The Center for Public Integrity

Recently, the Center for Public Integrity reported about several young men who suffocated to death in an Illinois grain storage facility. Not only did the story highlight the lack of safety precautions at a job site, it revealed a terribly broken national system that repeatedly puts the lives of workers at risk.

Within weeks, the story prompted calls for action from concerned citizens, an announcement about potential criminal charges against the employer by the U.S. Department of Justice, and OSHA’s pledge to review the workplace conditions of America’s grain workers. This type of impact is the heart of the Center’s work. But, they can’t do this type of investigative reporting without your support. And right now, I am offering to match every dollar you give, doubling your impact.

As a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, the Center relies on supporters like you in order to do its job. Their approach involves no-stone-unturned journalism that goes deep into the details and the data to reveal the truth and spark change.

The Hard Labor project revealed young workers who put their lives at risk to keep corn flowing in a bin. These individuals — some as young as 14 — should not have had to worry about inadequate and unsafe working conditions and die from the failure of the systems meant to protect them.

The Center for Public Integrity won three 1^st Place honors in the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Awards, the Society of Professional Journalists announced Tuesday, with journalists recognized for investigations into a mysterious kidney disease, the shadowy trade in human body parts, and threats to blue collar workers.

The projects were among winners in an SPJ contest drawing nearly 1,700 submissions. This is the second straight year the Center has won three top honors for public service, investigative and non-deadline reporting.

The winning projects:

• Mystery in the Fields, by writer Sasha Chavkin, photojournalist Anna Barry-Jester and editor Ronnie Greene, won  Public Service in Online Journalism. The series explored how a rare kidney disease is afflicting laborers across continents – and how governments, including the U.S., have been slow to raise alarms.
• Skin & Bone, produced by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center, won for Investigative Reporting Online. The series revealed how the business of recycling dead humans into medical implants has flourished.
• Hard Labor, by Jim Morris, Chris Hamby and Ronnie Greene, won the top prize for Non-deadline Reporting Online. The reports exposed the workplace and environmental perils U.S. workers encounter in the face of regulatory breakdowns.

I have always believed that if we are doing our job right at the Center for Public Integrity, then our investigations should anticipate the news. That was the case on Wednesday. The Center posted an important story early that morning about the U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s failure to complete its investigations into chemical accidents in a timely manner. Further, we reported that a former member of the board believed the agency was being “grossly mismanaged.”

Later that same day, an explosion tore through a fertilizer plant north of Waco in Central Texas, killing more than a dozen people and injuring more than 150, authorities say. The horrific accident was similar to other deadly industrial accidents described in our piece — accidents requiring Chemical Safety Board investigations that have dragged on, in some cases for years. Sluggish and incomplete investigations are important because finished reports often contain recommendations that can save lives going forward. Delay has a human cost.

Each year there are some 200 serious industrial accidents like the fertilizer plant explosion that are deemed to be of “high consequence.” Yet the Chemical Safety Board — modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board — is able to investigate only a handful, and then often takes years more to issue a report.

To be fair, the Board says it is stretched thin with a budget of only $10.5 million. And as the number of such serious accidents rise, the Board’s budget has remained flat. Congress has been unwilling to come up with more resources, the Board says.

Our reporting of previously secret off-shore companies and trusts from the British Virgin Islands to Singapore will continue throughout this year. The exact value of wealth held offshore in tax havens is hard to come by, but it is estimated to encompass $21-32 trillion in private financial assets. 

So far, the work by the Center’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has been republished or cited some 6,500 times by news organizations worldwide. Media in France, Spain and other places have given front-page play to stories about ICIJ’s reports, which have become known in shorthand on Twitter and in many news outlets simply as “Offshore Leaks.” The reaction has been positive, in almost all cases.

• A reporter for the Financial Times tweeted that “the leak of 260GB of data on offshore companies - this could be the biggest story of the year.”
• A Belgian news website called this “Probably the most significant journalistic collaboration in history.”
• However, a Wall Street Journal columnist called it an “offshore witch hunt.”  

Already we can see the impact the stories are having, especially in Europe, where governments have been moving toward more transparency:

The Center for Public Integrity’s landmark series on campus sexual assault continues to draw attention from other media outlets, more than three years after the initial stories were published. On Thursday morning, lead reporter Kristen Lombardi  appeared on WAMU’s The Diane Rehm Show , which is carried by dozens of stations nationwide.

Listen to the program.

Lombardi’s investigation into campus rape cases for the Center won the Robert F. Kennedy Award and the Dart Award in 2011, as well as the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in 2010, among other recognitions.The stories are available below.

The Center for Public Integrity’s international team has just launched the largest investigative reporting project in its 15 year history.

Drawing on a leaked cache of 2.5 million files, ICIJ has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts and about 130,000 individuals and agents, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich in more than 170 countries and territories all over the world. 

ICIJ stands for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an elite group of 160 investigative reporters in 60 countries that is a long-standing initiative of The Center for Public Integrity. The offshore tax haven project has so far involved some 89 journalists in 46 countries, and growing.

This leaked offshore information totaled more than 260 gigabytes of data — about the same amount of information as would be found in half a million books. I believe this may be the largest amount of leaked data ever gathered and analyzed by journalists. ICIJ’s research involved using high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through corporate documents, emails, account ledgers and other files covering nearly 30 years. Alongside perfectly legal transactions, the secrecy and lax oversight offered by the offshore world allows fraud, tax dodging and political corruption to thrive.

To analyze the documents, ICIJ collaborated with journalists from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world.

Being a reader and a supporter of the Center for Public Integrity, you see the headlines from us every week about the effects of money’s influence on government power.

Just last week, for example, the Center examined the funding sources and top sponsors behind expense-paid seminars for all federal judges. Our investigation revealed that some of the world’s largest oil and pharmaceutical companies, including ExxonMobil, Pfizer and BP, and other special interest groups, such as the Koch Foundation, were paying for this judicial travel. In potential conflicts of interest, the report also found instances where judges later ruled in favor of the sponsors of seminars they had attended.

As the tweets, comments and posts came pouring in, it was clear that thousands of readers like you feel strongly that no branch or level of government now seems immune from the influence of money. Here’s a selection of what some of you had to say on Twitter:

Sometimes our independent judiciary doesn't look so independent bit.ly/10kGv3x

— Public Campaign (@publicampaign) March 28, 2013

It's a conflict of interest when federal judges attend corporate sponsored seminars publicintegrity.org/2013/03/28/123… #occupy #occupyusa #p2

The Center for Public Integrity’s Hard Labor series, which revealed how corporate irresponsibility and lax regulation contribute to thousands of worker deaths, injuries and illnesses in America each year, has been honored by the White House Correspondents' Association.

The project, which was launched in the spring of 2012 and continues this year, earned the WHCA’s Edgar A. Poe Award for “excellence in news coverage of subjects and events of significant national or regional importance to the American people.” The award will be presented to Center reporters Jim Morris, Chris Hamby and Ronnie Greene at the association’s annual dinner in Washington on April 27.

Judges in the competition said the series “compellingly shows how the government has failed to keep its promise to protect workers from injury and death on the job.

“Drawing on years of data and on-the-ground reporting in eight states and Canada, the authors demonstrate how corporate corner-cutting, government inability or unwillingness to impose meaningful penalties, and bureaucratic pressure to make caseload quotas have stymied real regulation,” the judges wrote. “They tell the workers' stories in a manner that evokes Studs Terkel, excellently weaving human interest with deep-data scrutiny and using numbers sparingly but with powerful effect.”

The Center’s work reached millions of readers, listeners and viewers through partnerships with outlets such as NPR, WBEZ, WBUR, Mother Jones, NBCnews.com, the Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette, and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The Poe award is funded by the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Newhouse Newspapers in honor of their distinguished correspondent, who also served as a WHCA president.

Other winners in 2013:

Does it matter that giant oil companies and drug makers are the most frequent sponsors of all-expense-paid seminars for federal judges? 

Does it matter that more than 100 of these judicial seminars have an acknowledged bias toward presenting a conservative, free-market ideology?

Is this a real or only an imagined problem? No matter how any citizen answers these questions, there can be no argument that full transparency and accountability for such judicial travel are required—and that’s what The Center for Public Integrity provides with this week’s new investigative report and interactive database.

The perception of corporations buying influence exists, whether or not these educational retreats really do impact judicial decision-making.

After all, the Center found instances where judges traveled to seminars paid for by oil companies, the American Petroleum Institute, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and later issued rulings favoring some of those same sponsors.

Certainly, there is a First Amendment right for any federal judge to travel to Sedona, Ariz., Chicago, or Washington, D.C., to attend a conservative-leaning conference.  And, there is nothing illegal about having the trip paid for by corporations who in some cases are also litigants before the federal courts.

But if all that is just fine, as judges insist it is, then it is critical to make sure all of this information is publicly available and searchable. And it should be clear how much sponsors are paying for these seminars— that information is not required to be reported under current rules, which should be of grave concern to anyone who cares about an untainted judiciary.

The Center is publishing two major investigations next week that you can read here and will hear on NPR as well as other partners.

On Sunday, we are partnering with NPR and The Kansas City Star to look into the “drowning” deaths of people working around grain storage bins. The investigation found that federal regulators have routinely slashed fines in these cases, including a 2010 grain bin accident in Mt. Carroll, Ill., that took the lives of a 14-year-old boy and a 19-year-old man. A third worker, 20, barely escaped.

You can read that story Sunday here on our website on and in the Sunday Kansas City Star. NPR’s All Things Considered airs the grain story on Tuesday and you can also hear it on Wednesday's Morning Edition. If you miss either NPR story or the story in the Kansas City Star, we'll share those in next week's Weekly Watchdog.

The grain death story is part of our Hard Labor series on workers’ rights.