Only a couple of weeks after landing in the Bay Area, Stephen Stock had California’s Governor and State Assembly scrambling to address an environmental issue he uncovered, the unregulated practice of widespread hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, for oil in California. It is a practice that has become widespread but was little known until Stock uncovered it. Now lawmakers and regulators in Sacramento have moved to address the issues Stock uncovered.
A little more than a year after Stephen exposed the rise in the number close calls between airplanes in the skies over the Bay Area and the country the National Transportation Safety Board released new safety recommendations to the FAA to address the issues raised in the report.
Stock has also uncovered the still little regulated practice of having children as young as eight years old work in the fields of America, from California's Central Valley to North Carolina's tobacco road. He's also exposed the numbers of people voting in California the name of dead residents, a rise in the number of high quality fake IDs in the US which is now creating a homeland security threat, campaign finance ties between Silicon Valley and the halls of political power, and questionable federal stimulus spending.
Prior to working in the Bay Area, Stephen served as an investigative reporter for CBS4 in Miami where his work changed policies, laws and lives. His investigative work prompted hearings by the U.S. Congress and changed the way the state of Florida tracks and monitors children in day cares. While at CBS4, he uncovered troubles in America’s aviation security systems, violence in local schools, dozens of troubled bridges in South Florida, allegations of misuse of power in Miami Beach, double dipping at Miami’s police department, FEMA storm unpreparedness and questionable use of federal tax dollars through the US Farm Bill.
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Stephen also served as the lead investigative reporter for WESH-TV2, the NBC affiliate in Orlando where he uncovered tax fraud by Florida prison inmates, uncovered the reason hundreds of Ford trucks and heavy vehicles mysteriously burst into flames, exposed shoddy building practices and inspections in Central Florida’s home building industry and exposed questionable spending by a prominent State Senator from Orlando.
Stock's investigative work has won several prestigious national awards. He served as lead investigative reporter on WESH-TV2's 20-part series,"Building Homes: Building Problems," which examined the home building industry in Central Florida. That work earned Stock and WESH-TV2 News a George Foster Peabody Award. He also covered the space shuttle program for NBC, and was part of the team of reporters who won a Columbia Alfred I. duPont Silver Baton for coverage of the space shuttle Columbia tragedy.
His work garnered an Associated Press Mark Twain award, two different citations by Florida’s Associated Press as Best Investigative Report, an Individual Achievement honor and two different Best in TV awards. He’s also been honored several times by the Society of Professional Journalist’s Green Eyeshade Awards (covering 11 different states) and been cited twice as the Best of Television category.
He’s also won three Edward R Murrow Awards, including one for his work exposing the practice of having children work in the fields of American agriculture and one for his work documenting the number of close calls between airplanes in the air and on the ground in South Florida. Stock also garnered a local Emmy Award from the Northern California Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS). He's also won Suncoast Regional NATAS Emmy Awards for his investigations into cargo theft in the United States, medical mistakes where patients were billed by doctors anyway and political blackmail involving strip clubs in Miami Beach. In all he’s won eleven individual and team regional Emmy Awards.
You might have also seen Stephen covering hurricanes (he’s been in the middle of 37 named storms including the middle of seven hurricane eyes) or space shuttle launches and landings (he’s covered 42 of them including the last shuttle flight ever.) For nearly a decade Stephen served as a contributing correspondent for NBC News, MSNBC and NBC News Channel, covering hurricanes, shuttle launches and other nationally important stories that happened in the Southeast and broadcasting those stories to NBC stations throughout the nation.
Stock was named an Ethics Fellow at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg in 2004. He’s twice been a finalist for the IRE award, given by the nation’s prestigious Investigative Reporters and Editors organization.
Prior to joining NBC Bay Area, Stock also worked in Greenville, South Carolina, as Anderson Bureau Chief and Investigative Reporter and in Wilmington, North Carolina as the Senior Investigative Reporter and anchor, as well as in Roanoke, Virginia, where he got his start in commercial television.
He’s married to the lady, Lynn, who has put up with him for more than 25 years and through countless news assignments that have kept them apart. Lynn and Stephen met at UNC-Chapel Hill where they fell in love—with each other and with Tar Heel basketball and everything else Carolina Blue. They have one super smart son, Michael, who followed in his parents’ footsteps, in fact exceeding them, as he is an Honors College student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Michael also serves as an officer on the Marching Tar Heel band. Michael is also a former leader of the Coral Gables High School Band and makes his dad look amateurish with his video and editing technology skills.
