WASHINGTON, D.C. November 7, 2005 — The Center for Public Integrity announced Monday that it has been awarded a two-year, $700,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to extend Well Connected, its landmark investigation of the telecommunications industry, to a global level.

The grant will ensure that the Center can build on the successful first three years of Well Connected. Its features include Media Tracker, a comprehensive searchable database of U.S. media ownership, and a series of stories exploring the cozy relationship between the broadcast industry and its primary regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. The project has also produced the book Networks of Influence, a comprehensive expose of the money the industry has spent to gain influence in Washington.

The Ford Foundation’s generous support allows the Well Connected study to expand its research to global media and telecommunications ownership, among other projects. Using the Center for Public Integrity’s international network of journalists, the project will compile a list of the 100 most powerful communications firms in the world and explore how their ownership, holdings and regulation affects information pipelines around the world.

“This grant award illustrates the Ford Foundation’s extraordinary commitment to transparency in business and government,” said Roberta Baskin, the Center’s executive director. “All at the Center are appreciative of the Ford Foundation’s longstanding support for our core mission to raise the level of public discussion around these important issues.”

Under the direction of project manager John Dunbar, Well Connected also will expand the reach and depth of its original mission supported by the Ford Foundation for three years: to be an effective, permanent watchdog that monitors and holds accountable the institutions charged with defending the public interest in the media and telecommunications industries.

The Center for Public Integrity conducts investigative research and reporting on public policy issues in the United States and around the world. Through objective and thorough analyses, the Center hopes to serve as an honest broker of information and to inspire a better-informed citizenry that can demand a higher level of accountability from its government and business leaders. Since 1990, the Center, an independent, nonprofit organization, has released more than 275 investigative reports and 14 books. In the past eight years alone the Center has been honored more than 40 times – by, among others, PEN USA, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the Society of Professional Journalists and with the George Polk Award.

The Ford Foundation is an independent nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has been a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide, guided by its goals of strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation and advancing human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation also has offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Russia.

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