The Investigative Fund
The Investigative Fund provides support for the research costs associated with investigative journalism. The Fund emphasizes reporting on subjects often ignored by the mainstream media, and seeks to improve the scope and overall quality of investigative reporting in the independent press and beyond. Above all, we want to support reporting with the potential to have a social impact.
Power Problem
 Did the nation's business press fail to uncover the roots of the current financial crisis? Dean Starkman's article in the June 2009 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review offers the definitive answer. He reviewed more than 2,000 stories from the most influential business journalism print outlets from January 2000, at the dawn of the housing bubble, through June 2007, right after all warnings were moot. His conclusion? The story was gettable and—with a few notable exceptions—it was not got.
"The idea that the press did all it could, and the public just missed it, is not just untenable," Starkman writes. "It is also untrue." He writes that the few stories that got to the heart of the matter were "corks bobbing on a news Niagara." Listen to Starkman's radio interview on CounterSpin.
More
|
Alexandra Poolos
(PBS)
Editor's note: On April 29, Sweden granted asylum to Adil Hakimjan, one of the original Uighurs, formerly imprisoned at Guantánamo, who had been abandoned in Albania. Since then, four Uighurs have been released to Bermuda and Palau has offered to take the rest.
In this Investigative Fund-supported documentary that aired nationally on PBS's Frontline/World, producer Alexandra Poolos tells the story of 22 Uighur men who were captured by U.S. troops and imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay seven years ago. Despite the U.S. government declaring their innocence, only five have been released—and they were sent to languish in Albania. The rest remain behind bars at a new facility in Guantánamo modeled after a supermax prison.
MORE
2009-01-27
Shane Bauer
(The Nation)
Editor's note: Shane Bauer maintained a blog, Iraq Days, during the time he was in Iraq reporting on this story. See his blog posts here.
Just after the United States took Baghdad in 2003, the Green Berets began training young Iraqis with no military experience in the desert of Jordan. The resulting brigade was a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under U.S. command and be unaccountable to the normal political process.
MORE
2009-06-22
Alyssa Katz
(Salon)
The biggest winners in the government's $275 billion homeowner bailout just might be the very mortgage brokers who were responsible for creating the disaster in the first place. Many are now reinventing themselves as heroes of the mortgage crisis by offering loan modification services—services that in many cases look more like scams.
MORE
2009-03-04
|
Teo Ballvé
(The Nation)
After Teo Ballvé article was published, El Tiempo, Colombia's paper of record, ran a front-page article about the issue; the Burlington Free Press also covered it.
Ballvé combined eye-witness interviews with internal documents from USAID, a subcontractor, ARD, as well as documents obtained from an investigation by the Colombia attorney general to show that the U.S. government aid program, Plan Colombia, steered palm oil development dollars to agricultural companies linked to narcotraffickers—who have planted biofuel crops on lands stolen using paramilitary violence.
MORE
2009-06-15
Lucy Komisar
(In These Times)
Using evidence from whistleblowers and internal company documents, Komisar finds that Sodexo, a $20 billion-a-year global leader in the food and facility management industry, has taken hundreds of millions of dollars of "rebates"—or kickbacks—from suppliers while operating cafeterias and other facilities for schools, hospitals, universities, government agencies, the military and private companies across the country.
MORE
2009-03-03
AC Thompson
(The Nation)
A.C. Thompson found that in New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina, some white residents armed themselves with handguns, assault rifles and shotguns. Shouting racial epithets, they opened fire on any passersby they believed to be looters, shooting at least 11 African Americans seeking refuge. Three and a half years later, as a result of this Nation article, the FBI has opened an investigation. According to a June 19 Times-Picayune article on the investigation—which cited Thompson’s Nation story as the first to report on the post-hurricane racist vigilante violence—a federal grand jury has been hearing testimony from police officers about the shooting of Henry Glover, one of the victims, for at least a month. In addition, the NOPD’s homicide division has also been investigating Glover’s death.
MORE
2008-12-18
|
