By Paul Singer, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006

A staff meeting that degenerates into a near-fistfight is never a good sign for an organization. For the Center for Public Integrity, the January showdown between the managing director and a senior reporter was yet another in a chain of embarrassing mishaps that have marred Executive Director Roberta Baskin's first year on the job.

	Inaccurate reporting and senior staff departures have marred the Center for Public Integrity over the past year.

Founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis, a former TV journalist, the nonprofit center conducts investigative research and reporting on public policy issues. During Lewis's 15 years at the helm, the center produced close to 300 reports and books and was repeatedly honored by professional journalism groups for its hard-hitting work. In 1998, Lewis won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.

But in the time since Lewis stepped down as executive director in December 2004, the center has unveiled a lobbying database rife with inaccurate numbers, issued and then withdrawn an incorrect report on White House travel, lost many senior staff members, and announced that it had a serial plagiarist on its payroll.

Baskin, a prize-winning television journalist who replaced Lewis and celebrated her first anniversary on January 31, acknowledged, "It has been an enormous challenge over the past year." But she said that turmoil is to be expected in an organization making a transition from the leadership of a visionary founder to a new, institutional structure.

The most recent expression of this turmoil is the allegation by former senior reporter Bob Williams that he was fired in January for raising concerns about a no-bid consulting contract that Managing Director Wendell (Sonny) Rawls received in the mid-1990s from the Tennessee Valley Authority, where an old friend was serving as chairman.

Baskin named Rawls her second No. 2 after the previous managing director resigned in December after serving only six months. Rawls, himself an acclaimed journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 at The Philadelphia Inquirer for his reporting on a Pennsylvania mental hospital and then worked at The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At several newspapers, Rawls worked with Bill Kovach, who is now a center board member.

After Rawls's appointment, Williams discovered old news stories linking Rawls to a contract controversy at the TVA. Williams says he brought the reports to the attention of the center's board of directors.

A TVA inspector general audit in 1997 faulted agency managers for allowing the appearance of favoritism in the awarding of sole-source contracts. Rawls, who was out of journalism at the time, had received a contract from the TVA under then-Chairman Craven Crowell, a former journalist who had once worked with Rawls at The Tennessean in Nashville. The IG report singled out several contractors for criticism, but Rawls was not named.

In an interview for this story, Rawls said that his TVA contract, spanning three years at a total value of about $200,000, "had been unanimously agreed to by the entire board" and that the value of the contract "fell far below the numbers that required bidding at TVA." The contract was to develop a communications plan, an area in which Rawls was expert. "I don't think ethics is a matter of concern here," Rawls concluded.

Nevertheless, Williams raised concerns about the contracts as well as Rawls's ties to Kovach, and questioned whether this background disqualified Rawls from becoming second-in-command at the center.

Baskin says she looked into the matter and found no reason for concern about Rawls. "It's groundless, it's unfounded," she said in an interview. Rawls "is a highly experienced Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and then some. My own experience with him is that he is extremely honorable, hardworking, smart, and transparent."

In an all-staff meeting at the center in late January, while Baskin was out of town, Rawls discussed the issue, and Williams raised his concerns. According to several accounts, the meeting grew heated and Williams ultimately asked Rawls to "step outside." Although there were no fisticuffs, Williams says that a few days later he was told he would be fired if he didn't resign.

In Williams's view, he was fired for raising ethical questions about his boss. "How is this not cronyism?" Williams said in an interview. "How is this not something we write about every day here?"

Baskin, noting the privacy of personnel matters, would not comment on Williams's departure, beyond saying that he had resigned.

In an otherwise stable environment, the turmoil surrounding Williams's departure might simply be an odd blip from a combative staffer. But the situation at the center has been anything but stable since Baskin took over.

Since Lewis stepped down, the center has lost most of its senior staff, including the development director, the communications director, the managing editor, the database editor, and several senior writers. The center lists a staff of about 30 people, and only half of them have been in their jobs longer than Baskin.

"It's like a baseball manager coming in and making changes on the team," Baskin said. "I didn't fire anybody; people left. And it's really considered pretty ordinary. We are going through something of a transformation. And in that process we are maintaining core projects and we are building in new directions, and some people are comfortable with that and some people aren't."

But along with the changes have come some embarrassing errors. Last summer, National Journal published a story criticizing the center's new LobbyWatch Web site for exaggerating, in some cases by millions of dollars, the amount of money that companies were spending to lobby in Washington. The center posted several disclaimers defending its methodology and then announced a new methodology, but many of the original documents remained on the site. Ultimately the center concluded its lobby numbers were flawed, and Baskin ordered the removal of all documents that used numbers from that database until the data could be reconfirmed. Many of those documents are still unavailable.

In November, the center issued a report claiming that White House staff had accepted $2.3 million worth of free travel from outside groups. The report was picked up by the Associated Press and got wide play in newspapers around the country. A week later, AP ran a correction citing numerous errors in the report -- the total value of travel was $1.5 million, not $2.3 million; the number of staff accepting more than $10,000 worth of travel was 23, not 51 as the center had reported; and the report overestimated the spending of several outside parties by tens of thousands of dollars. The center issued a press release acknowledging the errors and withdrew the report.

Bill Allison, who was editor-at-large when he left the center in December, says that some of the recent problems may stem from Baskin's efforts to turn reporting projects around more quickly and to update the center's Web site more frequently.

"I don't think it's crazy for the center, which had an award-winning Web site, to think that maybe the way to expand is to focus on the Internet," Allison said. But the center was built on a reporting model in which legions of young reporters under the tutelage of a few senior staff could spend months culling data and producing reports that were carefully written, checked, and released at the rate of a handful each year. To generate smaller investigative pieces more frequently, "you are going to need a much bigger staff," Allison said, and a staff that has more veteran reporters who can manage projects with less oversight.

"The center never saw itself as competing on a daily basis or against a weekly magazine," Allison said. Instead, the center made a reputation by stepping back and taking a deeper, more detailed look at news. "If it gets back to that and starts doing projects like that again, I think it will be fine," he said.

Allison also points out that Baskin was the victim of problems that occurred before she arrived. For instance, in September the center issued a press release announcing that a staff member had been caught using material from other published works without attribution. The center had to remove from circulation its 2002 book Capitol Offenders -- detailing how the personal financial interests of state legislators intersect with their public duties -- and returned the Investigative Reporters and Editors award that the book had won.

In the wake of last year's errors, Baskin established a policy requiring every piece of information to be verified by an underlying document. For an upcoming report, Baskin said, staff members have gone through more than 30,000 public records by hand. Last month, the center hired Bill Dedman, the managing editor of The Telegraph in Nashua, N.H., and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, to audit the center's work and provide recommendations for improving accuracy.

Allison and other former staffers say they have no doubt that the center will regain its footing. Aron Pilhofer, the center's former database editor who left in August, said, "This is an organization that has put out an incredible body of work and will continue to do so for a long, long time. Obviously there was a transition period after Chuck left that everybody knew was going to happen."

"The managers and the board have taken great pains to reassess and improve the center's practices as problems have come to light," said Charles Piller, a Los Angeles Times reporter and the chairman of the center's board. In a February 14 e-mail to the center's staff, the board's executive committee reiterated its support for Rawls. "It was not hard to look into the warmed-over claims and see that they were baseless," the e-mail said. "We firmly stand behind Sonny and have no doubt whatsoever about his personal integrity."

The committee added, "None of us should allow groundless claims to prevent Sonny or our organization from moving forward confidently to correct long-standing problems and make the center more effective and successful in coming months and years."

Lewis declined through a spokesman to comment for this article.

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