The Center for Public Integrity

In the 10 months since The Center launched the State Integrity Investigation in collaboration with Global Integrity and PRI/Public Radio International, more than 12 states have proposed new legislation or started a reform campaign. Four more states have passed new measures. The latest actions come from Maine and North Dakota. In Maine, legislation to make it unlawful for state officials to leave their jobs andimmediately go to work for industries they regulated – the so-called “revolving door” – is one of several ethics bills expected to be debated this session. And lawmakers in North Dakota have introduced a package of ethics reform bills that would revamp the state’s oversight of its politicians. Dubbed the Sunshine Act, the measures would create an ethics commission to investigate state officials and would tighten campaign finance reporting rules, among other changes.

What grade did your state earn?

Last year, the Center for Public Integrity’s investigative work was cited nearly 15,000 times by other media organizations. I expect that number will grow this year. That’s in part because of a new Center project launched this week called Primary Source.

Primary Source will publish daily original reports on all things influence-related: examinations and analyses of primary source documents pertaining to political contributions, spending, lobbying and other forms of special interest influence.  Primary Source is part of the Center for Public Integrity's larger Consider the Source project that focuses on developments in the post-Citizens United world of money and politics.

Veteran foreign correspondent Douglas Birch is joining the Center for Public Integrity’s national security reporting team. Birch has reported from more than 20 countries, covered four wars, a dozen elections, the death of a pope and the hunt for a malaria vaccine. He formerly served as the Moscow bureau chief for the Associated Press and spent 22 years at the Baltimore Sun.

“I can’t think of another journalist better than Doug Birch to help the Center dig into nuclear and proliferation dangers, investigate fraud and abuse in military spending, and explain how Capitol Hill makes defense-spending decisions,” said Executive Director William E. Buzenberg. “He’s an excellent addition to our already strong reporting team, led by National Security Managing Editor R. Jeffrey Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter.”

Birch was the AP’s diplomatic and military editor in Washington, following his work in Moscow from 2001 to 2005 and from 2007 to 2010. At the Baltimore Sun, he was an enterprise, feature and science writer. Birch was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002 for his series on the abuse of human subjects in drug trials. A graduate of Columbia University and its graduate journalism school, he was also a Knight science journalism fellow at MIT.

Birch lives in Baltimore with his wife, Jane, who works for a Baltimore charitable foundation. His daughter Alison is an architect living in Charleston, S.C. He begins at the Center on Jan. 22nd.

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan and independent news organization specializing in investigative journalism on significant public policy issues. Since 1990, the Washington, D.C.-based Center has released more than 500 investigative reports and 17 books to provide greater transparency and accountability of government and other institutions.

The Center for Public Integrity’s ground-breaking series, Cracking the Codes, has been named first-place winner of the 2012 Philip Meyer Journalism Award sponsored by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE.) The series documented how thousands of medical professionals have steadily billed Medicare for more complex and costly health care over the past decade – adding $11 billion or more to their fees – despite little evidence elderly patients required more treatment. The series also uncovered a broad range of costly billing errors and abuses that have plagued Medicare for years – from confusion over how to pick proper payment codes to apparent overcharges in medical offices and hospital emergency rooms. The findings strongly suggest these problems, known as “upcoding,” are worsening amid lax federal oversight and the government-sponsored switch from paper to electronic medical records.

This project represents a classic mix of the Center’s ability to marry traditional shoe-leather reporting with rigorous data analysis. Reporters Fred Schulte and Joe Eaton, working with project editor Gordon Witkin and database editor David Donald, analyzed 133 million Medicare records over 20 months to demonstrate how upcoding of diagnoses and procedures was steadily increasing Medicare payouts over the years.

Esteemed political journalist Dave Levinthal will join the Center for Public Integrity Jan. 7 as a senior member of its team investigating the impact of the ever-increasing flow of money in elections.

Rob Tornoe, a political cartoonist based in Delaware, is now drawing original cartoons for The Center, based on our stories. You'll see his work pop up on publicintegrity.org, our Facebook page and on Twitter. Tornoe also draws cartoons for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Press of Atlantic City, Media Matters and Philadelphia NPR affiliate WHYY, among others.

NEW YORK — The Center for Public Integrity and ABC News were awarded an Emmy Award Monday for their yearlong investigation exposing flaws in a U.S. government green energy program meant to boost new and innovative technologies.

Center senior investigative reporter Ronnie Greene and a team from ABC were honored for Green Energy: Contracts, Connections and the Collapse of Solyndra, a series of reports exploring  how the Department of Energy awarded lucrative green energy contracts. The coverage detailed breakdowns in the award to solar panel maker Solyndra Inc., which later filed for bankruptcy, and examined connections between Obama campaign bundlers and the DOE.

The prestigious News & Documentary Emmy Awards, presented Monday at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall, honored the Center and ABC for Outstanding Business and Economic Reporting. The ABC team included producer Matthew Mosk and chief investigative reporter Brian Ross.

Click here to read ABC’s story. Watch the segment by ABC World News with Diane Sawyer here.

On the campaign trail the other day, Mitt Romney was asked what the "big idea" of his campaign was. He answered, "Freedom." 

Funny that he didn't follow that up by discussing what our voting system, the voting system that defines our ability to be free, has devolved into. On one hand, we have several states attempting to put laws in place that disenfranchise voters by forcing them to jump through hoops in order to obtain proper documentation to vote. 

On the other, donors to super PACs are subverting disclosure laws by giving their money to nonprofit sub-branches, allowing anonymous donations to fund political activity and purchase elections. 

That doesn't seem like "freedom" to me. 

The 2012 presidential contest will be the most expensive - and most secretive - election of the modern era. Thanks to federal court decisions, corporations, billionaires and labor unions can spend as much as they want to fill the airwaves with half-truths and outright propaganda.

Sadly, much of the media is missing this story and instead obsessing over scripted, corporate-funded national conventions, where the biggest news was Clint Eastwood interrogating an empty chair.

The Center for Public Integrity is dedicated to giving you the most credible information possible - not available from other news outlets. We’re not focused on the parade of celebrities and sound-bite gaffes. We are focused on uncovering the shadowy groups that are determined to decide who the next president and members of Congress will be through a historic influx of special-interest cash, the result of the now-famous "Citizens United" Supreme Court ruling.

This is investigative reporting that I believe you care about and the kind of critical journalism that separates the Center for Public Integrity from the for-profit daily news chatter. And it's why I'm asking you to take a role in ensuring that this reporting continues by contributing today.

At the Center for Public Integrity, we are a watchdog for the public, not for insiders and shareholders. We take the time to write impartial, nonpartisan stories that give you the real truth.

But the truth has a price - research, reporting, writing, editing, fact-checking and publishing all cost money. We hope you consider it a price worth paying so we may continue to give you reporting that holds government, corporations and special interests accountable to you.