Introduction
The Center for Public Integrity can benefit from the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s latest crowd-funding campaign in support of “aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption and law-breaking in government.” A donation to this fund over the next two weeks will be matched up to $10,000 by actor and Foundation board member John Cusack.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation has already raised about $200,000 for a select handful of organizations, from the National Security Archive to WikiLeaks.
Foundation support for the Center will go toward our National Security reporting on Pentagon spending. We’ll examine what makes up the biggest defense budget in the world. We’ll detail what’s gone wrong in some of the Defense Department’s most troubled and costly projects like the F-35 fighter jet and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ships. We’ll look at the explosion of military entitlements, and map how top defense contractors in Washington regularly finance the election campaigns of the lawmakers who oversee or control their budgets.
Crowd-funding by the Freedom of the Press Foundation is built on the recognition that “this kind of transparency journalism — from publishing the Pentagon Papers and exposing Watergate, to uncovering the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and CIA secret prisons — doesn’t just happen. It requires dogged work by journalists, and often, the courage of whistleblowers and others who work to ensure that the public actually learns what it has a right to know.”
As the Foundation acknowledges, increasingly it is the non-profit media and transparency organizations like The Center for Public Integrity that are emerging as a critical component of the journalism landscape. “Leveraging the power of the Internet, these organizations are helping to reinvent and reimagine independent watchdog reporting.”
I couldn’t have said it better.
Until next week,
Bill Buzenberg
Executive Director
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