CSI”[10] and “News War”.

The New York Times won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for “the work of David Barstow and Lowell Bergman that relentlessly examined death and injury among American workers and exposed employers who break basic safety rules.”[2] The series, "A Dangerous Business", detailed a record of worker safety violations and environmental law violations in the iron sewer and water pipe industry.

Projects from his investigative reporting seminars at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, have appeared on national television, including PBS' Frontline and Frontline/World, ABC's 20/20, Nightline, CBS Evening News, and 60 Minutes II; and in print, where students have been primary authors or contributors of stories in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as in magazines, The Atlantic, and international and local newspapers.