CONTENTS

17 FOI REPORT THE IRE JOURNAL Federal commission changing access rules TABLE OF CONTENTS to avoid FOIA guidelines JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 By Charles Davis 4 Draconian security act means 18 PARENTS SURRENDER CHILDREN it’s time to dig harder, deeper TO GAIN MENTAL HEALTH AID By Brant Houston By Jeremy Olson Omaha World-Herald 5 NEWS BRIEFS AND MEMBER NEWS 20 – 31 WHAT AILS HOSPITALS 6 CAR CONFERENCE TO FEATURE BEGINNER TRACK BED-TO-BED INFECTIONS By Gina Bramucci Deadly germs spreading The IRE Journal through nation’s hospitals By Michael J. Berens 7 MAPPING PROJECT EXPLORES Chicago Tribune RACIAL DISPARITY IN JURIES By Mark Houser SURGERY, DEATH (Pittsburgh) Tribune-Review RATES Analysis of statistics 8 BOOKS OF 2002 provides local picture Book-length investigations By Charlotte Huff run from personalizing issues Fort Worth Star-Telegram to providing history lessons By Steve Weinberg CHOPPER WARS The IRE Journal Competition for patients becomes 13 BOOKS HELP ADD MATH dangerous game TO REPORTERS’ WRITING SKILLS By Kirk Swauger By Scott R. Maier The (Johnstown) University of Oregon Tribune-Democrat 14 INTERVIEWS WITH VETERANS CARE THE INTERVIEWERS Records detail nation’s Dealing with treatment, oversight gaps Sensitive Issues By Joan Mazzolini By Lori Luechtefeld The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer The IRE Journal

32 DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ABOUT THE COVER Probe prompts change in way cases prosecuted Heart surgeon Jeffrey Lin performs By Rick Brundrett a triple bypass operation at Plaza The State (Columbia, S.C.) Medical Center of Fort Worth. 34 STATE SLUSH FUND Public money used to fund legislators’ private interests Cover story, pages 20-31 By Michele McNeil Solida The Indianapolis Star Cover photo by Rodger Mallison, Fort Worth Star- 36 DATABASE REPORTING REVEALS Telegram FOOD-HANDLING GONE WRONG Work also shows inspections sometimes not taking place By Fred Vallance-Jones The Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator

2 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 3 THE IRE JOURNAL FROM THE IRE OFFICES VOLUME 26  NUMBER 1 DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS & EDITOR Len Bruzzese Draconian security act means

MANAGING EDITOR Anita Bruzzese it’s time to dig harder, deeper

ART DIRECTOR Wendy Gray y now, you are probably aware of the Homeland Security Act that BRANT HOUSTON SENIOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR threatens to make secret – and keep secret – serious flaws in the Steve Weinberg critical infrastructure of the United States. CONTRIBUTING LEGAL EDITOR BBut it’s well worth reading the act to get the depressing details. Under the act, any agency David Smallman or employee can be prosecuted if they disclose information “related to the security of criti- cal infrastructure or protected systems” that a private company has voluntarily submitted to EDITORIAL INTERNS Gina Bramucci, Lori Luechtefeld the federal government. If convicted, the federal employee can be imprisoned up to a year and fined up to $5,000. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called the provision the “most severe weakening of the Freedom of Information Act in its 36-year history.” Leahy said the provision hurts national IRE security and frustrates enforcement of the laws that protect the public’s health and safety. IRE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR The provision supersedes any state or local open records laws and exempts the new Depart- Brant Houston ment of Homeland Security from the Federal Advisory Committee Act. That law requires agencies to meet standards of openness and accountability. There is more, but you can check BOARD OF DIRECTORS the entire act at the Library of Congress online site, http://thomas.loc.gov/. (For comments

CHAIRMAN on the effect of the act, go to OMBWatch, a private nonprofit at www.ombwatch.org, and to David Dietz, Bloomberg News The Reporter’s Committee on Freedom of the Press at www.rcfp.org.)

PRESIDENT Shawn McIntosh, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Lessening accountability This latest law represents a continuing effort by elected officials – both federal and local VICE PRESIDENT – to use concern over “security” to seal off government and business information from the David Boardman, The Seattle Times public and to lessen accountability at a time it’s needed most. TREASURER Long-time journalists Seymour Hersh and Bob Simon recently told a gathering of media Duane Pohlman, WEWS-Cleveland lawyers that they have never been as worried as they are now about officials’ efforts to with- SECRETARY hold and/or control information. Edward DeLaney, Barnes and Thornburg But this only means that we the journalists must dig harder and deeper than ever. A quick perusal of the archives of the IRE Resource Center reveals dozens of recent and Paul Adrian, KDFW-Dallas/Fort Worth important stories on this country’s faulty infrastructure, corporate negligence, and the threats Stephen K. Doig, Arizona State University to public safety. Many stories are based on information and databases removed from the James V. Grimaldi, The Washington Post Web or closed to scrutiny in a panicked, ill-advised reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Andy Hall, Wisconsin State Journal Among those stories are investigations into flawed airport security, unsafe dams, public Chris Heinbaugh, WFAA-Dallas/Fort Worth health threats and exploding gas pipelines. Dianna Hunt, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Nonetheless, we need to continue to pursue stories on safety and security. The latest Stephen C. Miller, The New York Times closing down of information should encourage us to do more reporting – and better report- Cheryl Phillips, The Seattle Times ing – in the public interest. Mark J. Rochester, The Denver Post Stuart Watson, WCNC-Charlotte Court of last resort With the threat of prosecution always nearby, public employees probably will be less forth- The IRE Journal (ISSN0164-7016) is coming and err on the side of denials of our requests for information. This means we will have published six times a year by Investiga- to cultivate more sources, do more research and cross-reference more documents and databases tive Reporters and Editors, Inc. 138 Neff to develop relevant and important stories. One of the reasons IRE has been co-sponsoring the Annex, Missouri School of Journalism, Columbia, MO 65211, 573-882-2042. Better Watchdog Workshops has been to increase local open records training. E-mail: [email protected]. Subscriptions are Journalists are often called a “court of last resort” when it comes to government or busi- $60 in the U.S., $70 for institutions and those ness accountability. With the newest lockdowns on information, it looks like the court will outside the U.S. Periodical postage paid at Columbia, MO. Postmaster: Please send ad- have to be open longer hours. dress changes to IRE. USPS #4516708 Brant Houston is executive director of IRE and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted © 2003 Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. Reporting. He can be reached through e-mail at [email protected] or by calling 573-882-2042.

4 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 5 I R E N E W S

2003 Global Conference IRE members win big MEMBER NEWS planned for Copenhagen in annual SEJ awards onny Albarado moves to business The second Global Investigative Journalism IRE members made an impressive showing editor of The Commercial Appeal in Mem- Conference organized by IRE and several Euro- in the Society of Environmental Journalists’ S pean journalism organizations is set for May 1-4 2002 awards, winning five of nine first-place phis, after nearly 11 years as projects editor. in Copenhagen. prizes and several honorable mentions. The  Walt Bogdanich has moved to assistant The conference will focus on outstanding winners: editor for The New York Times investigative stories done internationally, the latest jour- • Outstanding feature reporting, print: Scott unit. Bogdanich, who joined The Times as nalistic techniques and the effect of media Streater, Pensacola News Journal, for investigations editor for business stories, convergence on investigative journalism. One “Hidden Hazard: A look at our environment’s of its chief benefits: increasing the ability of has worked on investigations for CBS’s effect on our health.” Streater wrote about the reporters to cross borders in pursuit of the story. “60 Minutes,” ABC News and The Wall investigation in the July-August 2002 issue The event will include reporting panels, hands-  of The IRE Journal. Street Journal. Ron Chepesiuk has been on training in computer-assisted reporting and awarded a 10-month Fulbright grant as a • Outstanding deadline reporting, print: Del informal discussion groups. visiting professor at Chittagong University The first conference, held in 2001, drew more Quentin Wilber and a team of reporters at than 300 journalists from 47 countries. The (Baltimore) Sun for coverage of a tunnel in Bangladesh. Chepesiuk, who takes up his Complete details and registration forms fire in downtown Baltimore in July 2001. new post in January, will teach courses in can be found at www.ire.org/training/ • Outstanding series, print: Ralph K.M. feature writing and investigative journalism. globalconference/ Haurwitz and Jeff Nesmith, The Austin  Bob Greene, who played an instrumental American-Statesman, for “Pipelines: The Watchdog Workshops role in the founding of IRE, was awarded the invisible danger,” an investigation of a pipe- Society of Professional Journalists’ Lifetime adding sites for 2003 line regulatory system that put lives at danger Achievement Award. Greene, who just retired The Better Watchdog Workshop series, and spent little time enforcing the law. co-sponsored by IRE and the Society for Pro- from Hofstra University and IRE’s endowment • Outstanding program or series, broadcast: fessional Journalists, continues to add new committee, led a team of journalists in the Vince Patton and Terry Renteria, KGW- training sites. Arizona Project, a 1977 series investigating The sessions teach journalists how to do Portland, Ore., for “Oregon’s Changing investigative and enterprise reporting while on Coast,” an in-depth look at causes behind corruption in Arizona. The series, prompted a beat and emphasize the use of freedom-of- the shifting Northwest coastline. by the car-bombing death of IRE member Don information laws in the pursuit of these stories. • Outstanding small-market coverage, broad- Bolles, was one of IRE’s defining moments. The workshops specifically serve journalists cast: Heather King, KOMU-Columbia, Mo.,  from small- to medium-sized news organiza- Reynolds Holding, San Francisco Chronicle, tions – from both print and broadcast. The SDX for “Herculaneum lead,” a series on the high received the Public Service Award from the Foundation has helped underwrite most of the lead levels caused by an old smelter and the northern California chapter of SPJ. Holding was events, with additional support coming from community that has been fighting the problem honored for his series on how mandatory arbi- press associations and local newsrooms. for decades. tration strips consumers of many legal rights. Upcoming sites include:  CFIC director moves on; Walter Johns Jr., assistant managing editor of the Houston Chronicle, has been elected trea- Feb. 8 – Evanston, Ill. will continue to assist IRE surer of Associated Press Managing Editors. Feb. 22 – Tempe, Ariz. Aron Pilhofer, IRE’s Campaign Finance  March 8 – Storrs, Conn. Information Center director, has taken a job Newsday reporter Thomas Maier won March 22 – St. Petersburg, Fla. as database editor with the Center for Public the International Consortium for Investiga- March 28 – Minneapolis, Minn. Integrity in Washington, D.C. tive Journalists’ 2002 award for outstanding March 29 – Columbia, Mo. Pilhofer will continue to work on IRE international investigative reporting. Maier training efforts and will contribute articles on April 5 – Cleveland, Ohio was recognized for his series on immigrant open-source software to Uplink, a newslet- April 5 – Atlanta, Ga. ter by the National Institute for Computer- labor abuses, “Death on the job: Immigrants at April 12 – Spokane, Wash. Assisted Reporting. risk.” He explained how he reported the prize- April 12 – Long Island, N.Y. During his time at IRE, Pilhofer trained winning story in the March-April 2002 issue Oct. 4 – Eugene, Ore. many community journalists, updated the of The IRE Journal.  Patrick McDonnell has Oct. 25 – State College, Pa. campaignfinance.org Web site and helped moved from metro editor at the El Paso Times fine-tune its two powerful search tools: the CONTINUED ON PAGE 39 × Visit www.ire.org/training/betterwatchdog/ federal contracts database and the power for the latest additions and updates. search that allows political cash flow to be Send Member News items to Len Bruzzese at [email protected] and include a phone number for tracked across states. verification.

4 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 5 FEATURESI R E N E W S FEATURES

stories for someone just learning CAR,” says Brant Houston, IRE’s executive director. Friday morning panels will discuss using CAR on some of the most frequently covered beats, including local government, education and crime; and in the afternoon, hands-on sessions will include training in spreadsheets for analyzing datasets on these beats and others. “We also will focus on effective daily and beat uses of Census or other data in the open- ing sessions, before launching into hands-on training on Friday afternoon,” Houston says. “In this first afternoon session we will con- centrate on searching the Web for data and downloading it into spreadsheets.” The panel lineup for Saturday morning’s beginner track will highlight stories in which journalists built their own databases and used database managers to do stories. Recent changes in campaign-finance coverage are just some of the many areas the panels will CAR CONFERENCE cover. On Sunday, panelists will talk about getting a story off the ground, offering story TO FEATURE BEGINNER TRACK ideas journalists can tackle when they return to the newsroom. Hands-on sessions for Saturday and Sunday afternoons will offer basic instruction in using database managers for stories, plus a walk-through of the overall CAR process BY GINA BRAMUCCI THE IRE JOURNAL – from importing a database to analysis to writing a lead. Conference planners decided to offer advanced-level participants a special he 2003 Computer-Assisted Report- have little or no experience with CAR, Thursday afternoon session, as well as early ing Conference, slated for Charlotte, while special sessions are planned for CAR evening sessions. These sessions will be N.C., will introduce experts. An added bonus small roundtable discussions and workshops features for begin- Conference: this year: To ensure that no that will explore the latest in CAR, such as ningT and veteran CAR report- Annual Computer-Assisted one misses a favorite panel, intranets, mapping and social network soft- ers, while highlighting some Reporting Conference hands-on teaching sessions ware. Some of the specific software to be of the latest developments in will be extended into the covered includes Access, SQL Server, SAS, March 14-16 the field. early evening. SPSS and mapping using ArcView. Experts Charlotte, N.C. The annual conference, On Friday morning, the will lead each of the advanced CAR sessions, co-hosted by The Charlotte Westin Charlotte special beginner track will which will be held in hands-on training rooms Observer and NBC News, open with an overview of when necessary. will be held at the Westin Costs: computer-assisted reporting As always, this year’s conference will have Charlotte in the heart of the Registration: $150 stories and ways to use CAR panels on specific beats and will showcase the financial district, and will (students: $100) techniques when just start- best stories done over the past year. run March 14-16, a Friday To attend, membership must ing out. Most of these stories “We also will have special sessions for edi- through a Sunday. be current. See www.ire.org/ involve small datasets that are tors working to manage CAR in their news- Conference organizers accessible on the Web, have rooms,” says Houston, “and on blending CAR training/charlotte/ for latest have more than 50 panels been built by other reporters, with traditional investigative stories.” details. and workshops slated for or are slices of data that can Charlotte, and more than 50 be obtained quickly from the Gina Bramucci is a graduate student at the hands-on sessions. An introductory track IRE and NICAR database library. Missouri School of Journalism and an edito- will span all three days for reporters who “These are great examples of manageable rial intern for The IRE Journal.

6 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 7 FEATURES FEATURES MAPPING PROJECT EXPLORES RACIAL DISPARITY IN JURIES

BY MARK HOUSER Tribune-Review Knox James (PITTSBURGH)TRIBUNE-REVIEW

e usually doesn’t count heads each good enough. I had to look at the system. Is it time he enters a room, but when really random? Do blacks and whites have a rea- Reggie Flowers sonably equal chance of being showed up for jury For more detail on the called to jury duty? duty and glanced around at the computer-assisted report- The answer is no, and that H ing techniques used in this other 87 people, he couldn’t help conclusion was the centerpiece but notice something. story, see the November- of a four-month (Pittsburgh) He was the only black December 2002 issue of Uplink, Tribune-Review investigative person present. a newsletter of the National project, “A jury of peers?” “I don’t understand,” he Institute for Computer-Assisted told me later. “It’s supposed Flawed surveys Reporting. Find out how to sub- Delvon Anderson, 38, was one of four black jurors in a to be a cross-section of your Pennsylvania’s open scribe at www.ire.org/store/ group of 75 called to jury duty. “It would be better to community.” records law is among the look into things and see why it happens rather than I, too, noticed it after a few periodicals.html. nation’s worst, but this time just leave things as they are,” Anderson said. weeks of visiting jury rooms. I lucked out and got what I Though the Census shows 11 percent of Allegh- needed. The key public records I relied on were their addresses. eny County’s adult population is black, I found the jury arrays, the computerized daily lists of Using mapping software, I plotted the home the typical criminal court jury room was only 4 everyone summoned for jury duty, along with CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 × percent black. On the other hand, African-Armerican defen- Seeing things differently dants far outnumber white ones, according to court records. Those defendants frequently have to trust The (Pittsburgh) Tribune-Review story “A Journal of Constitutional Law published a a dozen white people to weigh their actions and jury of peers?” examined at a system that study, “Death Sentencing in Black and White,” decide their fates. routinely overlooks blacks for jury service and showing how whites and blacks on juries Juries clearly have an important function: how it threatens public trust in the courts. often see things very differently. The study’s They physically demonstrate the founding con- The Trib did not examine whether all-white authors relied on interviews with 1,155 jurors cept of American democracy that our government juries give black defendants harsher verdicts. who served on 340 capital murder trials in is of, by and for the people. That’s what they’re supposed to do, anyway. For one thing, it would have required sifting 14 states. But courtrooms in Pittsburgh, one prominent through hundreds of trial records to get The starkest differences came in cases defense attorney said, look “like South Africa enough cases for a statistical analysis. Those where blacks were accused of killing whites. during apartheid.” records are often incomplete or contain For instance, in such cases: What’s going on? errors. • The defendant got the death penalty 72 In Pennsylvania, as in many other states, Several trial records examined were miss- percent of the time when there were no computers make random lists of potential jurors ing the jurors’ names, for instance, rendering black males on the jury, but only 38 percent from voter registration and driver’s license them useless. And because those records of the time when at least one black male databases. Challenges to jury room imbalances don’t record the race of jurors, it would have was on the jury. in such systems, where there is no overt bias in taken at least a dozen phone calls for every Only 8 percent of white jurors thought the picking possible jurors, have been struck down • repeatedly in the state and federal courts. Rulings trial to find out for sure. defendant was sorry for the crime, but 44 follow the U.S. Supreme Court, which has said However, other researchers are studying percent of black jurors did. that while the system may not discriminate, no how race affects verdicts. Their results prob- defendant is guaranteed a racially representative ably won’t surprise you. The study is online at www.law.upenn.edu/ jury or jury pool. Last year the University of Pennsylvania journals/conlaw. So just counting heads in the jury room wasn’t

6 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 7 BOOKS BOOKS

criminal justice proceedings and corrupt poli- tics is a tour de force. Construction workers die every year. Some BOOKS OF 2002 of them are immigrants who have entered the United States illegally. These workers, des- BOOK-LENGTH INVESTIGATIONS perate to earn money to send to impoverished families back home, are hired easily. Their RUN FROM PERSONALIZING ISSUES employers often care little, if at all, about obeying wage or hiring laws, assuming they TO PROVIDING HISTORY LESSONS will not get caught by investigators from the U.S. Labor Department or Immigration and Naturalization Service. Some employers care BY STEVE WEINBERG little, if at all, about workplace safety. They THE IRE JOURNAL choose the cheapest construction materials and techniques, assuming they will not get caught by Occupational Safety and Health nvestigative books by journalists during books of the year: “The Short Sweet Dream Administration inspectors. 2002 featured lots of superb efforts by of Eduardo Gutierrez.” So, when Eduardo Gutierrez, age 21, died first-time authors. The veterans, however, Breslin is inextricably identified with New in the November 1999 collapse of a building held their own. Jimmy Breslin, keynote York City. Yet his books can transcend the Big under construction in Brooklyn, there was no speaker at the 2002 IRE Annual Conference Apple while still being of it. Breslin’s expose reason to think that anyone would much care, I CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 × last June, wrote one of the best investigative of immigration law, worker safety, civil and INVESTIGATIVE BOOKS OF 2002 very year, Steve Weinberg does his best to compile this list for The • Baskin, Yvonne • Boot, Max IRE Journal. It consists of books of investigative or explanatory jour- A Plague of Rats and Rubber The Savage Wars of Peace: Small E Vines: The Growing Threat of Spe- Wars and the Rise of American nalism, broadly defined, published for the first time during 2002, in the cies Invasion Power United States, in English. The authors are women and men who work (Island/Shearwater) (Basic Books) primarily as journalists, and who are trying to reach general audiences • Beam, Alex through retail bookstore sales. If you know of a book unintentionally Gracefully Insane: The Rise and omitted from this list, please send an e-mail to Steve Weinberg at Fall of America’s Premier Mental [email protected] or by fax at 573-882-5431. Hospital (Public Affairs)

A • Assael, Shaun • Becker, Lisa Liberty • Abramsky, Sasha Sex, Lies and Headlocks: The Real Net Prospect: The Courting Pro- Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built Story of Vince McMahon and the cess of Women’s College Basket- a Prison Nation World Wrestling Federation ball Recruiting (St. Martin’s) (Crown) (Wish)

• Adair, Bill • Birkbeck, Matt The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a A Deadly Secret: The Strange Dis- Crash Investigation appearance of Kathie Durst (Smithsonian Institution Press) (Berkley)

• Allen, John L. • Bledsoe, Jerry • Boston Globe team Conclave: The Politics, Personali- Death by Journalism?: One Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic ties and Process of the Next Papal Teacher’s Encounter With Political Church Election Correctness (Little, Brown) (Doubleday) (Down Home Press) • Bowden, Charles • Anderson, Jon Lee • Blow, Richard Down by the River: Drugs, Money, The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches From American Son: A Portrait of John F. Murder and Family Afghanistan Kennedy Jr. (Simon & Schuster) (Grove) (Holt) • Bowden, Mark • Antilla, Susan • Blumenfeld, Laura Finders Keepers: The Story of a Man Tales From the Boom Boom Room: B Revenge: A Story of Hope Who Found $1 Million Women vs. Wall Street • Bardach, Ann Louise (Simon & Schuster) (Atlantic Monthly Press) (Bloomberg Press) Cuba Confidential: Love and Ven- geance in Miami and Havana (Random House)

8 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 9 BOOKS BOOKS

INVESTIGATIVE BOOKS OF 2002 • Bradsher, Keith • Carroll, Colleen F • Gilbert, Elizabeth High and Mighty: SUVs – the The New Faithful • Farrell, John A. The Last American Man World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles (Loyola University Press) Tip O’Neill and the Democratic (Viking) and How They Got That Way Century (Public Affairs) • Celis, William (Little, Brown) • Glatt, John Battle Rock: The Struggle Over a Cries in the Desert One-Room School in America’s • Featherstone, Liza (St. Martin’s) Vanishing West Students Against Sweatshops (Public Affairs) (Verso) • Gonzalez, Juan Fallout: The Environmental Conse- • Clifford, Frank • Feinstein, John quences of the World Trade Center The Backbone of the World: A The Punch: One Night, Two Lives Collapse Portrait of the Vanishing Way West and the Fight That Changed Bas- (New Press) Along the Continental Divide ketball Forever (Broadway) (Little, Brown) • Graysmith, Robert Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of • Clifford, Hal • Fleeman, Michael America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer Downhill Slide: Why the Corporate If I Die Revealed Ski Industry Is Bad for Skiing, Ski (St. Martin’s) (Berkley) Towns and the Environment (Sierra Club Books) • Flynn, Sean • Grossman, Elizabeth 3000 Degrees: The True Story of Watershed: The Undamning of • Cohen, Adam a Deadly Fire and the Men Who America The Perfect Store: Inside eBay Fought It (Counterpoint) • Breslin, Jimmy (Little, Brown) (Warner) The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo • Guinn, Jeff Gutierrez • Conaway, James • Forrest, Brett Our Land Before We Die: The (Crown) The Far Side of Eden: The Ongoing Long Bomb: How the XFL Became Proud Story of the Seminole Negro Saga of Napa Valley TV’s Biggest Fiasco Indians • Bruni, Frank (Houghton Mifflin) (Crown) (Tarcher) Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush • Cose, Ellis • Francis, Eric H (HarperCollins) The Envy of the World: On Being a The Dartmouth Murders • Halberstam, David Black Man in America (St. Martin’s) Fire House • Bryant, Howard (Washington Square) (Hyperion) Shut Out: A Story of Race and Base- • Freeman, Gregory A. ball in Boston • Crewdson, John Sailors to the End: The Deadly • Hallman, Tom (Routledge) Science Fictions: A Scientific Mys- Fire on the USS Forrestal and the Sam: Boy Behind the Mask tery, a Massive Cover-up and the Heroes Who Fought It (Putnam) • Bryce, Robert Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (Morrow) Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, Jealousy (Little, Brown) • Hancock, LynNell and the Death of Enron • Fried, Stephen Hands to Work: The Stories of Three (Public Affairs) • Crile, George The New Rabbi: A Congregation Families Racing the Welfare Clock Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraor- Searches for Its Leader (Morrow) • Burnett, John S. dinary Story of the Largest Covert (Bantam) Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy Operation in History – the Arming and Terror on the High Seas of the Mujahideen • Frump, Robert (Dutton) (Atlantic Monthly Press) Until the Sea Shall Free Them: Life, Death and Survival in the Merchant • Byron, Christopher D Marine Martha Inc. • D’Orso, Michael (Doubleday) (Wiley) Plundering Paradise: The Hand of Man on the Galapagos Islands G C (HarperCollins) • Gantenbein, Douglas • Campbell, Douglas A. A Season of Fire: Four Months on The Sea’s Bitter Harvest • Drew, Elizabeth the Firelines of America’s Forests (Carroll & Graf) Citizen McCain (Tarcher) (Simon & Schuster) • Campbell, Greg • Gavenas, Mary Lisa Blood Diamonds: Tracing the • Drexler, Madeline Color Stories: Behind the Scenes Deadly Path of the World’s Most Secret Agents: The Menace of of America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Precious Stones Emerging Infections Industry • Hart, Kathleen (Perseus) (Joseph Henry Press) (Simon & Schuster) Eating in the Dark: America’s Experiment With Genetically Engi- • Caro, Robert • Gertz, Bill E neered Food The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Breakdown: How America’s Intel- • Eskin, Blake (Pantheon) Master of the Senate A Life in Pieces: The Making and ligence Failures Led to Sept. 11 (Knopf) Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (Regnery) (Norton)

8 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 9 BOOKS BOOKS

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8 without offices, Breslin conveys how daily life the huge and small nations improve. except his family and friends in San Matias is lived by the hard-working unfortunates too Bardach demonstrates that the equation is Cuatchatyotla, Mexico — assuming they ever often invisible to journalists. not so simple, and that Cuba is not really old learned of his death. news after all. She introduces family after Breslin cared, it turned out. He decided to Cuba Confidential family split asunder by U.S.-Cuba conflict, use the nearly anonymous dead man as the Ann Louise Bardach has been concentrat- families such as the Medinas. Felipe Medina centerpiece of a book. Breslin made it his job ing her investigative skills on Cuba for the past piloted deposed dictator Fulgencio Batista out to learn about Gutierrez’ maturation in San decade, publishing primarily in The New York of Cuba as Castro grabbed power. As Felipe Matias, his decision to enter the United States Times and Vanity Fair as a freelancer. left, his sister Abilia, a Castro revolutionary, illegally, his risky trek to New York City, his Her book-length investigation, “Cuba said to a relative, “If we ever capture my hiring by a disreputable builder, the building’s Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami brother and he is guilty, I want to be the one collapse, and the criminal and civil inquiries and Havana,” combines expose, gossip and to send him to the firing squad.” Felipe eventu- that followed. straight news to explain the complexities of ally settled in Miami. Abilia remained in Cuba. Along the way, Breslin introduces many U.S. foreign policy close to home. They never communicated. other characters from San Matias, including For decades, Cuba has seemed like old Recently, however, Felipe’s daughter Lilia the young woman, Silvia, whom Gutierrez news to many readers. The equation looked decided to visit the island nation she could loved. Her dangerous journey as a 15-year- so simple: Left-wing dictator Fidel Castro barely remember. With trepidation, she met old from central Mexico to her illegal hiring in overthrew a right-wing dictatorship on the her aunt Abilia for the first time. Felipe’s College Station, Texas, constitutes the book’s Caribbean island 43 years ago, the U.S. and name did not arise during the conversation secondary plot. Cuban governments have been at war ever — until the end. “How is my brother?” Abilia When a seasoned reporter and fine stylist since, Miami is filled with exiled Castro haters asked Lilia on the way out the door. Felipe like Breslin decides to investigate a fresh topic, pandered to by American presidents of both was gravely ill. But before he died, he and the result is often a model for younger journal- parties, Castro is bound to die soon, and then Abilia exchanged letters that forged a belated ists to follow. By concentrating on characters everybody will see whether relations between CONTINUED ON PAGE 12 × INVESTIGATIVE BOOKS OF 2002 • Henry, Shannon • Jackson, Steve L The Dinner Club: How the Masters Love Me to Death • Lamb, David of the Internet Universe Rode the (Pinnacle) Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns Rise and Fall of the Greatest Boom (Public Affairs) in History • Johnson, Sandra E. (Free Press) Standing on Holy Ground: A • Langewiesche, William Battle Against Hate Crime in the American Ground: Unbuilding the • Herman, Marc Deep South World Trade Center Searching for El Dorado: A Journey (St. Martin’s) (North Point Press) Into the South American Rain Forest on the Tail of the World’s K • Leibovich, Mark Largest Gold Rush • Karam, Jana Abrams The New Imperialists: How Five (Doubleday) Into the Breach: A Year of Life and Restless Kids Grew Up to Virtually Death With the EMS Rule the World • Hertsgaard, Mark (St. Martin’s) (Prentice Hall) The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World • Katz, Samuel M. • King, Joyce • Leveritt, Mara (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Relentless Pursuit: The Diplomatic Hate Crime: The Story of a Drag- Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the Security Service and the Manhunt ging in Jasper, Texas West Memphis Three • Hirsch, James S. for al-Qaeda Terrorists (Pantheon) (Atria) Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa (Forge) Race War and Its Legacy • Klein, Joe • Levine, Judith (Houghton Mifflin) • Kessler, Ronald The Natural: The Misunderstood Harmful to Minors: The Perils of The Bureau: The Secret History of Presidency of Bill Clinton Protecting Children From Sex • Honigsbaum, Mark the FBI (Doubleday) (University of Minnesota Press) The Fever Trail: In Search of the (St. Martin’s) Cure for Malaria • Kramer, Jane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) M • Kilian, Pamela Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an • Mackey, Sandra Barbara Bush: Matriarch of a American Militiaman The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy J Dynasty (Pantheon) of Saddam Hussein • Jackson, Steve (St. Martin’s) (Norton) No Stone Unturned: The Story of • Krieger, Michael NecroSearch International • King, Jeanne All the Men in the Sea: The Untold (Kensington) Dead End: The Crime Story of the Story of One of the Greatest Res- Decade – Murder, Incest and High- cues in History Tech Thievery (Free Press) (M. Evans)

10 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 11 BOOKS BOOKS

INVESTIGATIVE BOOKS OF 2002

• Malkin, Michelle • Murphy, Caryle • Preston, Richard • Schwartz, Stephen Invasion: How America Still Passion for Islam: Shaping the The Demon in the Freezer The Two Faces of Islam: The House Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals Modern Middle East, the Egyptian (Random House) of Saud From Tradition to Terror and Other Foreign Menaces to Experience (Doubleday) Our Shores (Scribner) R (Regnery) • Ramos, Jorge • Schwartz-Nobel, Loretta N The Other Face of America: Growing Up Empty: The Hunger • Martin, Justin • Nash, J. Madeleine Chronicle of the Immigrants Shap- Epidemic in America Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon El Nino: Unlocking the Secrets of ing Our Future (HarperCollins) (Perseus) the Master Weathermaker (Rayo/HarperCollins) (Warner) • Mathis, Deborah • Raviv, Dan Yet a Stranger: Why Black Ameri- • Nevins, Joseph Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons cans Still Don’t Feel at Home Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of Battled Over the Marvel Comics (Warner) the ‘Illegal Alien’ and the Remaking Empire – and Both Lost of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Broadway) • Maxwell, Fredric Alan (Routledge) Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who • Rieff, David Now Runs Microsoft A Bed for the Night: Humanitari- (Morrow) O • Olsen, Jack anism in Crisis (Simon & Schuster) • McAllester, Matthew “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer (St. Martin’s) Beyond the Mountains of the • Robbins, Alexandra Damned: The War Inside Kosovo Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and (New York University Press) • O’Neill, Gerard, and Dick Lehr The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of Bones, the Ivy League, and the a Mafia Family Hidden Path of Power • McDougal, Dennis (Little, Brown) Blood Cold: Fame, Sex and Murder (Public Affairs) • Scroggins, Deborah in Hollywood – the True Story of • Roebuck, Karen Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Robert Blake and Bonny Lee Bakley P Under the Knife Death in the Sudan (Onyx) • Palast, Greg (Pinnacle) (Pantheon) The Best Democracy Money Can • McPhee, John Buy: An Investigative Reporter • Rubin, Richard • Shannon, Elaine; and Ann Blackman The Founding Fish Exposes the Truth About Global- Confederacy of Silence: A True The Spy Next Door: The Extraor- (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) ization, Corporate Cons, and High Tale of the New Old South dinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Finance Fraudsters (Pocket Books) Hanssen, the Most Damaging FBI • McPhee, Michele (Pluto) Agent in U.S. History Mob Over Miami • Rucker, Patrick Michael (Little, Brown) (Onyx) This Troubled Land (Ballantine) • Sheff, David, • Miller, G. Wayne China Dawn: The Story of a Tech- Men and Speed: A Wild Ride • Russo, Gus nology and Business Revolution Through NASCAR’s Breakout The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s (Harper Business) Season Underworld in the Shaping of (Public Affairs) Modern America • Shell, Ellen Ruppel (Bloomsbury) The Hungry Gene: The Science of • Miller, John; Michael Stone and Chris Fat and the Future of Thin Mitchell (Atlantic Monthly Press) The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot and S Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It • Sabbag, Robert • Smith, Carlton (Hyperion) Loaded: A Misadventure on the Death of a Doctor Marijuana Trail (St. Martin’s) • Milton, Joyce (Little, Brown) The Road to Malpsychia • Stabiner, Karen (Encounter) • Sammon, Bill All Girls: Single-Sex Education and • Pollock, Ellen Joan Fighting Back: The War on Terror- Why It Matters • Mitchell, Elizabeth The Pretender: How Martin Frankel ism From Inside the Bush White (Riverhead Books) Three Strides Before the Wire: The Fooled the Financial World and Led House Dark and Beautiful World of Horse the Feds on One of the Most Publi- (Regnery) • Steinberg, Jacques Racing cized Manhunts in History The Gatekeepers: A Premier Col- (Hyperion) (Free Press) • Schiller, Lawrence lege Admits a Freshman Class Cape May Court House: A Death in (Viking) • Motavalli, John • Powell, Bill the Night Bamboozled at the Revolution: Treason: How a Russian Spy Led (HarperCollins) • Stewart, James B. How Big Media Lost Billions in the an American Journalist to a U.S. The Heart of a Soldier: A Story of Battle for the Internet Double Agent • Schorr, Jonathan Love, Heroism and September 11 (Viking) (Simon & Schuster) Hard Lessons: The Promise of an (Simon & Schuster) Inner-City Charter School (Ballantine)

10 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 11 BOOKS

INVESTIGATIVE BOOKS OF 2002 • Stille, Alexander W • Wise, David The Future of the Past • Walker, John Frederick Spy: The Inside Story of How the (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) A Certain Curve of Horn: The Hun- FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed dred-Year Quest for the Giant Sable America • Stober, Dan; and Ian Hoffman Antelope of Angola (Random House) A Convenient Spy: (Atlantic Monthly Press) Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of • Wittes, Benjamin Nuclear Espionage • Ward, Diane Raines Starr: A Reassessment (Simon & Schuster) Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, (Yale University Press) and the Politics of Thirst • Stone, Amey, and Michael Brewster (Riverhead Books) • Wolff, Alexander King of Capital: Sandy Weill and Big Game, Small World: A Basket- the Making of Citigroup ball Adventure (Wiley) (Warner)

• Stratton, W.K. • Wolman, William; and Anne Cola- Backyard Brawl: Inside the Blood mosca Feud Between Texas and Texas • Temple-Raston, Dina The Great 401(K) Hoax: Why Your A&M A Death in Texas: A Story of Family’s Financial Security Is at (Crown) Race, Murder and a Small Town’s Risk, and What You Can Do About Struggle for Redemption It • Sullivan, Randall (Holt) (Perseus) Labyrinth: A Detective Investigates the Murders of • Timmerman, Kenneth R. • Woodward, Bob Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G, Shakedown: Exposing the Real Bush at War the Implication of Death Row Jesse Jackson (Simon and Schuster) Records’ Suge Knight, and the (Regnery) Origins of the Los Angeles Police • Worrall, Simon Scandal • Toth, Jennifer The Poet and the Murderer (Atlantic Monthly Press) What Happened to Johnnie (Dutton) Jordan: The Story of a Child Turn- • Weaver, Mary Anne Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad ing Violent • Wynter, Leon E. T (Free Press) and Afghanistan • Takahashi, Dean (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Opening the XBox: Inside Business and the End of White Microsoft’s Plan to Unleash an V • Whitaker, Robert America Entertainment Revolution • Viorst, Milton Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad (Crown) (Prima) What Shall I Do With This People? Medicine and the Enduring Mis- Jews and the Fractious Politics of treatment of the Mentally Ill Y • Taylor, John Judaism (Perseus) • Yarsinske, Amy Waters The Count and the Confession: A (Free Press) No One Left Behind: The Lt. Comdr. True Mystery • White, Emily Michael Scott Speicher Story (Random House) • Vise, David A. Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the (Dutton) The Bureau and the Mole: The Myth of the Slut Unmasking of Robert Philip Hans- (Scribner) sen, the Most Dangerous Double Z • Zuckoff, Mitchell Agent in FBI History • Wickelgren, Ingrid (Atlantic Monthly Press) Choosing Naia: A Family’s Journey The Gene Masters: How a New Breed (Beacon) of Scientific Entrepreneurs Raced for the Biggest Prize in Biology (Times Books/Holt)

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 10 of a historical reference work. That book is Caro, like Breslin, is a former IRE confer- understanding. “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the ence keynote speaker. The reporting that fills “Cuba Confidential” is filled with such Senate.” It is volume three of what is expected the 1,167 pages of volume three is, like always memorable anecdotes that derive from skill- to be a five-book biography of the former U.S. with Caro, mind-boggling in its thoroughness. ful reporting. Bardach is no slouch with president, who died in 1973. As in the previous two volumes, however, the documents, either, as her informative endnotes The author is Robert Caro, a former news- main reason for contemporary investigative demonstrate. Those endnotes are worthy of paper reporter for Newsday who has spent the journalists to read Caro is the writing style. study by journalists trying to pin down infor- past 30 years writing memorable investiga- Nobody tells a complicated, multi-layered mation across hostile national borders. tive biographies. Caro’s first was “The Power story about the making of public policy better Broker,” an expose of New York urban plan- than Caro. He is a paragon of narrative. Presidential depth ner Robert Moses. The book is still in print What is probably the most important book because it holds lessons for every generation Steve Weinberg is senior contributing editor to of 2002 for investigative journalists is more of journalists. The IRE Journal and a former executive direc- tor of IRE.

12 THE IRE JOURNAL BOOKS

Reporters and Editors. BOOKS HELP ADD MATH Both books deserve a place in the newsroom, yet each serves a distinct purpose. Math Tools TO REPORTERS’ WRITING SKILLS for Journalists may be most useful as a concise reference guide to basic math. However, dense BY SCOTT R. MAIER with formulas and figures, reading Math Tools for UNIVERSITY OF OREGON Journalists could be numbing if TEST YOURSELF n a focus group on newsroom use of math, Wickham has devised skill drills (with answers) not daunting to A math quiz for daily journalists a frazzled copy editor pleaded almost tear- that apply to math problems reporters confront. In those who are by Arizona State University pro- fully for a reference book she could consult on addition, each chapter provides “Learning Chal- wary of num- fessor and IRE board member, journalistic use of numbers just as she turns to lenges” – hands-on activities that take math lessons bers. Numbers Steve Doig, can be found at Ithe AP Stylebook for guidance on language. For- into the real world. in the Newsroom www.ire.org/education/math_ tunately, two excellent handbooks now provide In Numbers in the Newsroom, Cohen excels at distill- test.html. a guide to the math that reporters seeks to show that skillful use ing mathematical and editors commonly encounter of numbers requires journalistic formulas into conceptual forms that journalists can in their work. sensibility. “Selecting the right understand and readily use in their work. Numbers Math Tools for Journalists by number for just the right place in in the Newsroom encourages journalists to apply Kathleen Woodruff Wickham and a story,” Cohen says, “depends on their interpretative skills to numbers – a notion Numbers in the Newsroom by the same news judgment you use likely to induce distress among those who simply Sarah Cohen are written on the in selecting just the right quote, want straight-forward rules to follow. premise that all journalists, despite anecdote or image.” Rather than Personally, I keep both books in easy reach. their pervasive fear of numbers, start with mathematical formulas, need math to describe the complex Cohen opens with the proposition Scott R. Maier was a newspaper reporter for 20 world that the numbers represent. that no number is perfect – at best, years before joining the faculty at the University of Oregon, where he is an associate professor. His Both books seek to help take the she says, a number offers a sum- doctoral research at the University of North Carolina terror out of reporting numbers by mary of the messy, breathing world at Chapel Hill focused on numeracy in the newsroom. conveying math fundamentals in that the figure depicts. By putting A version of this review was published in Newspaper practical journalistic terms. Both Math Tools for Journalists numbers “in their place,” Cohen Research Journal. emphasize basic math but are By Kathleen Woodruff Wickham seeks to help tame the terror that comprehensive in their reach. And (Oak Park, IL: Marion Street numbers evoke in the newsroom. both books draw on the authors’ Press), 159 pages, $16.95 She offers non-mathematical tips experience in the newsroom as for working with numbers (two well as in the classroom. In spite of my favorites: “envision your of their similarities, each differs in dream number” and “gut-check” its approach to making math acces- your numbers). But she also sible to journalists. clearly and thoroughly covers In Math Tools for Journalists, the mathematics that journalists Wickham notes that journalists encounter, providing step-by-step should be able to perform basic instruction from calculating aver- math before they begin their basic ages to margin of error. writing courses, but many cannot While she gallantly emphasizes because these skills were learned what journalists do right with num- long ago and shunted aside. She bers, Cohen provides “The 10 most says: “It’s not that journalists can’t wanted list” of common ways that do basic math. It’s that journalists Numbers in the Newsroom: journalists run afoul with numbers, have forgotten how.” To address Using Math and Statistics in including “The Mr. Spock Disease this deficiency, Wickham starts News, By Sarah Cohen (Colum- (false precision) and “Overcook- bia, MO: Investigative Reporters with the most basic math – addi- and Editors), 108 pages, $15 for ing vegetables” (using an average tion and subtraction – and covers IRE members of an average). Cohen, database increasingly complex topics rang- editor at The Washington Post, ing from percentage change to statistical analysis. worked as an economist for a decade before her For example, Wickham explains and demonstrates journalism career began as a newspaper reporter. standard deviation in terms that journalists can Among IRE Journal readers, Cohen perhaps is best understand. A former reporter who now teaches known for the keen and good-natured instruction journalism at the University of Mississippi, she provided as training director for Investigative

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 13 FEATURES FEATURES

Giving family members time to digest what he was telling them was important. Interviews with the Interviewers In his initial phone calls, he introduced him- self to the families, told them how he had found Some journalists have a natural gift for interviewing. Others spend them and told them that he was investigating the institution at which their loved ones died. entire careers mastering the skills. During 2003, The IRE Jour- The people on the other end of the line were nal presents the series “Interviews with the Interviewers.” We have always surprised. They thought their family talked with some of the most renowned interviewers in investiga- members had been provided the best care tive reporting. Focusing on a different style of interview each possible. Wilson acknowledged that he was issue, we share their experiences, techniques and advice with you. catching these families completely off- guard. Between his first and second calls, he PART 1 the hard questions. sent the families letters that detailed his investiga- One of the things that put the women most at tion as well as a few documents demonstrating the Dealing with ease was Neff’s role as an investigative reporter. facts he was uncovering. By the second call, the Before contacting the women, he met with a families were better prepared to talk. sensitive issues rape crisis counselor who was then able to vouch for his good intentions to the women before he Define motivation BY LORI LUECHTEFELD interviewed them. When dealing with tragedies such as these, THE IRE JOURNAL “A lot found it therapeutic to talk to someone people often are reluctant to speak with the press. who had talked to other rape survivors,” Neff Journalists often hear the angry comment “You young boy was raped and abused in a says. only want to sell newspapers.” juvenile detention center. When he was Duff Wilson of The Seattle Times also found Hargrove knows this reaction well. She released, Mary Hargrove of the Arkansas that a slow, many-step interview process was responds by saying “I’m sorry I’m intruding, ADemocrat-Gazette took him to IHOP – the Inter- important in establishing trust. While investigat- but...” It is then up to her to explain why her national House of Pancakes. ing patient deaths at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer investigation is important enough to merit inter- “He just wanted free-world food,” she says. Research Center, he had to contact family mem- rupting the person’s grief. Often it helps to find a When interviewing people on sensitive and bers of patients who had died 15 years earlier. friend of the person through whom to communi- traumatic issues, whether they are victims or In this case, the sensitive aspect was not the cate with the family. family members of victims, their comfort level family’s fresh grief, but reopening old wounds. The greatest motivation families of victims during the interview is crucial. In the case of this boy, he was comfortable at a pancake house. Comfort is key in sensitive interviews because these encounters are like no other investigative interviews. Often the issues discussed in the interviews aren’t the facts of the case. They’re the emotions of the case. They’re the real-life effects on real people. It’s how a death, a rape, a scam or any other tragedy changes a person or a family. As with any investigative piece, time is one of a journalist’s greatest assets in conducting interviews on sensitive issues. Not only must

subjects be comfortable in their surroundings, Democrat-Gazette Arkansas Breidenthal Staton but with their interviewer as well. Before getting to the tough issues, Hargrove recommends talking about something easier. Talk about their families. Have them pull out photo albums. Don’t rush it James Neff of The Seattle Times realized the importance of time while interviewing numerous rape victims for his book, “Unfinished Murder: The Capture of a Serial Rapist.” The process was a slow one, and Neff waited until his second and third interviews with each victim before asking Mary Hargrove talks about a recent story with several Democrat-Gazette reporters.

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often have to speak to journalists is the prospect “I don’t initiate touching. I’m a reporter and I need is. Stories she wrote as a young reporter would of preventing similar tragedies. to keep that distance. But being a reporter does not be written much differently if she did them now, “Help them help it mean something,” says mean leaving my humanity at the door.” she says. Mike McGraw of The Kansas City Star. Despite these personal connections with Another thing experience has taught Har- Hargrove agrees. “Ask them, ‘What can other subjects, there are limits to what a journalist can grove is to use caution when dealing with recent parents do?’ That gives them a purpose.” understand about a source’s personal tragedy. tragedies. When interviewing victims for an investi- “You should never say ‘I “If you arrive somewhere gative piece, it is important for journalists to understand’ or ‘I know how Dealing with tragedy soon after a death, make sure remember that their subjects already have been you feel,’” says Joe Hight, Single copies of “Tragedies and the family isn’t so in shock through a terrible ordeal. managing editor of The Daily Journalists” are available without that they don’t know what “Tell them you aren’t there to victimize them Oklahoman and executive charge from the Dart Center. they’re saying,” Hargrove further,” says Valeri Williams of WFAA-Dallas. committee member of the says. Send a note to the center at It is important that they know there is no right or Dart Center for Journalism As a young reporter, [email protected] to request wrong answer. You are dealing with how their and Trauma. “You don’t know Hargrove covered the lives have changed, not grilling them. how they feel. Everyone’s an a copy or for information on bulk kidnapping of a young girl The most important thing, Williams says, is individual.” orders. from a mall. The day the not to embarrass your source. The journalist is Hight offers more advice girl’s body was found, her not there to cattle-prod emotions out of a subject for journalists handling the stresses of interview- father called her sobbing hysterically, telling her for the sheer sake of drama. ing victims in the 30-page booklet “Tragedies and what had happened. When interviewing subjects about sensitive Journalists,” which he co-authored with Frank The story ran. topics on camera, Williams tells the sources where Smyth, a Dart Fellow and Washington represen- Two days later, the father called Hargrove she will take the interview, but doesn’t tell them tative of the Committee to Protect Journalists. again to tell her the body had been found. He her exact questions. Although many techniques on interviewing didn’t remember his first phone call. He blew “I hate practice interviews,” Williams says. can be learned, the most important one, says Har- up when he discovered a story had already run. “They sound practiced.” grove, has to come naturally: genuine caring. “Why did you have to do it so fast?” he wanted “What viewing audiences want is genuine- Age and experience are valuable in conducting to know. ness,” Williams says. Sometimes this might be sensitive interviews. tears, sometimes anger. Good questions will elicit “If I didn’t have children, this would be much Lori Luechtefeld is a graduate student at the Mis- these things naturally. tougher,” Hargrove says. Her own life experiences souri School of Journalism and a magazine studies Journalists must be prepared to deal with the often help her see what the heart of a story really intern with The IRE Journal. raw emotions of others. “When people cry, let them cry.” Hargrove says. Don’t stop them just because you feel uncomfortable. Always bring Kleenex. The interviewing process not only taxes victims and families of victims emotionally; it taxes the journalist. During the course of many intense interviews, journalists often find it hard to insulate themselves from the emotions, some- times falling into the role of what Neff calls “the vicarious victim.” “For me it was overwhelming,” Neff says. “I got pretty raw.” “It’s hard,” Hargrove agrees. “I’ve cried through a number of interviews. It doesn’t make me less professional.” Hargove says it’s important for journalists not to lose their humanity in interviews. The first thing she does when interviewing someone about personal tragedy is offer condolences. She is surprised by how many reporters don’t. “We’re human and so are they,” she says. While working on her article “Tears in the Dark,” a woman hugged Hargrove after their second interview. “Of course I hugged her back,” Hargrove says.

14 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 15 FEATURES FEATURES

Jurors to be called for jury service, on average, as people questionnaires to the potential jurors to see if they living in black neighborhoods. should be exempted or disqualified from duty for CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7 Call it what you want, but that’s not random. reasons like current military service, lack of U.S. addresses of the 45,000 people summoned to So what’s wrong with the system? For one citizenship or a criminal record. serve on a county criminal jury in the previous thing, flawed survey methods. A third of those forms never get a response. 18 months. Think of it this way: If you wanted to do a Many are returned to sender because the recipient From the 2000 Census, I knew the adult popu- residential telephone poll about the next election, has moved. The commission never tries to track lation of each municipality or Pittsburgh neigh- what would happen if your pollsters only made down new addresses, because it gets back enough borhood. With these numbers, I came up with a weekday calls? Your respondents would be mostly forms for its purposes. (The commission used to “jury service rate” for about 150 municipalities homemakers and pensioners, and you’d miss most send out inspectors to track down nonrespondents, and neighborhoods. people who are employed. but those jobs were eliminated to cut costs.) After that, the color patterns were clear. If you wanted a broader picture, the pollsters African Americans are less likely to own Countywide, 44 of every 1,000 adults were would have to call back in the evening to catch the homes than whites, according to the Census. called for criminal jury duty over the last year people who work during the day. If they didn’t, if Renters move more often. That factor alone may and a half. But in neighborhoods that were at they only relied on the people who answered the go a long way toward explaining the disparity. least 98 percent white, an average of 53 jurors first time, the survey sample wouldn’t represent Also, statistics indicate black residents often were called. In a few white neighborhoods it was the public at large, and all the survey conclusions work in low-wage jobs, the kind that don’t pay 65 or more. would be suspect. employees for days missed for jury duty. Con- But in majority black neighborhoods, the aver- The Allegheny County Jury Commission is sidering that the paltry $9 daily stipend the court age was 26. And not one of those neighborhoods making a similar mistake. pays won’t even cover downtown parking, those had more than 31 jurors called per 1,000 adults. After it gets a random list of names from the people might be strongly inclined to ignore their In other words, people living in overwhelm- rolls of voters and drivers, but before anyone is questionnaires because they can’t afford to serve. ingly white neighborhoods were twice as likely actually called for jury duty, the commission sends (Some states try to counter this by offering higher

16 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 17 FEATURES FEATURES FOI REPORT juror pay or requiring employers to pay jurors, but not Pennsylvania.) There could be other explanations, but local Federal commission records — such as driver’s licenses — are either unavailable or too out-of-date to check. Recent changing access rules Census Bureau election surveys show very little difference between black and white registration rates nationwide, so that explanation remains to avoid FOIA guidelines murky. CHARLES DAVIS In any case, the daily parade of black regulatory battle with huge implications to requesters who are defendants before white juries takes a toll on for federal freedom of information is deemed to have a “legitimate need” for it. frustrated attorneys, concerned judges, jurors playing out in Washington, D.C., and FERC stressed that the new category of who worry they’re part of an unfair system, A– but for the energy trade press – no one is selectively available information would con- defendants who think they’ve been railroaded paying much attention. This bodes poorly for sist only of information already exempt from and spectators who see their suspicions of insti- the Freedom of Information Act, as many access disclosure under the FOIA, but the trend tutionalized racism confirmed. Even if all-white battles swirling around homeland security will toward tiered access is hard to miss. juries are scrupulously fair to black defendants, take place not on the floor of Congress, but in FERC argued that the act is not the damage is done. dimly lit administrative proceedings where the well-suited for requests about sensi- Lots of blacks and whites told the Trib they mainstream press rarely treads. tive documents, because under FOIA the feared the system was stripping the courts of their In September, the Federal Energy Regula- commission is not permitted to restrict what legitimacy. A judge had even gone so far in one tory Commission unveiled a notice of proposed parties do with documents after they’re recent trial as to abandon randomness altogether, rulemaking restricting access to “critical released. The new guidelines allow FERC ordering attorneys to interview every minority in energy infrastructure information” (CEII). In staff to limit what happens to energy project the room for jury selection before any whites. what would be the first such permanent action information after it is made available. For by a government agency, the commission said example, the commission could now demand Fixing the problem it makes little sense to continue handling docu- a nondisclosure agreement to be signed by Disillusionment and distrust crept up even in ment requests on pipelines, electric transmis- landowners, environmentalists or other likely places I didn’t expect it. One black man whose son sion networks and power plants through the recipients that would restrict how information was gunned down by another black man looked FOIA. But rather than turn to Congress for a is handled or shared following its release. at the all-white jury judging his son’s accused legislative solution, it unilaterally changed the Cut through the regulatory language, and murderer and muttered, “I don’t see none of his rules to suit itself. you have rules that essentially clear the way for peers.” The new FERC rule departs from previous the commission to override FOIA for certain The Trib’s package ran on a Sunday. On access policy in two significant ways. No. 1: document requests on pipelines, power plants Monday, the district attorney called the jury com- it drops limits imposed on access to maps and and electric transmission networks. missioners and demanded they form a plan to fix other information revealing the location and The rules indicate that FERC now imposes the problem. He and another county official also routing of energy facilities, but extends other access restrictions “to those who have a legiti- met with black church leaders and asked them to information restrictions still applicable to mate need for the information,” and it intends speak to their congregations about the importance existing energy facilities to proposed facilities to place the recipients “under an obligation to of jury duty. The NAACP got involved. A member as well. No. 2: it designates a “CEII coordina- protect the information from disclosure.” In of the state Senate judiciary committee vowed to tor” to make decisions on information requests other words, FERC decides who gets it and introduce a resolution to study jury room racial pursued outside the FOIA. what they do with it. imbalances in all 67 counties in Pennsylvania. A brief history lesson: the federal FOIA was Meanwhile, a blue ribbon panel created by the Tiered access enacted, in large part, to repudiate the widely Pennsylvania Supreme Court three years ago to The proposal marks the first public mani- hated Administrative Procedures Act of 1946, look at racial bias in the justice system is gearing festation of the post-Sept. 11 inquiries into a deferential piece of legislation that gave up to deliver its recommendations. what should and should not be available after agencies broad discretion in deciding what The chairman is the dean of a Pittsburgh law the terrorist attacks. In effect, FERC has information to disclose, including the ability school. After reviewing our numbers, he told the moved to a tiered system of public access. to make information available on a preferential Trib that the problems the newspaper detailed While anyone can request anything under basis. The FOIA was enacted to limit agency threaten to undermine the legitimacy of the courts the FOIA, the commission would withhold discretion regarding disclosure and to close the and erode social order. certain previously public information that it loopholes used to deny legitimate information says is exempt from mandatory disclosure and to the public. Mark Houser is an investigative reporter special- would only make such information available CONTINUED ON PAGE 38 × izing in computer-assisted techniques for the Pitts- burgh Tribune-Review. Charles Davis is executive director of the Freedom of Information Center, an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and a member of IRE’s First Amendment task force.

16 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 17 FEATURES FEATURES

Our Mentally Ill Children” was the result of PARENTS SURRENDER CHILDREN grunt-work reporting. When we couldn’t call sources, we wrote TO GAIN MENTAL HEALTH AID to them. When one doctor wouldn’t talk, we called another. When state officials delayed providing data or protested the requests, we BY JEREMY OLSON kept the pressure on, calling and e-mailing until OMAHA WORLD-HERALD they came through. When data wasn’t avail- able, we created our own surveys and research projects to quantify systemic problems. t was month eight of a 10-month investi- tally ill children. While waiting to meet Drew, I interviewed gation of Nebraska’s child mental health Early reporting identified so many problems and re-interviewed his mom, his grandparents, care system and I still hadn’t met the star with the child mental health system that it was his brother, his sister, his attorneys and some of of the series. difficult to choose which ones would become his therapists. I examined hundreds of records Drew, a 17-year-old state ward, had been the focus of our series: about his treatment, schooling and state care. I I • confined to the state’s rehabilitation and treat- Parents surrendering custody of their children reviewed his old schoolwork, childhood draw- ment center for boys – a juvenile jail, essen- to the state as a last-resort way of getting them ings and letters he sent home from Kearney, tially. His state caretakers had decided early on mental health treatment. Neb. I armed his mother with questions to ask not to let me see him, much less talk to him. • Detention centers cluttered with mentally ill him during one of her visits to him. The mishandling of this boy’s treatment for children but providing little or no treatment. It wasn’t enough for the narrative I aspired bipolar disorder was too remarkable – portray- • A shortage of mental health experts that to write about the four years he spent in state ing so many of the system’s failures – to let left family doctors practicing psychiatry or custody, starting when he was 13. that be a hindrance. So I continued report- patients waiting months for an appointment. This young man had been tossed from inpa- ing anyway. The persistence would payoff, Many couldn’t wait, instead ending up in tient treatment programs to detention centers eventually. emergency rooms, in crisis. and back. His medications had been changed as The struggle to meet Drew exemplified Even more difficult was getting past the if they were brands of toothpaste. He was sent what the team of Omaha World-Herald stigma of mental illness enough to coax home with inadequate follow-up support, and reporters faced as it examined a system that is children and their parents to talk about these his downward spiral ended predictably with a so tight-lipped and protective that it’s nearly injustices. manic confrontation with his mother and then impossible to judge how well it cares for men- The publication of “Trust Betrayed: Failing confinement in a state facility geared for tough teens, not the mentally ill. And all while the state administered his care. His older brother, by contrast, was never a ward of the state after being diagnosed years earlier as bipolar. He was treated at a single private facility, Boys Town. He succeeded in school, eventually enrolling in college to study engineering. At the bare minimum, I wanted to ask

Kent Sievers Omaha World-Herald World-Herald Omaha Sievers Kent Drew the ultimate cliché: How did this make you feel? While the medical profession strenuously shields its patients’ privacy, mental health agencies are even more protective. There are sound reasons for these barriers, but they also make it easier to conceal problems in the mental health system from public scrutiny. It took months to build up trust with hos- pital leaders, psychiatrists and mental health advocates. We let them know exactly what we were doing, even if it was going to result in criticisms of their work. They opened up somewhat and introduced us to children and parents who decided on their own whether to A child wrestles with his tutor, Joyce Rein, after he half-heartedly swung at her hand with a pencil. tell their stories. We had to be flexible and anticipate prob-

18 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 19 FEATURES FEATURES

Leaders at Boys Town were skeptical, given Drew’s repeated failures in residential treatment. He was behind in school, too. But he wrote a sincere letter, asking to be accepted, which clinched his move. On the trip to Omaha, Drew stopped to spend the night at his mother’s house in Lin- coln. From a reporting standpoint, it was the

Kent Sievers Omaha World-Herald World-Herald Omaha Sievers Kent only chance to meet Drew, since Boys Town – like the state – has a closed-door policy, especially for state wards. He agreed to share several hours with a reporter and photographer. Project photogra- pher Kent Sievers was particularly relieved. He had created a series of gripping photos but had none of Drew. Maybe Drew was as anxious to meet me as I was to meet him at that point. We played chess, his best game. We talked in the living room, with his mom, about the details of the Drew, 17, is shown during a home visit in Lincoln the night before going to Boys Town in Omaha. Nebraska is previous four years, and then talked privately among the worst states in providing care for mentally ill youths. on the front porch about things he didn’t want his mother to know. lems from the start. Project editor Cate Folsom insurance coverage of mental health care. Drew had grown much more self-assured and the newsroom leadership decided early on • Other stories showed how children were than the child described in so many documents that name issues wouldn’t be an obstacle to being poorly placed in inappropriate levels and interviews – the 13-year-old taken to a psy- good stories, which is why several stories of care, where they were doomed to fail, and chiatric hospital for the first time after making include only first names of children and their how creative, community-based treatment 30 long cuts on his arms with a razor blade. families. in other states could be used in Nebraska. He was no longer on psychotropic drugs The payoff: We also revealed he state’s lack of data to and had suffered far fewer manic or depres- • Stories on the state’s rehabilitation and treat- track the progress of state wards. Computer- sive episodes, but the harm from being bounced ment center for boys in Kearney, written by assisted reporter Joe Kolman helped expose around the mental health and juvenile justice Robynn Tysver, contrasted the prevalence of these problems. A key to his work was his systems was clear. mental illness among children there with the diligence, together with learning the terminol- When we published the series, Drew dis- small amount of mental health care provided. ogy of the Nebraska Health and Human Ser- agreed with his characterization in an introduc- They revealed Kearney’s bastardized “peer vices System. Leaders of the system were not tory story as being “sometimes violent” and culture” program, which allowed children going to volunteer information unless Kolman worried the stories made him look like “dam- to regulate other children, often by physical knew exactly what document or data source aged goods.” He was the new guy at Boys Town, restraint. Gov. Mike Johanns at first defended to request. and his anxiety came in part from the fact that the program, bolstered by information from • My stories and others by Judith Nygren classmates now knew all about his past. his staff that other states still used peer revealed the plights of mentally ill children But he also hoped his participation in the culture. He changed his mind when further and their families. Nygren’s contrasted the series would make a difference. And some new reporting by Tysver showed that none of those success that one family had in getting help friends reassured him they recognized his story states used it anymore and that some thought for their mentally ill child and the struggles in their own lives. it was an archaic, “Lord of the Flies” way to of another family that was spiraling out of “I want other kids who think they’re alone run a juvenile facility. He called for an end control even after years of involvement by and think there’s no hope for them in life to to the restraint system. public officials and mental health agencies. know that there are people who can help,” he • The series inspired legislation. In particular, My story about Drew was told over four days wrote to me after the series was published. legislators were struck by the stories of and prompted dozens of calls from parents “Even though the present may seem dark and parents forced to surrender custody of their who had their own Drews at home. frightening, there is always a light in the future. children to the state because it was the only “I don’t feel so alone anymore,” one mother Don’t stop looking for it, you will find it.” way to provide them with mental health care. wrote. That last line applies to reporters covering Federal and state legislation has been pro- The break in our efforts to meet Drew came mental-health care, too. posed to address this issue, either by allowing when his older brother, the Boys Town gradu- children to enroll in Medicaid without becom- ate, lobbied to get him moved from Kearney Jeremy Olson is the medical reporter for the ing state wards or by compelling better private to Boys Town in Omaha. Omaha World-Herald

18 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 19 BED-TO-BEDBED-TO-BED INFECTIONSINFECTIONS DeadlyDeadly germs spreading throughthrough nation’s hospitalshospitals BY MICHAEL J. BERENS CHICAGO TRIBUNE ven before the first death, doctors feared operating room No. 2. A germ lived inside what was supposed to be the hospital’s safest and most sterile place. For more than a year, the E devastatingly swift predator infiltrated dozens of patients with infections, destroying bone and tissue. Gloria Bonaffini, 71, was unaware that hospital germs had burrowed into the bodies of up to one in five Connecticut patients who passed through the room. She didn’t know that room No. 2 was a place where dust sometimes littered the air because of faulty ventilation, where flies buzzed overhead during open heart surgery as some doctors wore germ-laden clothes from home into surgery, or failed to wash their hands. She didn’t learn any of these things before her death. Nor do tens of thousands of patients who enter U.S. hospitals where the promise of clean and safe care has been undermined by widening cost-cutting measures and negligence. But if so many people are unnecessarily dying or injured by germs inside hospitals — as detailed in a Tribune investigation, “Unhealthy Hospitals” — journalists might wonder why there appears to be scant evidence of this national crisis. Last summer, the Tribune reported that in 2000, nearly three-quarters of deadly hospital-acquired infections — or about 75,000 — were preventable. Specifically, deaths linked to hospital germs represent the fourth-leading cause of mortality among Americans, behind heart disease, cancer and strokes. The pursuit of this story begins in the traditional trenches of journalism — court records, investigative reports Continued on page 22

SURGERY,SURGERY, DEATHDEATH RATES RATES AnalysisAnalysis of statisticsstatistics providesprovides local picturepicture BY CHARLOTTE HUFF FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM

n 1995, the Texas Legislature passed a law requiring the collection of hospital death rates and other The noble workings of hospitals have been statistics for consumer report cards. Five years later, the hospitals were accused of stonewalling and there was no sign that the ingrained on our memories since the first I statistics would be published by the state or by anyone else. The cost of the data needed to crunch the numbers was hefty: $4,000 for a year’s worth. The Star-Telegram decided it was television doctor donned scrubs. But some- worth the investment, and bought the two years available, 1999 and 2000. The newspaper devoted three reporters, two editors, a times reality is not as grand; no one likes to photographer and several researchers and copy editors to the task of analyzing and reporting on the data. think of nurses with dirty hands, surgeons In the end, the Star-Telegram was able to tell its readers which local hospitals had high death rates and which ones performed who only have profit in mind, patients unnecessary surgeries. Our readers learned, for example, that: shuffled through the system without proper • Nineteen hospitals in the Fort Worth/Dallas area had bypass programs, but only one met criteria set by researchers. They recom- mend that a hospital perform at least 500 bypasses annually to get the best results. Eleven of the hospitals didn’t perform even 200 treatment and caregivers focused only on surgeries a year. the bottom line. And yet investigations • The rate of Caesarean sections in the region ranged from 20 percent to 31 percent. Along the Texas/Mexico border it was even have shown again and again that while higher, more than 40 percent. many medical personnel and hospitals • A patient’s chance of dying could vary widely depending on where they were hospitalized. A stroke patient’s risk ranged from 2 try to answer that higher calling, there are percent to 16 percent. For pneumonia patients, the death rate ranged from 5 percent to 14 percent. others who use such poor practices that it’s Continued on page 25 enough to make anyone sick.

20 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 21 CHOPPER WARSWARS Competition forfor patients patients becomes dangerousdangerous game game

BY KIRK SWAUGER THE (JOHNSTOWN) TRIBUNE-DEMOCRAT

n the secluded serenity of the central Pennsylvania mountains, a medical helicopter war has placed accident victims in unsuspecting danger. I For nearly a decade, four helicopter providers often have ruthlessly fought to be the first at car crashes and other accidents in the Johnstown region. It is competition critics contend is driven solely by greed. The battle climaxed in late 2001 outside a small country high school 15 miles east of Johnstown. When 13-year-old Jeremy Weyant died after falling through a plate glass window while celebrating an undefeated season for the Chestnut Ridge Junior High football team, it was a tragedy that shattered the close-knit community in nearby Bedford County. Little did anyone suspect his death may have been preventable. A week or so later, during an interview on a completely unrelated story, I received a tip from a source that emergency room doctors at Conemaugh Hospital in Johnstown were outraged the boy was flown by helicopter to Pittsburgh, instead of being transported to Johnstown. Conemaugh, the primary trauma center between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, is just 10 minutes away by air from Chestnut Ridge. By contrast, it took a helicopter 38 minutes to reach Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, a flight that wasted valuable time in what emergency personnel call the “golden hour” for Continued on page 27

VETERANSVETERANS CARECARE RecordsRecords detaildetail nation’s nation’s Treatment,treatment, oversightoversight gaps gaps BY JOAN MAZZOLINI THE (CLEVELAND) PLAIN DEALER

hen plastic surgeons at Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center found infection spreading inside the belly of The noble workings of hospitals have been an elderly vet and called for assistance, they expected the hospital’s top surgeon to enter the operating room. ingrained on our memories since the first W Instead of Dr. John Raaf, they got a resident, a doctor in training. While the chief of surgery was scheduled to television doctor donned scrubs. But some- be at the VA for emergencies like Halver Durbin’s, he was actually on the other side of University Circle about a times reality is not as grand; no one likes to mile away, at University Hospitals, operating on patients from his private medical practice. think of nurses with dirty hands, surgeons It wasn’t an aberration for Raaf. In fact, he had set up a routine that on Mondays and Fridays, when he was scheduled and paid by the VA, he actually was seeing private patients at University Hospitals. It was an open secret. who only have profit in mind, patients And it’s happening at VA hospitals across the country. shuffled through the system without proper The Plain Dealer produced a five-day series to detail how well – or poorly – VA hospitals care for the men and women treatment and caregivers focused only on who risked their lives in service to their country. the bottom line. And yet investigations But the problems investigated continue: doctors not doing their jobs; unsupervised residents rotating in and out of the VA, have shown again and again that while leaving veterans’ medical care postponed again; and death rates for open-heart surgery centers that would be unacceptable at any other hospital. many medical personnel and hospitals The VA, with more than 170 hospitals across the country, is the largest health care system in the nation. More than $19 try to answer that higher calling, there are billion of taxpayer dollars flow through them each year. But in some ways, I feel the hospitals are often ignored until a major others who use such poor practices that it’s foul-up becomes public. enough to make anyone sick. Continued on page 28

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infection rates can BED-TO-BED INFECTIONS be gleaned from CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20 research reports and interviews — and culminates in stacks of from the public. even when computer databases that were merged in creative City employees, however, the hospital ways. couldn’t resist the temptation to refuses to pro- write about the case for an obscure vide current Bed to bed health care journal read typically or historical In 1998, at least 31 Chicago children con- by medical professionals. The data. You might be pleasantly tracted flu-like infections and eight died as a article contained stunning details, such as how surprised by the confessional tone of many microscopic invader snaked through a 93-bed dozens of nurses routinely failed to wash their reports. One doctor wrote about how a multina- long-term care medical center. The tragedy hands and how a dozen ill and feverish workers tional pharmaceutical company, touting a new marked one of the city’s most devastating infec- continued to provide care to healthy children as infection control drug, flew dozens of doctors tion outbreaks. Yet the Chicago Department of the germ spread bed to bed. to a Western U.S. resort lodge and lavished gifts Public Health kept the deadly outbreak a secret In hundreds of cases nationally, hospital and food on them. Photos: Nancy Stone Chicago Tribune Chicago Stone Nancy Photos: Above: A petri dish displaying an infection that will be tested for its DNA fingerprints. Northwestern Hospital is one of the few hospitals in the country that perform genetic typing so they can tell right away if they have an infection that is spreading in the hospital. They compare DNA fingerprints by hand to look for matches.

Right: In 1997, an infection killed four babies at Grace-Sinai Hospital in Detroit. Tracey Jones (left) gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl named Timothy and Tamia. Timothy, shown here on his father’s lap, never contracted the infection but Tamia died from hers.

FOR PLACEMENT ONLY!

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If you plan a similar investigation, pay special INVESTIGATING YOUR LOCAL HOSPITAL attention to papers or presentations delivered at By Michael J. Berens medical conferences. At a conference early last year, an Alabama nurse set up a poster board The two most useful documents for uncovering events inside hospitals display to show the path of a deadly germ in a are “survey” and “complaint” reports found in state and federal agencies. nursery unit. Most states periodically survey hospitals for potential health and safety Research reports typically mask the name violations. State inspectors also investigate specific complaints filed by of hospitals. Simply find where the authors patients or others. The final investigative records are public in most states. are employed; more times than not, the pri- A few, such as Colorado, even publish synopses on the Web. mary author is employed where the outbreak Federal survey and complaint files also are public and can be obtained occurred. One suggestion is to log research reports by from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for date, location, hospital name, etc., into a spread- Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The press office can be reached sheet. Do the same for state and federal hospital at 202-690-6145. Regional offices are listed at www.hhs.gov/news/ survey and complaint reports. And log every press2.html. lawsuit involving an infection case. It’s a lot of Inspection reports are laced with rich anecdotal stories. Each incident is work, but the payoff is obvious. Cross-match the linked to a numerical violation code. Infection-related violations contain data to bring it all together. the prefix 250. For example, 250.1300 (b) designates a doctor who failed to For example, the Tribune found that three- wear a mask during surgery. However, always ask for the full report. Com- quarters of the nation’s 5,000-plus hospitals pleted reports also include hospitals’ “plan of correction,” which typically have been cited for significant cleanliness and disputes or confirms the allegations and outlines remedies. sanitation violations since 1995.

Billing databases Here are few inside tips: For billing purposes, hospitals are required to create massive computer databases encompass- • State employees under federal contract conduct most federal surveys. ing patient admissions. Details include personal The quickest access to federal reports is through the state agency, which information (age, sex, race), medical background always keeps a copy. Federal officials are notorious for lethargic FOIA (diagnosis and procedures), as well as financial responses. data (how did the patient pay; how much was the bill). There are dozens of categories. Best of all, • HHS regional offices can provide a computerized list of all surveyed it’s generally a public record. hospitals in your area. The list is useful in crafting FOI requests, as well The federal government keeps a national patient admission database called MEDPAR as gauging how often hospitals in your area have been surveyed. There — the Medicare Provider Analysis and Review. is a large disparity nationally, ranging from once a year to once every The Web downloads are partial files and six years or more. subsets. You’ll have to negotiate for the full database. MEDPAR encompasses all govern- • Survey and investigative reports rely on a confidential document ment-subsidized hospitalizations — about 60 called the witness list, which includes identities and occupations of percent of all hospital admissions. every person interviewed. The non-public document frequently can be Also, about 17 states maintain computer data- obtained through court records, attorneys or patient advocates. bases of every patient who is admitted to a hospi- tal. These are the most valuable. For instance, the • Other records include workplace safety files from the Occupational California database (costing $200) indicates if an ailment was hospital-acquired or already present Safety & Health Administration (OSHA), which can be searched by hos- when the patient was admitted. pital name at www.osha.gov/oshstats/ Instead of purchasing it, an inexpensive alternative is to seek out private or university • Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) contains records researchers who will share access to the database. on unsafe medical equipment, particularly reused and unclean medical Most will do it for free. This is a good strategy devices linked to infections. The FDA also tracks the number of hospitals for getting a peek into MEDPAR, which is costly cited for Medicaid or Medicare fraud; those files can provide dozens of and time-consuming to obtain. angles, including how hospitals performed unnecessary surgeries or In essence, these are billing databases. Each fraudulently billed patients. record contains dozens of pieces of information, including a patient’s age, sex, zip code, length of stay, hospital identification, diagnosis of

22 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 23 C O V E R S T O R Y KEY WEB SITES

Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology Connect with the people Nancy Stone Chicago Tribune Chicago Stone Nancy who do the job. www.apic.org/

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - National Center for Infectious Disease This is a jumping-off point for dozens of pages within the CDC, which is a treasure trove of data and research, contacts and background. www.cdc.gov/ncidod

Medicare Provider Analysis and Review Mindy, 8, helps her mother Debra Shore with her intravenous antibiotics used to fight an infection. Deaths linked to hospital infections represent the fourth leading cause of mortality among Americans. The federal government’s national patient admission database. major ailments, and procedures performed. The designates whether the patient died. http://cms.hhs.gov/statistics/ data allows you to track how many people were The challenge is that medical information is medpor admitted through the emergency room, from a listed as numerical codes known as ICD-9 and nursing home, even from prison. The data also DRG codes. The Centers for Disease Control and Medical dictionaries Prevention offer a free CD listing these codes. Look up everything. Many Web sites provide free search engines, www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ such as: http://within.dhfs.state.wi.us/cgi- dictionaries.html bin/plookup It’s possible to concoct very specific analysis. The Society for Healthcare For example, you can track patients who have Epidemiology of America undergone cardiac bypass surgery who later had their sternums removed because of post-surgery A key and influential group of doctors infection. Or, how many newborns developed and practitioners whose annual confer- pneumonia? How many joint-replacement ence is a must-attend event for those surgeries later resulted in amputations from interested in infectious diseases. infections? www.shea-online.org/ Coupling patient admission databases with hospital survey reports and investigations can Peter English portal site yield many stories, such as how many patients Links to hundreds of communicable died from infections during a time when a hospital disease and health care sites worldwide. was cited for shutting down its infection control department because of cost. www.fam-english.demon.co.uk/ Investigating hospitals often requires a patch- comdis.htm work of paper records, computerized data and human sources. Individually, these sources can Tribune series yield wonderful stories. Combined, they form Go to main page, look for special a powerful spotlight to uncover the healthcare reports in left margin. Free registration industry’s darkest and most protected nooks. is required. www.chicagotribune.com Michael J. Berens is a project reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

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numbers, we waited for the new SURGERY, DEATH RATES software, and then recalculated CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20 the statistics. Even with all of our Hospitals fight release statisticians said the results careful planning, some hos- The project also explored data collection efforts would be more reliable, pitals resisted commenting in other states and showed how Texas has lagged in avoiding wide swings on the results, which we releasing information to consumers, in part because from year to year. And usually e-mailed to them. The 40-plus hos- of efforts by hospitals. we broadened our analysis to include hospitals in pitals we studied rarely questioned the accuracy of We obtained confidential memos and docu- nearby Dallas, knowing that some of our readers our analysis. But they bristled at our plan to publish ments showing repeated hospital efforts to slow cross city lines for care. any statistics from the state’s data before the state the process behind the scenes. We used the state’s Risk adjustment, a statistical method that issued its first official report. public information laws to obtain figures on how lowers a hospital’s death rates if its patients are many hospitals had been fined for refusing to older and sicker than normal, is always controver- Varied reactions release their information to the state. sial. Statisticians frequently disagree on the best Surprisingly, hospitals with poor results were We also reported on how the hospitals had suc- approach. Hospitals often will dispute any figure, often the most open. The facility with the highest cessfully lobbied in 1999 for a change in the law saying that no analysis can fairly account for the heart bypass death rate in the area talked candidly to bar Texans from obtaining the types, or even complexities of medical care. about how it was modernizing techniques, cracking the number, of complaints filed against their local We decided to go with the method that also down on infection control and referring more high- hospitals. would be used by the state, developed by the fed- risk patients to hospitals with larger programs. The project took four months. Before we even eral Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality The two hospital systems that dominate the got to the reporting, we made several key deci- and Stanford University. We hired a professor to market had very different responses. One readily sions involving which illnesses and treatments to run the risk-adjustment program, written in SAS discussed its results and improvements that had study, as well as the best way to “risk adjust” the programming language, and analyzed the results been made. The other would only say that statistics numbers to fairly account for differences in patient ourselves. are misleading and wouldn’t discuss improvement conditions. Then we hit a snag. The Texas hospitals were efforts. The state was looking at 25 illnesses and treat- the first to be analyzed with the federal computer The death rates and other hospital results were ments, but we decided to focus on nearly a dozen program and they complained about some of its published over two days. The feedback was over- of the most common, including C-sections and methods. The critics finally convinced federal whelmingly positive. The project was used in a heart bypasses. officials and Stanford researchers to revise their local graduate studies class, consulted by research- We combined the 1999 and 2000 data because approach. To eliminate any debate over the ers in other parts of the country and discussed by Photos: Rodger Mallison Fort Worth Star-Telegram Worth Fort Mallison Rodger Photos:

A patient is prepared for an arterial stint at Medical City Hospital in Dallas. An analysis found Texas Medical personnel perform a heart catheterization at Baylor All Saints Medical Center. Nineteen hospitals in the lagged in releasing information to consumers, in Fort Worth/Dallas area had bypass programs, but only one met criteria set by researchers. part because of efforts by hospitals.

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ies not only will provide benchmarks so you know if your region is low or high compared with the national average but will help you find knowledgeable experts. • Even before the numbers are ready, start building a list of medical experts. Many doctors will be reluctant to speak candidly about differences in care, so this will take time. • Expect shades of gray. Not everyone agrees on the best medical treatment or how to define a

Rodger Mallison Fort Worth Star-Telegram Worth Fort Mallison Rodger worrisome death rate. For example, research- ers worried for years that too many Caesarean sections were being performed. Today, the rate remains high, yet some doctors say even more surgeries should be done. The Star-Telegram series “Vital Signs” was writ- ten by medical reporter Charlotte Huff, business reporter Trebor Banstetter and computer-assisted reporting specialist Jeff Claassen. Editors were Lois Norder and Kathy Vetter. Photographs were taken Glenton Heidemann, 65, exercises in the cardiac rehabilitation unit of Osteopathic Medical Center of Texas. by Rodger Mallison. Stories were copy edited by Tim Sager, Scott Mitchell, Chris Borniger and John floor nurses and doctors. debate, so understand the strengths and weak- Forsyth. Steve Wilson designed the graphics. Sarah Some lessons we learned: nesses. Huffstetler and Anne Burdette designed the pages. • Research your statistical method thoroughly • Start early on collecting studies that look at the Brenda Edwards and Mary Jane O’Halloran helped before you start. Any method is subject to treatments you will be reviewing. Those stud- with the research.

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CHOPPER WARS tacting doctors, emergency CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21 dispatchers and state officials, Conemaugh’s saving lives. Wars.” altruism began to Weyant died on the way. The helicopter ser- unravel. Its helicopters Running with the tip, I contacted Dr. vice that transported consistently were late in Lee Miller, director of trauma services at Weyant to Pittsburgh, arriving at emergencies, rescue authori- Conemaugh. The newspaper and Conemaugh STAT MedEvac, soon launched an internal ties declared. doctors and administrators have had a conten- investigation into the case. And with money on the line, officials from tious relationship for years, dating to the time Emergency dispatchers from throughout two neighboring counties accused Conemaugh the health system ousted its former CEO amid the region confided the war between STAT of intentionally providing misleading arrival hundreds of job cuts. MedEvac and Conemaugh had escalated times for its helicopters. Miller was surprisingly candid. He con- to a dangerous level. At stake: millions of Of the 26 calls in a year for a Conemaugh firmed Conemaugh had filed a formal com- dollars. helicopter in Somerset County, the choppers plaint surrounding the accident with Southern Using figures obtained from the state were late 23 times, county 911 records indi- Alleghenies EMS, a subcontractor for the health department, I found out that while cated. Pennsylvania Department of Health. medical helicopters themselves typically Even more confusing, the two counties Had Weyant been transported to Johnstown, aren’t money-makers, the nonprofit hospitals that complained most about Conemaugh sub- Miller contended, “the child would not have owning them benefit tremendously from the scribed to a free STAT MedEvac dispatching died in the back of a helicopter — that I can patients the choppers bring in. system, The Tribune-Democrat learned. guarantee you. The Pittsburgh helicopter service dis- “He may have gone on to die, but he would patches all medical helicopters in Somerset have died in the operating room with trauma Of the 26 calls in a year for and Bedford counties, including Conemaugh’s surgeons and vascular surgeons trying to save and helicopters from the Maryland state police his life.” } a Conemaugh helicopter and West Virginia University. By flying to Children’s, the helicopter in Somerset County, the Conemaugh officials claimed that the dis- ignored state requirements that stipulate patching system is no more than a promotional patients are to be transported to the nearest choppers were late 23 tool for STAT MedEvac, while a STAT MedE- trauma center. vac official countered “it’s the right thing to times, county 911 records do. The last thing county 911 dispatchers want Probing questions indicated.~ to be doing is helicopter shopping.” Because of Pennsylvania’s skimpy right-to- Based on The Tribune-Democrat investi- know law, state health investigations typically gation, emergency dispatch authorities from are confidential. Specifically, hospitals in the Johnstown eight counties agreed to begin closely monitor- Without a substantial paper trail to follow, region charged an average of $38,983 to treat ing flight times. the only way to piece together the story was severe trauma cases in the region. For less The state, meanwhile, later exonerated through interviews with doctors, emergency serious injuries, they collected an average STAT MedEvac in the death of the Bedford dispatchers, paramedics and other sources of $9,732. teen, saying the helicopter crew followed developed over the years. “It’s terribly scary,” said Jill Miller, orders from a command physician in Pitts- Their anecdotes about the problem were manager of Somerset Area Ambulance burgh. verifiable through police accounts and other Association. “The more flights they get, the Because the investigation exposed prob- public records, such as 911 reports and infor- more money they make. But the fact still lems with Conemaugh’s helicopters as well, mation at Southern Alleghenies EMS. remains that it shouldn’t be about dollars and Dr. Lee Miller, whose complaint triggered the We soon found other examples of traffic cents, it should be about patient care.” probe, once again has quit speaking to me. accidents involving competition among chop- The average cost of a helicopter transport Interestingly, silence may be the most last- pers or late-arriving helicopters. When a van is about $4,000, but could be more, depending ing impact of the series. Nearly a year after we carrying Amish people crashed, Conemaugh on the distance. It costs about $650 an hour for published our stories, emergency dispatchers sent helicopters even though they weren’t fuel, crew, and maintenance costs. have reported no major life-or-death contro- dispatched. “No institution makes money on heli- versies surrounding the services. Armed with that evidence, we were able copters, but they bring patients back to your to return to medical helicopter services with facility and that’s how you can pay for the Kirk Swauger is an investigative reporter who also covers City Hall for The Tribune-Democrat, where more probing questions. helicopter,” Conemaugh’s Lee Miller said. he has worked since 1988. Swauger won second It ignited a whirlwind of accusations and place in the National Headliner Awards three years denials, reopening an issue I had probed seven Promotional tool ago for spot news, and has earned numerous state years earlier in a five-part series, “Chopper As I probed deeper into the story, con- and regional journalism awards.

26 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 27 C O V E R S T O R Y

VETERANS CARE The reports also detailed that the chiefs of cardio- CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21 thoracic surgery at the That’s a shame. Because they are federal facili- gram was doing a poor job university hospital knew ties, much information — data that would never and too many veterans the surgeons at the VA be available at the public hospitals — is available were dying, it let the pro- were substandard but let through the Freedom of Information Act. gram stay open because them operate on veterans I requested from each of the VA hospitals a the affiliated university anyway. list of their doctors, their specialties, what depart- hospital wanted it open for training programs. No one told the veterans, many of whom ments they worked in, their salaries and whether they were full or part time. Included in that was their FTEE, or full-time equivalent status. Because of that information, I knew, for example, that Raaf was a “seven- eighths” employee and paid more $114,000 a year to be at the VA 35 hours a week. With some good sources, I found that he had Scott Shaw The Plain Dealer Plain The Shaw Scott physically been in the operating room just 12 times during a year. Other doctors stood out as well, including the director of orthopedic surgery who didn’t do a single surgery in a year, and was in the operating room overseeing residents just 16 times. While my best sources were in Cleveland, investigations by the VA’s Office of Inspector General showed me this was a problem across the country. I also did FOIA requests for every settle- ment and judgment against each VA for medical malpractice annually for five years. It didn’t give me names, but did supply me with the month the settlement (which by law can’t be sealed) or the verdict was rendered. That helped nail down the time period to search at the courthouse. The FOIA request for the numbers of bypass surgeries performed by about 40 VA hospitals, death rates and all site-visit reports, yielded a ton of terrific information. I put the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet so I could sort them in different ways, such as the highest death rate to lowest or the least surgeries to most. I also computed the dif- ference between the actual death rates versus the risk-adjusted rates, which I got with the FOIA. First, it became clear that most VAs had death rates significantly higher than private hos- pitals, even when risk-adjusted for differences in patients. More than one-third of the veterans hospitals performing heart surgery didn’t do at least 150 heart surgeries annually for five years, which is required by VA policy and what experts agree is the bare minimum necessary to ensure expert care. I also found that 10 cardiac centers were being “monitored” because of high patient death rates. Terry Soles, shown here weeding his garden, died a few days after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer by Second, the hospital inspection reports emergency room doctors at a private hospital. He had lost more than 100 pounds over two years while VA showed that even when the VA thought a pro- residents looked for a cause.

28 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 29 C O V E R S T O R Y TIMELY DATABASES FROM IRE By Jeff Porter The IRE Journal

The IRE and NICAR Database Library offers a growing collection of health-related databases that can spur or strengthen a local or national story:

• The National Practitioner Databank contains information about doctors and other health care practitioners who have had medical malpractice suits filed or adverse action taken against them. Although names are not included, some news organizations have been able to use this database with other public records to identify practitioners. This database includes information on malpractice payments and adverse licensure, clinical privileges and pro- fessional society membership.

• The Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience Database, main- tained by the Food and Drug Administration, includes medical devices that have failed, how they failed, and the manufacturer information. It includes information about injuries and deaths.

• The AIDS Public Information Dataset by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contains details about AIDS cases reported to state and local health departments since 1981. The CDC compiles this database every year and includes individual records for each AIDS patient and summary informa- tion by state, metropolitan area, mode of exposure to HIV, sex, race/ethnicity, age, and other details. Reporters can use this easy-to-analyze database to show local trends in AIDS cases.

• The FDA uses the Adverse Event Reporting System to flag safety issues and identify pharmaceuticals or therapeutic biological products (such as blood) for further epidemiological study. It may ultimately prompt regulatory responses such as drug labeling changes, letters to health care professionals, or market withdrawals. Adverse drug experiences include serious and unexpected consequences of human drug use, such as failure of “expected pharmacological action,” as well as accidental or intentional overdoses or abuse. Journalists who have used this data recommend it to guide reporting on consumer medical issues, the FDA or the pharmaceutical industry.

• The Federal Election Commission’s Campaign Contributions Database can help a journalist track how health-related companies seek political influence. The database consists of campaign contributions to candidates seeking federal offices, and those related to federal political action com- mittees.

For more details about these and other databases, go to www.ire.org/datalibrary/ databases/ or call the Database Library at 573-884-7711.

Jeff Porter is director of the IRE and NICAR Database Library.

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from older veterans that they couldn’t under- TAPPING RESOURCES, stand their doctors or had other culture clashes. FINDING SOURCES I used my list of all doctors at each VA, and also put in a FOIA request for a list of “logs” By Joan Mazzolini found at the VA headquarters showing indi- In my investigation of veterans hospitals, I vidual hospital requests to hire foreign doctors. was able to detail other hospitals where the I also used the American Medical Association’s surgeons were rarely, if ever, in the operating site (www.ama-assn.org), which allows you to rooms overseeing residents or simply operat- search for a doctor and see where the person went ing on veterans in need. Some of the sources to medical school and did residency training. I used included: Once foreign doctors finish their residency train- ing at hospitals across the country, U.S. immi- • www.va.gov/oig is the VA Office of the gration laws require they go home for two years Inspector General. Some of its reports are before returning. But getting a full-time position on the Web site, but others must be ordered, at a veterans hospital gets you a waiver, as does usually arriving after a few weeks or longer. I getting a job in an area federally designated as recently received a report more than a year medically underserved. after my request. Investigations often detail Halver Durbin, shown here in a family photo, died • The federal watchdogs overseeing veter- how long veterans waited for neurosurgery, three days after refusing more surgery at a VA hospital. ans’ health care in the Office of Inspector When the chief of surgery was called to deal with an General are too understaffed to handle the cardiac care, orthopedic surgery, and other infection in his belly, a resident showed up instead. medical care. The chief was scheduled to work, but was operating 15,000 complaints that come in each year on private patients. and have no real authority to order changes. • www.va.gov is the VA’s Web site, and a great The reports and inspections available at the source of information. You can do searches on could have gone to private hospitals under the OIG Web site, while providing a pretty good different topics. Medicare program. idea of the problems, also reveal the extent of OIG power. And it’s pretty inadequate: Hospitals • www.gao.gov, the Web site of the Gen- Other findings in the series included: investigated last year often are found to have the eral Accounting Office, also offers helpful • Veterans hospitals have hired thousands of foreign doctors to care for the nation’s elderly war vets, same problems or deficiencies the OIG found reports. passing over qualified Americans in the process. five years ago. • A great place to go for informa- And many of these foreign doctors were hired Joan Mazzolini has been at The Plain Dealer for tion is your local federal courthouse. in part-time VA positions, with the remainder of nearly 11 years. She has won a George Polk Award If a patient sues the VA, he first must file an their time spent at the better-paying university for medical reporting and is a past IRE winner. Her administrative complaint. If that fails, he must hospitals affiliated with the veterans hospitals. series, “In Harm’s Way: Inside VA Hospitals,” was file a federal lawsuit. While it’s a little time- I looked into this issue after hearing complaints a finalist for the IRE’s FOI Award last year. consuming to search for malpractice claims against the United States of America (because you also pick up the people who were injured by mail trucks, for example) it does get you the people you need to illustrate the story. For example, I was able to find Elizabeth Ann DeRousse’s sad story through a federal lawsuit. A WWII veteran, she used the local Dealer Plain The Shaw Scott VA, though her family wanted her to use Medicare. A neurosurgery resident quickly discovered an aneurysm in her brain, but he rotated back to the University of Kentucky before schedul- ing her surgery. (Residents usually rotate out after three months.) That happened one more time, but the third resident finally scheduled a surgery. Unfortunately, five days before her operation the aneurysm burst and she died. It had taken more than six months for her to get a surgery date. Peter Melone, 73, is hospitalized for persistent problems with his amputated leg. A VA resident staffing the emergency department didn’t catch his abdominal aneurysm in time.

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ACCESSING HOSPITAL AND MEDICAL DATA The Plain Dealer’s Joan Mazzolini gave these tips on accessing hospital and medical data, as well as birth and death information, at the 2002 IRE Annual Conference in San Francisco:

• Hospital and medical data sources. Check out state health the ages of the mother and father, their race and education level, departments: Nearly every state licenses hospitals, which means whether the mother had any medical problems during pregnancy that facilities must collect data in certain areas. This is usually a or complications during labor (including a transfer to another gold mine, but may take a lot of asking. hospital), the amount of prenatal care given, and method of With diagnostic-related group data, patients are hospital- delivery. Names of the babies and parents are often deleted for ized under a particular diagnostic-related group, DRG, or type privacy reasons. of illness. Insurance companies and Medicare pay the hospital • Administration records. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid according to the DRG code. States usually analyze this data and Services, which has replaced the Health Care Financing Admin- will give it to you. Stories drawn from this data might include istration, maintains dozens of data files with information about looking at how long patients are hospitalized for a particular patients who receive Medicare and Medicaid, and which hospitals, illness; most frequent causes of hospitalization; how much dif- clinics, doctors and nursing homes provide services to them. For ferent hospitals charge for similar types of care; emergency room more information, visit http://cms.hhs.gov. admissions; and outliers. • Listservs. This is a helpful tool if you have the time and are look- While Ohio isn’t one of the states that licenses hospitals, ing for particular people. I used it when working on a transplant there is still some data available. For example, the state keeps project and the VA project. information on how many open-heart surgeries are performed, • Getting the data. Ask for: as well as complication and death rates for each hospital. It does 1. The data: On diskette or a CD, either as a DBF file or in fixed- the same for heart catheterization, etc. width (ASCII). States have gotten more sophisticated and • Death certificates. These certificates are available in about 20 might ask if you want it in Excel or Access. You can convert states. Contact your state health department or department of them either way. Paper records are still good, but you have to vital statistics. The records usually include the deceased’s name, do the importing. social security number, cause of death, time of death, place 2. Record layout. This is the key or guide to the data, which might of death, occupation, age, race, sex, and whether there was a be given to you with no column heads. coroner’s investigation and autopsy. 3. Cost: Some places still try to overcharge, but this is happening To translate cause of death codes, you will need the less frequently. The DRG data, for example, costs about $25 — a International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9), ninth revision. price that includes data on two diskettes plus shipping. The This is available in a two-volume set of books from the World state tries to cover its costs, not to make money. Health Organization, or on CD-ROM from the U.S. Department Finally if someone is going to e-mail data to you, make sure of Health and Human Services. For more information call the your organization doesn’t have a firewall that will stop it. ThePlain National Center for Health Statistics at 310-436-8500, or see Dealer does, so I have data e-mailed to my AOL account. Also, http://wonder.cdc.gov/. make a copy of the original data and leave the original alone. The “wonder” site at the Centers for Disease Control also Manipulate the data on the copy. allows you to run searches for different causes of death in some states and the nation. For example, you can find how many of the Other tipsheets available through IRE children born to 12- to 14-year-old mothers in the past decade Also at the San Francisco conference, Valeri Williams of WFAA- have died as infants. Dallas/Fort Worth, and Natalya Shulyakovskaya, The Orange County To double check on whether someone has died you can Register, outlined documents and databases in the following tip- check the Social Security Web site: sheets, available through the IRE Resource Center: http://www.ancestry.com/search/rectype/vital/ssdi/main.htm No. 1628: Natalya Shulyakovskaya, The Orange County Register, • Birth certificates. Like death certificates, birth certificates are provides a tipsheet on databases that help compare doctors available in about 20 states. Contact your state health depart- and hospitals, find hospital trends, and track down patients and ment or department of vital statistics to find out if certificates victims of abuse or mistreatment are available in your state. No. 1650: Valeri Williams, WFAA-Dallas/Fort Worth, gives a collection The records usually include the date of birth, birthplace, of document recommendations for any journalist looking into child’s sex, race, gestational age and weight. Records also show hospitals, malpractice or medical negligence.

Copies of these tipsheets and others related to medicine or hospitals are available from the IRE Resource Center by visiting www.ire.org/resourcecenter/ or by calling 573-882-3364.

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Reaction to our story came swiftly. Four days later, state Attorney General Charlie Condon – the DOMESTIC VIOLENCE state’s top prosecutor – ordered solicitors state- wide to quit dismissing most cases. Probe prompts change Prosecutors told us they often had no choice to drop charges because victims – usually women – in way cases prosecuted refused to cooperate. Victim advocates said many women don’t want to prosecute for a number of BY RICK BRUNDRETT reasons, including fear of retaliation and financial THE STATE (COLUMBIA, S.C.) dependence on the batterer. But advocates and Condon told us they hen Teresa Reese was shot dead charged Willie Earl Reese Jr. with severely beat- believed that to break the cycle of violence, tough in April 2001, outside her parents’ ing her. But they later dropped the case. prosecution was needed, even if victims didn’t rural home near South Carolina’s That was a typical pattern statewide, our want to press charges. Condon’s “no-drop” order capital city of Columbia, The State investigation would find. Using state court banned prosecutors from dismissing cases solely carriedW a brief about the slaying and the arrest of administration computer records, database editor because victims refused to cooperate. her estranged husband, Willie Earl Reese Jr. Chris Roberts and I analyzed dismissal rates from That policy was a first in South Carolina, At first glance, the 29-year-old woman’s 1996 to 2000 for the two most serious domestic though it has been used for years elsewhere in death was just another sad domestic violence violence charges: criminal domestic violence of a the nation. We told our readers how it worked in statistic, reinforcing a national study that ranked high and aggravated nature, and third- and subse- San Diego and Duluth, Minn. South Carolina first in the rate of women killed quent-offense criminal domestic violence. But attitudes in a historically conservative by men. In a front-page story, Roberts, veteran reporter Southern state don’t change easily. State gov- But The State decided to dig deeper after Clif LeBlanc and I informed readers that their ernment reporter Valerie Bauerlein, for example, receiving a tip from a source. What we eventu- prosecutors and judges were dropping more than showed how veteran state lawmaker Jake Knotts ally found resulted in dozens of stories and a half of the most serious cases. persuaded a judge to drop a domestic violence statewide change in the way domestic violence Of the 4,351 circuit court charges examined, charge against a man whose wife told police her cases are prosecuted. 2,350 charges, or 54 percent, were dismissed husband had assaulted her. over the five-year period. Prosecutors – called Our initial stories, however, might have raised No-drop order solicitors in South Carolina – dropped most of some awareness at the state’s General Assembly. Two years before Teresa’s death, prosecutors the cases. Less than two months after our first story, law- makers voted to increase marriage license fees statewide to provide an estimated $1 million more a year to domestic violence shelters. The bill, which was pushed by the women’s caucus, had stalled before our investigation. Soft on abusers Not everyone cheered our work. We fol- lowed the case of a two-time domestic violence victim who contended that Condon’s no-drop policy would hurt families by keeping offenders – often the primary wage earners – behind bars. The woman, who had a 10th-grade education and two small children at the time, was fight- ing to get a sentence reduction for her carpenter husband, who had been convicted of assaulting her mother. Some prosecutors also were grumbling about Condon’s order, sources told us. There were those who felt his directive was too strict; others didn’t like being told what to do by someone in Colum- bia. And some accused Condon, who was running for governor, of political grandstanding. (Condon lost his gubernatorial bid in the Republican pri- mary in June.) Condon later issued a memo to prosecutors

32 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 33 FEATURES FEATURES

FROM THE IRE RESOURCE CENTER

For more information on domestic violence and the prosecution of such cases, consider these stories available from the IRE Resource

Tim Dominick The State The Dominick Tim Center (www.ire.org/resourcecenter): • Story No. 17437 – Protection from abuse orders are awarded by the court to men or women who say they are being abused or threatened. The defendant is required to stay away from the plaintiff, but this investigation shows the system fails many of those looking for help and the court authorities are bound by regulations and unsure of how to make them better. Pam Lehman and Melissa Tyrrell, The York (Pa.) Adam Self was sentenced to three years in prison for criminal domestic violence. His mother-in-law, Brenda Bryant Daily Record. (right), says that Self has changed and it would be better for him to be working and taking care of his family than be in prison. In the center is DeAndrea Gist of the Attorney General’s office. • Story No. 17234 – Domestic violence tears families apart, leaving children without clarifying his no-drop position. He told them his For the lesser charge of third and subsequent mothers. A team of reporters looked behind order wasn’t meant to impose a blanket ban on offense, which carries a maximum three-year the numbers to tell readers why men kill the dismissals; cases could be dropped if there was sentence, the average sentence was slightly women they claim to love and why the bat- no evidence or not enough evidence to sustain more than a year. a conviction. Though they didn’t dispute our analysis, terers are rarely punished until they finally But his instruction didn’t satisfy Lexington judges denied they were being soft on abus- kill the victim. Special focus was given to County Solicitor Donnie Myers – the state’s most ers. They said the worst offenders often are challenges women in rural Minnesota and well-known death penalty prosecutor. Myers prosecuted under other types of assault charges Wisconsin have in escaping the abuse. Kay transferred 60 of his domestic violence cases that carry longer sentences than the most serious Harvey, Phil Pina, Rick Linsk, Charles Lasze- to Condon’s office, saying he couldn’t prosecute domestic violence charges. wksi, Lisa Donavan, St. Paul Pioneer Press. them mainly because victims either didn’t want Our investigation also found that domestic to prosecute or couldn’t be located. violence laws in South Carolina are weak. No • Story No. 18154 – Columbus Monthly tells Condon accepted the challenge, assigning charge – no matter how serious the injuries – car- the story of Mary Lapos-Altmiller, “a well- the cases to a special domestic violence team ries more than a 10-year sentence, and none is liked Westerville librarian, a wife, a mother, in his office. Most of the cases are still pending, listed as a felony. Also, no charge is classified as benefactor to stray cats,” who walked out though Condon’s team has gotten mostly guilty a violent offense, which allows serious abusers on her life to marry her childhood sweet- pleas in the others. to participate in prosecution-run rehabilitation heart, Clee Ridenour. The story details how The State also wanted to analyze sentencing programs that can result in the dismissal of their the “attempts to revive a first love ... turned patterns for the two most serious domestic vio- charges. into full-blown domestic violence,” and lence charges. We figured that if most cases were State bills that would have toughened penal- ended up with Ridenour being charged being dropped, abusers who were prosecuted ties for batterers and made Condon’s no-drop probably were getting little or no prison time. policy a law died in the General Assembly. with the murder of his wife. We were right. In a follow-up story, Chris Roberts and I Results encouraging percent in the previous five years. reported that South Carolina judges gave no We wanted to find out how effective As for Willie Earl Reese Jr. – the man whose prison time to at least half of all offenders con- Condon’s order was a year later. So again, we case launched our investigation – he was con- victed of the most serious charges. Using state analyzed dismissal rates for the two most seri- victed last December of murdering his estranged corrections and probation databases, we found ous charges using the state court administration wife, Teresa. The jury deliberated less than a half that 1,728 defendants got probation only from database. hour. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison. 1996 to 2000. Our findings, reported in a Sunday front- And judges rarely gave long sentences to page story, were encouraging: Dismissal rates Rick Brundrett covers South Carolina’s judicial the abusers who ended up in state prison. On by prosecutors and judges statewide dropped system and legal issues. He has been with The State the aggravated assault charge, which carries a from 54 percent during1996-2000 to 35 percent since 1998. Previously, he worked for 12 years at maximum 10-year sentence, offenders received in the year after Condon’s order. Convictions The Herald-Palladium in St. Joseph, Mich., where an average sentence of just under three years. also rose after the order, to 48 percent from 34 he was primarily a police reporter.

32 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 33 FEATURES FEATURES

only to government units. In other project files, checks were made out to groups that seemed to have nothing to do with the project description. STATE It became apparent that millions of dollars were being spent with little or no scrutiny. That’s when I approached Janet Williams, SLUSH FUND projects editor at The Star, and told her a few weeks devoted to this story would prove Public money used to fund worthwhile. After getting the OK to stray from legislators’ private interests daily Statehouse stories, I began to follow the money. BY MICHELE MCNEIL SOLIDA I spent a week sifting through thousands THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR of documents on projects, flagging those that seemed troubling and others that provide good examples of where Indiana tax revenue was he Baptist Women’s Shelter in East and courthouse renovations. going. Chicago, Ind., illustrates what went But lawmakers who wrote the law didn’t I checked records with the Indiana Secretary wrong with the Build Indiana Fund, follow it, my reporting found. of State’s office on numerous organizations that a pool of public money that became Since 1989, lawmakers have divvied up were receiving money. Those business records aT slush fund for legislators. $260 million among themselves – with each were helpful because some entities claimed to A state senator funneled $445,000 from this lawmaker getting between $300,000 and be incorporated, but actually weren’t. In other taxpayer-financed fund to a private women’s $900,000 to sprinkle within their districts cases, I was able to use these records – listing shelter, even though Indiana law required Build every two years. How large the allowance officers and directors – to show that legislators Indiana money be given only to local govern- legislators receive is based upon whether they were directly involved in the organizations to ments for public construction projects. are members of the controlling political party. which they were sending money. Further, Indiana turned over $145,000 of Lawmakers allocate the money to pet projects As a reporter new to the Statehouse beat, that grant without asking for a single receipt. of their own choosing, simply by placing a line seeking help from my colleagues became To get the rest of the money, the East Chicago item in the state’s budget. The public has virtu- important as the story grew. Janet Williams, church pastor in charge of the project turned ally no say in where this money goes. as the editor on this project, helped guide my in forged construction invoices. State officials The Star’s investigation found that law- reporting and writing. The Statehouse intern never followed up on the project. makers sent millions of taxpayer dollars at the time, Jennifer Wagner – now The Star’s The shelter was never built. to questionable projects, such as to private city hall reporter – undertook the tedious task Sen. Sam Smith, D-East Chicago, and organizations for nonpublic projects. Checks of typing a list of hundreds of Build Indiana pastor Lee Gilliam are under criminal inves- were sent to projects that were never built. One projects into a database so we could run it tigation for stealing and misusing the money lawmaker funneled money to a nonprofit orga- online and in the paper. And fellow Statehouse – the result of a six-week investigation by The nization he founded and runs, with the check reporter Kevin Corcoran, a veteran to this beat, Indianapolis Star. sent to his own mailbox. Another lawmaker provided invaluable suggestions, prompting me That was just part of the fallout from performed construction work on a project for to ask for a list of all Build Indiana checks my Build Indiana Fund investigation, which which he secured the money. And about $40 that had been sent out by the Indiana Auditor’s began as a routine story assignment from my million went to nonprofit groups – organiza- Office. editors. tions never audited by the state. That list from the auditor, obtained in My simple story about Build Indiana proj- Excel spreadsheet format, became crucial to Questionable projects ects turned into an investigation after I pulled my story. Since the State Budget Agency’s Every two years when Indiana lawmakers an old project file from the State Budget paper and electronic files weren’t complete, pass a new state budget, they include a lengthy Agency’s office just to see how the process this was the best record to show where the list of local projects to be funded with Build worked. It was a renovation of a community money went. The spreadsheet allowed me to Indiana Fund money. My assignment was to do center. But something immediately caught my see who was receiving the money and where a story about what kinds of projects received eye: The lawmaker’s construction company did the checks were being mailed. I was able to money in the 2001 budget. the work. The money from the state-funded determine which projects were legal – per the The Build Indiana Fund, created by the grant this lawmaker secured essentially ended original 1989 law that money go only to public legislature in 1989, was robust thanks to tax up in his own pocket. entities – and which were not. This list showed revenue from Indiana’s riverboats and its lot- I looked through more files – some were me that one lawmaker was having money sent tery. The law that created the fund also spelled thick with detailed project proposals and to his personal mailbox for an organization he out its use: to keep local property taxes down receipts, others just contained photocopies of founded and still runs. by paying for public construction projects in checks. Many of the projects clearly violated This Excel spreadsheet also alerted me to local communities, such as road improvements the original 1989 law that required money to go another problem: Projects never in the state

34 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 35 FEATURES FEATURES

budget were getting money. The pastor receiving the money gave me The story also provided many follow-ups. different stories about where the shelter was I wrote about how one lawmaker sent his tax- Outrage at lawmakers located and its purpose. When I located the payer money to for-profit businesses – includ- Then came scores of personal interviews. East Chicago shelter address, I found it was a ing a pizza joint and a day care center. And I From those discussions, I learned that the State private residence. wrote about how a potentially incriminating Budget Agency became so overwhelmed with I wanted to be thorough, so I tracked down e-mail, which seemed to show an exchange the number of projects that it started issuing copies of the canceled checks to see who from of Build Indiana money for campaign help, checks without asking for receipts. I learned the women’s shelter project was endorsing disappeared from the files. that lawmakers changed their minds often, them. That led me to an Indianapolis ware- Readers were outraged at lawmakers, who choosing to send money to projects other than house that houses old state records, including contended their actions were legal since these those approved in the state budget. canceled checks from the State Treasurer’s projects were in the state budget. Still, they The most remarkable part of the story came Office. changed the Build Indiana Fund law to legal- when I learned the Baptist Women’s Shelter in The Baptist Women’s Shelter project ize much of what they had been doing. But East Chicago, Ind., didn’t exist. I knew there became the lead for my story, which prompted they also included some new accountability were problems with the project because the con- swift reaction. Gov. Frank O’Bannon halted all measures, and equalized spending between struction invoices in the budget files didn’t look spending from the fund until his office could Democrats and Republicans. authentic. Budget agency officials had attached improve accountability. He lifted the morato- Still, the law hasn’t been tested yet. The sticky notes listing concerns about who was rium a few weeks later and announced a series state’s budget crisis prompted Gov. O’Bannon signing the documents. I decided to call the of new accountability steps – including requir- to drain the fund to help Indiana’s bottom companies that provided the construction and ing receipts before money is released. line. furniture – and the invoices – but there were The Marion County Prosecutor’s Office is either no phone numbers, or the numbers didn’t investigating the Build Indiana Fund – includ- Michele McNeil Solida is a statehouse reporter work. There also was no record in the Secretary ing the Baptist Women’s Shelter. Criminal at The Indianapolis Star, where she has worked of State’s office of these companies. charges are likely. since 1997.

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But the municipal health bureaucrats were in DATABASE REPORTING REVEALS no hurry to hand over a disk. What followed would make a fine curriculum FOOD-HANDLING GONE WRONG for Obstruction 101. Ontario has an open records law that specifically applies to municipalities. Work also shows inspections Under it, the city was supposed to make a deci- sometimes not taking place sion on my request within 30 days of my filing it in March 2000. In reality, it took five months and a meeting with the city clerk (who oversees local administration of the act) before I got my BY FRED VALLANCE-JONEST first response. THE HAMILTON (ONTARIO) SPECTATOR The answer was no. I could not have the data- base. But if I was willing to hand over a check for more than $1,000 Canadian (about $630 U.S.), he cook in the small family restaurant Using computer-assisted reporting, it also revealed they’d be happy to make paper printouts. wanted to make sure the eggs weren’t that the city health department was frequently fail- The health bureaucrats said they couldn’t pro- greasy. ing to do the inspections required to protect the vide an electronic copy. Such excuses are routine So before the heaping plate of public, and even when serious problems were for bureaucrats. But in this case they were telling breakfastT went to the customer, she used a cloth found, little or nothing was being done. the truth, albeit in a narrow, self-serving way as lying on the counter to dab the eggs. She then they made no effort to solve the problem. put the grease-laden rag down, ready for the next Data block The provincial health ministry had designed meal. It would be used for six hours before being Senior managers at the newspaper had wanted the database system and provided it to municipali- washed. to do a story on restaurant safety for some time. ties to make it easier for them to report inspection Such was the scene witnessed by a public There would be high reader interest, and similar data to the ministry. As well as being able to spit health inspector in Hamilton, Ontario, an indus- CAR treatments by other newspapers had led to out what the province needed, the system allowed trial city with nearly half a million residents, about reforms in several North American cities, includ- for some standard printed reports, including a list an hour’s drive southwest of Toronto. ing Toronto. of inspections for any one premise. The city’s staff The inspector wrote about the incident in his The responsibility eventually fell to me had no idea how to make a copy of the underlying notes, one of more than 2,000 pages of inspection because of my special interests in CAR and public data they had themselves entered. reports released to The Hamilton Spectator as part documents research. Little did I know that getting When questioned, however, they did provide of its investigation into restaurant safety. out of the starting gate was going to take the better a key piece of information. The application was The resulting five-part series, called “Reserva- part of a year. written in Microsoft FoxPro. As I had used FoxPro tions,” revealed shocking food-handling practices My goal was to obtain a copy of the city’s extensively in the past, I now knew it should be in the back kitchens of well-known eateries. database of food premise inspections, so I could straightforward to write a query to produce the But the series was more than just a recitation see which establishments had the worst records data I wanted. of horror stories about mouse infestations, rotting and whether the city was doing the minimum I called the ministry people who had designed food, and cooks who never washed their hands. inspections required to protect the public. the application, and after some initial reluctance,

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a new ID. In two instances the mistake was inex- FROM THE IRE RESOURCE CENTER plicable. I chose to eliminate those two premises from any further analysis. This seemed reason- For more information on requesting and able. Because there were only two, the impact of using government data, consider these removing them would be minimal. Leaving them helpful tipsheets from the IRE Resource in would introduce errors. Center (www.ire.org/resourcecenter): The inspection table was twice as dirty. Some inspection entries were duplicated and a • Tipsheet No. 1466 offers strategies for later review of paper records revealed that a small negotiating for data and how to proceed

Ted Brellisford The Hamilton Spectator Hamilton The Brellisford Ted number of inspections were not entered at all. when the information you seek is not part I had to design queries to eliminate the dupli- of the public record, where else to get data cates, which could be identified from one of the and stories that didn’t rely on data records. fields. As for the missing inspections, they seemed (Reporters built their own data.) Jennifer few in number and health bureaucrats maintained LaFleur, Global Investigative Reporting the data was at least 98 percent complete. Still, Conference, Copenhagen, 2001. I knew that absolute precision would never be possible with this data. The deficiencies were later • Tipsheet No. 102 describes the Association revealed to readers. of Public Data Users, including membership Lesson 2: Make sure you figure out the limita- information. The APDU is an organization of tions of a data set before you start drawing any users, producers, and distributors of federal, conclusions. Check for flaws, such as unique IDs that aren’t unique. state, and local statistical data concerned To decide which paper files I wanted to see, I about the availability, use and interpreta- used a field that recorded the number of critical tion of public data. Services offered to violations found on an inspection visit. A critical members include a newsletter, annual violation is a mistake in food preparation or han- conference, membership directory, joint dling that has the potential to cause food poison- purchase of public data files, and telephone ing, such as storing foods at temperatures where contacts list for statistical agencies. Large bowls of newly cooked rice sit on the floor beside an open door with no bug screen. The bacteria thrive and grow. operator of another restaurant said this was a I compiled a list of premises that either had • Tipsheet No. 1634 includes useful ideas on common way to cool rice in Chinese restaurants, large total numbers of critical violations, or a large government data: online sources, overcom- but health officals say it’s a dangerous practice. number of failing inspections. I then submitted ing obstacles, organizing data. Some related an informal request for the detailed paper files. articles included. Kevin Corcoran, 2002 IRE they agreed to write the query and provide it to In contrast to my experience with the data, the Annual Conference, San Francisco. the city to run. health department was cooperative about provid- ing these reports. • Tipsheet No. 1578 outlines the basic tech- Lessons learned Lesson 3: Without the data, we never could niques for making changes to your data By November 2000, I finally had a disk in have zeroed in so well on premises that consis- table using the update query and string hand – for $30. tently had problems. The database allowed us functions. Mary Jo Sylwester, 2002 Annual Lesson 1: Perseverance pays in the hunt for to see both the big picture, and the detail that CAR Conference, Philadelphia. data. There are some wonderful tipsheets on this mattered. subject downloadable from the IRE Web site • Tipsheet No. 876 offers quick suggestions (www.ire.org). Sick customers on how to obtain public computer data Once my disk arrived, I was not surprised to I received the paper records in early 2001. through practical and non-confrontational find the data was dirty. There were two tables. From there, the project sat on the backburner means. Alan Levin, 1999 Annual CAR Confer- One contained information about establish- until May, when our city editor, Jim Poling, ence, Boston. ments, each identified with a unique ID. It linked assigned me to work on it full time. to detailed inspection information stored in the By that point, I had received an updated run of • Tipsheet No. 877 gives ideas for making second table. the inspection data from the city. Using Microsoft your negotiations move more smoothly, Both tables had problems which would have Access, I queried the database extensively, and since even when public record laws are caused me grief had I not identified them. determined how many times each premise had on your side, which isn’t often, it can take In the establishment table, a handful of the been inspected, as well as how many inspections ID numbers were duplicated, with more than one the department was doing. Using Excel, I calcu- months to get electronic data from govern- establishment having the same number. Usually it lated how much time passed between individual ment agencies. Bob Warner, 1999 Annual happened because a premise had changed hands inspections of each establishment. All of this CAR Conference, Boston. (and names) and someone had neglected to create CONTINUED ON PAGE 38 ×

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Restaurant safety background on food safety issues and posted sum- FOI report mary information derived from the city database CONTINUED FROM PAGE 37 on our Web site. CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17 revealed that the city was falling far short of the The response from the public, and from the inspection schedule required by provincial law. In politicians, was overwhelming in the true sense Potential spread some cases, years passed between visits, a fact that of that overused word. My voicemail was over- This sneaky maneuver by FERC will be I confirmed with the owners of the establishments loaded, letters and e-mails poured in, and our Web repeated by other agencies, largely because themselves. site was swamped, as outraged readers found out it works by camouflaging the fact that FOIA But there was still a key piece missing. for the first time about filthy conditions in restau- states clearly all federal agencies have but Roger Gillespie is the night managing editor rant kitchens, and the city’s failure to make them a single tool for determining which infor- at the Spectator, a tireless journalist who always clean up. mation should be protected: FOIA’s nine pushes his reporters to go that extra mile, or The phones were lighting up at City Hall, too. exemptions. three. By the second day of our series, the politicians Only one exemption pertains to critical Gillespie pointed out, and I agreed, that it was were already promising a cleanup. By the time energy infrastructure information – Exemp- important the reader understand the potential the last of the stories ran, councillors had voted tion 4, which allows federal agencies to consequences of a system that failed. That meant to hire additional inspectors, and to develop an withhold “trade secrets and commercial or documenting cases of food poisoning – the ulti- action plan to fix the problems identified by the financial information obtained from a person mate result of food handling gone wrong. newspaper. and privileged or confidential.” I filed a freedom of information request to The latter process continues. It is worth noting, though, that nothing another branch of the public health department, In February 2002, the city introduced a tem- in the exemption would permit the agency asking for records detailing outbreaks from the porary disclosure system that posts green signs to withhold information that the submitter previous year and a half. when a restaurant passes muster, and no sign oth- already discloses to the public or makes While I waited for that request to bear fruit, erwise. But as we reported in April, the system is available to competitors. I got to work interviewing restaurant owners, flawed because even when critical violations are The other great sleight of hand here is food safety experts, the inspectors and top health found, the signs are issued anyway, so long as the FERC’s straight-faced contention that it will bureaucrats. I wanted to ensure that any restau- problems are corrected by the time the inspector evenhandedly determine who merits access rant I named had every opportunity to respond. leaves. Not one single premise has been denied a by divining those with a “legitimate” need Sometimes, that meant several telephone calls or sign and the public is still given no information for information. In other words, government visits. Editor-in-Chief Dana Robbins knew the about the problems that are found. In fact, Ham- officials purport to make value-neutral dis- story would be controversial, so he wanted as ilton still requires members of the public to put in tinctions between requesters while accom- complete a picture as possible. a special request to the health department to see modating the public’s very strong interest in By early September, I had received records inspection reports. knowing what its government knows. documenting several dozen outbreaks or suspected Staff are expected to bring a report to city It’s not clear how FERC’s regulations outbreaks of food poisoning and was tracking councillors with options for a permanent disclo- will affect the FOIA process on Capitol down one of the victims, who had suffered the sure system, on mandatory food-handler training, Hill, where Senate and House lawmakers humiliation of seeing the guests at her own wed- and ways to make the inspection system work will have to reconcile competing critical ding meal fall ill. more effectively. infrastructure exemptions in a conference It was all coming together, and Denis Leblanc, That report is already six months past its committee on homeland security. In July, a precise editor known for his calm and steady original due date. the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee style, had been assigned to work with me to bring In the meantime, shortly after our series ran, reached a bipartisan compromise that creates the story to its conclusion. the owner of that family restaurant ordered his staff a new exemption allowing for the transfer of But then came Sept. 11. to stop using the “egg cloths.” He still insisted the sensitive materials to a new homeland secu- The editors saw no point in publishing while the cloths posed no risk to the public, but his diners rity agency, while the House bill, H.R. 5005, attention of the entire world was otherwise occu- apparently thought otherwise. includes a radical approach allowing for pied. “Reservations” finally launched Nov. 24. “Reservations” wasn’t perfect, nor was it critical infrastructure materials “voluntarily We led with the wedding story and documented inherently original, but it was successful in rais- submitted” to the government by individuals the failure of the city to live up to its obligations ing public and political awareness of a problem or businesses to be exempt from FOIA. to protect the public. that had literally festered under people’s noses. The bureaucrats who prefer secrecy like On Monday (the Spectator, like many The same data exist in dozens of cities, so it is a to make policy in a vacuum, where few are Canadian papers, does not publish on Sunday), story ripe for the picking. paying attention. we wrote about the restaurants with the worst They’re getting their wish so far in the inspection records. Three more days of stories Fred Vallance-Jones is a reporter and CAR specialist post-Sept. 11 rush to protect critical infra- followed, including a look at systems used by at The Hamilton Spectator. He has taught CAR at structure, as newsrooms seem fixated on other cities to disclose the results of inspections to Ryerson University in Toronto and at annual confer- Congress while FERC simply makes its the public. We also ran sidebars giving necessary ences of the Canadian Association of Journalists. own rules.

38 THE IRE JOURNAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 39 FEATURES IRE SERVICES Member News INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS AND EDITORS, INC. is a grassroots nonprofit organization CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5 dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting within the field of journal- to assistant metro editor at the Las Vegas Sun. ism. IRE was formed in 1975 with the intent of creating a networking tool and a forum in  Bryan Monroe, currently deputy manag- which journalists from across the country could raise questions and exchange ideas. IRE ing editor of the San Jose Mercury News, has provides educational services to reporters, editors and others interested in investigative been named assistant vice president for news reporting and works to maintain high professional standards. at Knight Ridder. He’ll take the new position Programs and Services: in the spring after completing a Nieman IRE RESOURCE CENTER – A rich reserve of print and broadcast stories, tipsheets and guides to help Fellowship at Harvard University.  Sarah you start and complete the best work of your career. This unique library is the starting point of any piece you’re working on. You can search through abstracts of more than 19,000 investigative reporting Okeson, the Journal Star in Peoria, Ill., won stories through our Web site. a first-place award for business writing from Contact: Carolyn Edds, [email protected], 573-882-3364 the Illinois Press Association for her investi- DATABASE LIBRARY – Administered by IRE and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. gation into fraud in the operations of online The library has copies of many government databases, and makes them available to news organizations auctioneer eBay.  Geneva Overholser, a at or below actual cost. Analysis services are available on these databases, as is help in deciphering former Washington Post ombudsman and a records you obtain yourself. current member of the IRE Endowment Advi- Contact: Jeff Porter, [email protected], 573-882-1982 sory Board, has been awarded the 10th annual CAMPAIGN FINANCE INFORMATION CENTER – Administered by IRE and the National Institute for Anvil of Freedom honoring individuals whose Computer-Assisted Reporting. It’s dedicated to helping journalists uncover the campaign money careers have shown a commitment to demo- trail. State campaign finance data is collected from across the nation, cleaned and made available to journalists. A search engine allows reporters to track political cash flow across several states in federal cratic freedoms, ethics and integrity. Over- and state races. holser also holds the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Contact: Brant Houston, [email protected], 573-882-2042 Public Affairs Reporting at the Missouri School ON-THE-ROAD TRAINING – As a top promoter of journalism education, IRE offers loads of train- of Journalism.  Ken Picard has moved from ing opportunities throughout the year. Possibilities range from national conferences and regional the Missoula Independent to Seven Days, an workshops to weeklong boot camps and on-site newsroom training. Costs are on a sliding scale and alternative weekly in Burlington, Vt.  Laure fellowships are available to many of the events. Quinlivan and WCPO-Cincinnati, were hon- Contact: Ron Nixon, [email protected], 573-882-2042 ored in the 2002 Excellence in Urban Journal- Publications ism competition for the documentary, “Visions THE IRE JOURNAL – Published six times a year. Contains journalist profiles, how-to stories, reviews, of Vine Street.” Quinlivan spent three months investigative ideas and backgrounding tips. The Journal also provides members with the latest news on upcoming events and training opportunities from IRE and NICAR. investigating urban decay in Cincinnati and Contact: Len Bruzzese, [email protected], 573-882-2042 offering solutions for neighborhood revital- UPLINK – Newsletter by IRE and NICAR on computer-assisted reporting. Published six times a year. ization.  Roshini Rajkumar has moved to Often, Uplink stories are written after reporters have had particular success using data to investigate WFTC-Minneapolis from WTVF-Nashville, stories. The columns include valuable information on advanced database techniques as well as success where she was a consumer investigative stories written by newly trained CAR reporters. reporter.  The northern California chapter Contact: Jeff Porter, [email protected], 573-884-7711 of the Society of Professional Journalists REPORTER.ORG – A collection of Web-based resources for journalists, journalism educators and others. has named Seth Rosenfeld its Journalist of Discounted Web hosting and services such as mailing list management and site development are the Year for his series in the San Francisco provided to other nonprofit journalism organizations. Contact: Ted Peterson, [email protected], 573-884-7321 Chronicle, “The Campus Files: Reagan, Hoover and the UC red scare.” The investigation For information on: was based on FBI files obtained through 17 ADVERTISING – Pia Christensen, [email protected], 573-884-2175 years of litigation.  David Zeeck, executive MEMBERSHIP AND SUBSCRIPTIONS – John Green, [email protected], 573-882-2772 CONFERENCES AND BOOT CAMPS – Ev Ruch-Graham, [email protected], 573-882-8969 editor of The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., LISTSERVS – Ted Peterson, [email protected], 573-884-7321 has been elected treasurer-designate of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Mailing Address: IRE, 138 Neff Annex, Missouri School of Journalism, Columbia, MO 65211

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