Text 6 San Francisco center keeps muckraking alive

Back in 1977, when a group of idealistic journalists founded the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, muckraking was in demand.

Washington Post reporters had just helped topple President Richard Nixon, and a new generation of journalists signed up for the same type of endeavor.

Over the years, some academics say, the media, controlled by a shrink­ing number of large corporations, has lost some of its appetite for investi­gative journalism.

“It has been clear for many years how cuts in news operations – both newspapers and TV – have been limiting the depth of many news­papers and newscasts,” Ted Pease, head of the Department of Journalism and Communication at Utah State University, said in an e-mail. The center certainly concurs.

“Investigative reporting is a money-loser for journalistic corporations,” said Burt Glass, executive director of the center. “It’s expensive, stories may not pan out, and you make a lot of enemies.”

But the center, based in San Francisco’s Financial District, doesn’t really worry about any of those things. As a nonprofit, it doesn’t concern itself with whether a story will make money, or enemies. It only wants its work to have an impact.

As the center marks its 25th anniversary, it can see results.

The center has exposed how toxic waste gets shipped from the United States to the Third World; how pesticides banned in the United States come back to this country on food grown elsewhere; and how the illegal trade in weapons operates.

Certainly, a wide range of outstanding investigative work appears in the mainstream media, such as the Boston Globe’s reporting on sex scan­dals among Catholic priests, which kick-started a national furor. Large newspapers remain committed to investigative work, according to Brant Houston, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a pro­fessional association of more than 4,000 journalists based at the University of Missouri’s journalism school.

But staff cuts – often made in the name of boosting profit margins – have taken a toll on in-depth reporting. Marilyn Greenwald and Joseph Bent, journalism professors at Ohio University, studied three months' worth of nine daily papers from 1980 and 1995 and found that the number of inves­tigative reports had been cut almost in half over that period.

Corporations have also lost the stomach for hard-hitting reports, be­cause of investigative projects that backfired and led to lengthy legal bat­tles, including notorious cases like the Cincinnati Enquirer’s expose of Chiquita Banana Corp. and ABC News’ undercover look at Food Lion super­markets. (San Francisco Chronicle, by Dan Fost) [3]

Text 7 The center for investigative reporting

The Center for Investigative Reporting is a non-profit news organization dedicated to exposing injustice and abuse of power through the tools of journalism. Led by a staff in San Francisco and powered by a nationwide team of independent reporters and producers, CIR is organized along three functions: as a journalism venture fund, investing in promising investigations at their early stages to give them a chance in the increasingly competitive news marketplace; as a documentary production house, producing investigations for television and radio; and as a publicity firm, maximizing the impact of the best investigations from the journalism community by promoting them to decision-makers, citizen groups and our journalism peers. Together, these activities equip citizens with the information they need to participate fully in the democratic process and bring about needed changes in laws, regulations, and the operations of government, corporations, and institutions.

Currently, CIR is focused on three beats or topic areas: Social and Criminal Justice, Environment, and Science and Technology. Over the years, reporting beats have also included Health, Education, and Politics and Money, among others. (San Francisco Chronicle, by Dan Fost) [3]