The Center for Public Integrity

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.

Knight Science Journalism at MIT's Tracker blog writes about The Center for Public Integrity’s latest collaboration with PBS' NewsHour in our Toxic Clout series. 

The story investigated the lack of regulation of the toxic chemical compound chromium (VI) found in the drinking water for Hinkley, Calif., almost 20 years after a class-action lawsuit. The suit was made famous in the Hollywood movie Erin Brockovich. 

Regulators have been slow to act on the problem of chromium (VI) in Hinkley and elsewhere in the country because chemical industry scientists have cast doubt on whether or not the chemical is toxic.

The Center's David Heath and Ronnie Greene partnered with NewsHour science reporter Miles O'Brien to tell this story and others in our Toxic Clout series.

KSJ Tracker praises this collaboration as a way to tell this story that may not have otherwise been told. The blog's author, Deborah Blum, writes:

A truly great journalist died this past week, although you may never have known much about him. His name was Murrey Marder. He was 93.

Marder was “one of the most significant journalists of our time,” as Charles Lewis, founder of The Center for Public Integrity, wrote recently in an eloquent tribute to Marder’s life and work.

“He was utterly tenacious about the truth,” Lewis wrote. “Not only did it outrage him when those in power lied, but it also especially gnawed away at him when the national news media would just stenographically report, and thus repeat, those lies.”

Lewis has created a superb oral history project and website about the role of journalism in American history called Investigating Power. One of the featured moments of truth recounted by Lewis concerns Marder, as a reporter for the Washington Post in the early 1950s. He may have done more than anyone else to bring down the demagogic reign of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, according to Lewis. Marder essentially chronicled and scrutinized McCarthy’s every major utterance and official action for four full years.

In 1953, when Sen. McCarthy was at the height of his power, Marder wrote a series of stories in the Post about McCarthy’s reckless charges portraying an Army Signal Corps Center at Fort Monmouth, NJ, as a “nest of spies.”  Marder made it clear this was empty rhetoric. “Nothing that can be independently ascertained from information available here or in Washington indicates that there is any known evidence to support such a conclusion .”

On the evening of March 19, 2003 — ten years ago — U.S. warplanes bombed a site in Baghdad that military officials believed was the hideout of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Although the failed attempt to kill him was followed two days later by hours of missile and bomb strikes, and then a ground invasion, it was an inauspicious start to a war that would lead to a lengthy U.S. occupation of Iraq and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. treasury. Almost 4,500 American troops were killed in the conflict and more than 32,000 were wounded.

Five years ago, in an effort to hold accountable the officials who led the United States into the Iraq war and orchestrated the war’s expansion, the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism combed through thousands of statements made by those officials about the war. The “Iraq; The War Card” project found hundreds of falsehoods, demonstrating that the policy underpinnings of the conflict were based in large measure on poor understanding, at best, or a manipulative public relations campaign, at worst.

The findings were not controversial, as many official reports — by Congress and others — have reached similar conclusions. But the Center put a number on the falsehoods, and tallied them all in one place. Here is that work, for those who may wish to look back on a tragic record of error-filled official assertions.

Tens of millions of Americans drink water contaminated with chromium (VI), a toxic compound the Environmental Protection Agency was poised in 2011 to conclude likely causes cancer. That finding would normally set the stage for setting stricter drinking-water standards. So far, the new standards have not been set.

If you want to know the story behind the delay, read our two-part investigation, Toxic Clout, including the latest report this week on how chemical industry scientists are able to stall action on a known carcinogen. Or, watch the excellent two-part PBS NewsHour series that documents how an industry uses its resources to raise questions, pay for studies and otherwise effectively block government agencies from taking action.

In some of our key findings, the Center for Public Integrity reported that the EPA’s delay was caused in part by waiting for new studies paid for by the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s main trade group and lobbyist. And, some of the same industry-paid scientists involved in past efforts to stall government action on chromium worked on the studies delaying the EPA.

Chromium (VI), you may recall, is the same chemical compound featured in the movie Erin Brockovich. That Oscar-winning film did much to raise awareness of chromium pollution in drinking water.  Because of that pollution, the company involved, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., paid $333 million to the people of Hinkley,  Calif. But, as I’ve noted before, this story does not end with the Hollywood version of events. The EPA has still not acted.

The Education Writers Association has honored the Center for Public Integrity's Susan Ferriss this week with a first-place prize in the 2012 National Awards for Education Reporting, in the category of Investigative Reporting in a Medium Newsroom.

The series of pieces, by Ferriss, Krissy Clark, KQED and Vanessa Romo, KPCC, examined how students were being disciplined in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

"Great persistence. Great find. Great narratives of children caught up in system," wrote the judges.

The 62 winning entries in the contest were chosen from among hundreds of submissions. Winners will be honored at EWA’s National Seminar, to be held May 2-4 at Stanford University. 

Read the series:

It is always gratifying when the Center for Public Integrity’s investigative projects have a major impact AND win major award recognition.  That’s been happening a lot lately.

Most recently, our State Integrity Investigation—a corruption risk index for all 50 states—was named a finalist for the distinguished Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This massive project has contributed to ethics reform efforts in 16 states so far, with more coming during this year’s legislative sessions.

The Goldsmith judges described the State Integrity project as "a wonderful blueprint for reporters all over the country to do enterprising stories on government." Produced in collaboration with Global Integrity and Public Radio International, this work has been written about in 1,500 other publications and been cited in more than 75 editorials. According to the Goldsmith Prize judges, the results of the State Integrity Investigation “include accelerated reform in government and an increase in disclosure requirements in many states.”

More than 80,000 chemicals are on the market in the United States, with hundreds added each year. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other regulators are supposed to protect the public from chemical contaminants in air, water and consumer products that can cause cancer and other illnesses. But the chemical industry's sway over science and policy is extremely powerful. Much like the clout of the NRA, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) is an industry trade association that often acts to create uncertainty and delay, actions that ultimately threaten the public health.  

In a new series of stories called Toxic Clout, The Center for Public Integrity is exploring how the chemical industry operates behind the scenes. We want to shed light on how a cancer-causing chemical compound could escape regulation that EPA scientists say is  necessary. Please tune in to the PBS NewsHour next Wednesday, March 6th, to see a special report produced in partnership with The Center for Public Integrity.

This report features a chemical compound that more than 70 million Americans drink traces of every day. Since 2010, EPA scientists have concluded that even small amounts of this compound may cause cancer.  

The chemical compound is called hexavalent chromium, which gained infamy in the Oscar-winning film Erin Brockovich. The film ends in Hollywood fashion, with the corporate polluter paying $333 million to people suffering from illnesses. But in real life, that is not the end of the story.