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PublicIntegrity.org

URL	http://www.publicintegrity.org
Type of site	Online Investigative Journalism
Owner	501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization
Created by	Charles Lewis

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to producing investigative reporting on public officials, government policy and its effects^[1].

Contents 1 Description 1.1 History 1.2 Honors 1.3 Origin of the Name 1.4 Spinoffs 1.5 Funding 1.6 Criticism 1.6.1 Funding from George Soros 2 Foundations Providing Support[30] 3 Management and Staff 4 Reports and Filings 4.1 Annual Reports[35] 4.2 Annual Returns[36] (IRS Form 990) 5 Further reading 6 References 7 External links

Located in Washington, DC, USA, the Center for Public Integrity produces reports aimed to provide transparent and insightful reporting. Topics include the financing of political campaigns, the stewardship of public institutions by governing officials, the influence private interests wield in federal and state government, and the ultimate results of public policy.

The Center releases its reports via its Web site, press releases and traditional book publishing. The information it collects and analyzes often reaches the public secondhand through coverage in conventional news mediums like television and newsprint. The Center's highest-profile release, The Buying of the President, appeared on The New York Times bestseller list several times after its January 2004 publication. The Center also collects and organizes the public records in gathers into online databases so that other reporters and the public have access to the information. In 2006, Slate media critic Jack Shafer described the Center as having "broken as many stories as almost any big-city daily in the last couple of decades"^[2].

Because it's funded by a network of private donors and philanthropic organizations rather than advertisers, the Center operates on a business model different from most traditional news organizations.

The Center was founded in March 1989 by Charles Lewis after an 11-year career as a television reporter that included a stint as correspondent Mike Wallace's producer for the CBS News program 60 Minutes^[3]. Frustrated by his sense that the current system failed to adequately investigate corruption in Washington, Lewis quit his job at CBS and founded the Center. At the time, he wrote:

In recent years, a disturbing paradox has increasingly gnawed at me: America's best and brightest reporters, working for the most respected national news organizations, too often do not investigate the country's most important stories. ... While about 4,000 accredited reporters work today in Washington, not much muckraking is actually going on. There needs to be a group of respected journalists in Washington who on a regular basis are doing insightful investigative studies of the systematic problems hampering government and the political process.^[4]

After starting out with headquarters in his home in Northern Virginia, Lewis used his house as collateral to open an 1800-square-foot office in Washington at 1910 K Street, N.W.^[5]. By the 1992 elections, Lewis had added three full-time staffers. The Center continued to grow over the years, relocating to 1634 I Street, N.W. in 1994, and by 2006 it employed more than three dozen employees. Its offices are now located at 910 17th Street, N.W.

Lewis served as director until January 2005. In July 2004, he resigned from the position and in December the Center's board choose his successor, television journalist Roberta Baskin. Baskin came to the Center after directing consumer investigations for ABC News's 20/20 and serving as Washington correspondent for PBS's NOW with Bill Moyers^[6]. She held the position until May 24, 2006^[7].

After Baskin's departure, Wendell "Sonny" Rawls, Jr., a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter served as acting director until he was succeeded by William E. Buzenberg, a vice president at American Public Media / Minnesota Public Radio, in December 2006^[8].

Since 1990, the Center for Public Integrity has released dozens of investigative reports and books. Its work has been honored by journalism awards from PEN USA, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Association of Capital Reporters and Editors, the National Press Foundation, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and others. A full listing may be found here.

In an essay marking the 10th anniversary of the Center's founding, Lewis wrote:

Initially the idea of having "investigative reporting" in the name appealed to me. But the landscape was crowded with groups having those words in their names: the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) in Missouri, the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Washington. It was not just that figuring out a way to include investigative and reporting in a memorable name without repeating all the other memorable names was going to be a problem. The whole reputation of investigative reporters was not exactly at its highest point at the time. Was this really how I wanted this group to be identified?

So I asked a friend who was not a journalist, "What should this be called?" We tried to come up with the central theme to our discussions and we realized that the theme was integrity. And then we refined that theme to public integrity. I went to my new Board members and suggested the name. We knew that it sounded a little pompous. A little pretentious. A little strange. But it ended up being a very useful name because when anything arose remotely involving ethics, or impropriety anywhere, any time, in any field of endeavor, we would get the call.^[9]

Created in 1997, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists network includes 92 leading investigative reporters and editors in 48 countries. The group has collaborated on numerous online and printed reports on corporate crime, arms trafficking, terrorism, U.S. military policy and human rights issues. Global Integrity, another international project, was launched in 2001 to systematically track and report on openness, accountability and the rule of law in various countries.

The Center for Public Integrity is supported by individual contributions and grants awarded by charitable foundations. A list of the Center's funders may be found on its official Web site. Donations are tax-deductible. The Center ceased accepting contributions from corporations and labor unions in 1996^[10]. According to its annual report, the Center's 2005 budget was $4.4 million, which outpaced its revenues for the year by $350,000. Fundraising and administration accounted for 28 percent of the expenses^[11].

Criticism of the Center frequently addresses the source of its financial support. Despite its claims to be a nonpartisan news organization and profession of the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics^[12], the Center has been accused of bias towards left-wing political causes because it has accepted money from organizations and individuals that favor liberal policies and/or actively oppose right-wing political causes.

Such criticism typically focuses on funding the Center has received from philanthropic organizations founded by two high-profile supporters of the Democratic Party, Barbara Streisand and George Soros.

George Soros is a Hungarian billionaire^[13] who has supported an array of political causes active in reforming the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, including the Solidarity labor movement in Poland, the Czechoslovakian human rights organization Charter 77, the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, the opposition to the Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic^[14] and the Republic of Georgia's Rose Revolution^[15]. In 2004, he asserted himself in American politics by donating millions of dollars to groups opposing the election of President George W. Bush^[16]. Soros himself has become a public critic of Bush and the Republican Party, speaking out in books published under his name and in interviews with journalists. Republican activists have responded with strong criticism of Soros and the causes he supports. Conservative television host Bill O'Reilly has identified Soros as a leader in what he calls "the secular-progressive cause^[17]." O'Reilly alleges that Soros exerts a destructive influence indirectly through groups his foundations fund. In October of 2006, O'Reilly commented:

He's given money to some of the worst people in United States of America. ... He wants radical change in this country. ... [H]e's damaging the country. He is the single most dangerous individual in the United States of America. And his assassins, the people he hires to harm the people with whom he disagrees. And he sits back and he goes, "Oh, I don't know what they're doing." Bull.^[18]

O'Reilly and other critics point to Soros' support of groups whose agenda many conservatives oppose, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Moveon.org^[19].

Conservatives have used the Center's connections to Soros in efforts to discredit its journalism^[20]. The Web site of one of Soros' organizations, The Open Society Institute, discloses four grants to the Center, all made before his entry into the 2004 presidential contest. They are:

• A $72,400 one-year grant in 2000 supporting "an investigative journalism series on prosecutorial misconduct."^[21]

• A $75,000 one-year grant in 2001 supporting "an examination of wrongful convictions resulting from prosecutorial misconduct."^[22]
• A $100,000 one-year grant in 2002 "to investigate the political spending of the telecommunications industry on the federal, state and local levels."^[23]
• A $1 million three-year grant in 2002 "to support the Global Access Project."^[24]

The first two grants funded what eventually became the "Harmful Error" report, which was headed by Steve Weinberg. Weinberg is a professional journalist and former director of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

The telecommunications grant supported the launch of the Center's ongoing "Well Connected" project. According to the Center's site, other funding for that endeavor has been provided by The Ford Foundation^[25]. The project has won an Online News Association award for enterprise reporting^[26] and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Online Journalism^[27].

According to its Web site, the Global Access project -- now known as Global Integrity -- seeks to "collect and disseminate trustworthy, credible, comprehensive and timely data and information on governance and corruption trends around the world." It publishes the Global Integrity Index, "an annual ranking of 50-100 diverse countries in more than 290 indicators of openness, governance, and anti-corruption mechanisms^[28]."

Despite their previous connections, the Center documented Soros' political donations during the 2004 political elections as a part of its "Silent Partners" project, which won an Online Journalism Association award for enterprise reporting for its reporting on the "527" groups that bypassed campaign finance disclosure regulations to funnel millions of dollars to both candidates^[29].

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1. Glaser, Mark. "Center for Public Integrity Leading the Way for Serious Online Journalism", Online Journalism Review, 25 February 2004.
2. Keiger, Dale. "An "i" Toward Tough Journalism", Johns Hopkins Magazine, November 2000.

• The Center for Public Integrity's official Web site (publicintegrity.org)
• The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' official Web site
• Global Integrity's official Web site
• Charles Lewis's official Web site