This story was published as an op-ed in The New York Times.

Two years after a series of gambles and ill-advised decisions on a BP drilling project led to the largest accidental oil spill in United States history and the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, no one has been held accountable.

Sure, there have been about $8 billion in payouts and, in early March, the outlines of a civil agreement that will cost BP, the company ultimately responsible, another $7.8 billion in restitution to businesses and residents along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also true the company has paid at least $14 billion more in cleanup and other costs since the accident began on April 20, 2010, bringing the expense of this fiasco to about $30 billion for BP. These are huge numbers. But this is a huge and profitable corporation.

What is missing is the accountability that comes from real consequences: a criminal prosecution that holds responsible the individuals who gambled with the lives of BP’s contractors and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. Only such an outcome can rebuild trust in an oil industry that asks for the public’s faith so that it can drill more along the nation’s coastlines. And perhaps only such an outcome can keep BP in line and can keep an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster from happening again.

BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences, and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.

Prior to the gulf blowout, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil, BP was convicted of two felony environmental crimes and a misdemeanor: after it failed to report that its contractors were dumping toxic waste in Alaska in 1995; after its refinery in Texas City, Texas, exploded, killing 15, in 2005; and after it spilled more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil from a corroded pipeline onto the Alaskan tundra in 2006. In all, more than 30 people employed directly or indirectly by BP have died in connection with these and other recent accidents.

In at least two of those cases, the company had been warned of human and environmental dangers, deliberated the consequences and then ignored them, according to my reporting.

None of the upper-tier executives who managed BP 2014 John Browne and Tony Hayward among them 2014 were malicious. Their decisions, however, were driven by money. Neither their own sympathies nor the stark risks in their operations 2014 corroding pipelines, dysfunctional safety valves, disarmed fire alarms and so on 2014 could compete with the financial necessities of profit making.

Before the accident in Texas City, BP had declined to spend $150,000 to fix a part of the system that allowed gasoline to spew into the air and blow up. Documents show that the company had calculated the cost of a human life to be $10 million. Shortly before that disaster, a senior plant manager warned BP’s London headquarters that the plant was unsafe and a disaster was imminent. A report from early 2005 predicted that BP’s refinery would kill someone “within the next 12 to 18 months” unless it changed its practices.

Such explicit flirtation with deadly risk was undertaken as part of Mr. Browne’s effort while chief executive to expand BP as quickly as possible. Mr. Browne relentlessly cut costs, including on maintenance and safety.

Then he hastily assembled a series of acquisitions and mergers between 1998 and 2001 that added tens of thousands of employees, blurred chains of command and wrought chaos on his operations. His methods 2014 and the demands of Wall Street 2014 became overly dependent on quantitative measures of success at the expense of environmental and human risk.

After each disaster, Mr. Browne pledged to refresh his focus on safety, investment in maintenance and commitment to the environment. His successor, Mr. Hayward, followed suit, saying that BP’s culture had to change. But the Deepwater Horizon tragedy 2014 which bears many of the same traits as the company’s past accidents 2014 shows how difficult it has been for the company’s leaders to shift BP’s corporate values and live up to their promises.

The question becomes: did they try hard enough, and did the mechanisms of oversight, regulation and law enforcement work sufficiently to provide a recidivist organization the deterrent that could guarantee its compliance?

After its previous convictions, BP paid unprecedented fines 2014 more than $70 million 2014 and committed to spend at least another $800 million on maintenance to improve safety. The point was to demonstrate that the cost of doing business wrong far outweighs the cost of doing business right.

But without personal accountability, the fines become just another cost of doing business, William Miller, a former investigator for the Environmental Protection Agency who was involved in the Texas City case, told me.

The problem then (and perhaps now) is that it is the slow pileup of factors that cause an industrial disaster. Poor decisions are usually made incrementally by a range of people with differing levels of responsibility, and almost always behind a shield of plausible deniability. It makes it almost impossible to pin one clear-cut bad call on a single manager, which is partly why no BP official has ever been held criminally accountable.

Instead, the corporation is held accountable. It isn’t clear that charging the company repeatedly with misdemeanors and felonies has accomplished anything.

At more than $30 billion and climbing, the amount BP has paid out so far for reparations, lawsuits and cleanup dwarfs the roughly $8 billion that Exxon had to pay after its 1989 spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. And BP will likely still pay billions more before this is finished.

And yet it is not enough. Two years after analysts questioned whether the extraordinary cost and loss of confidence might drive BP out of business, it has come roaring back. It collected more than $375 billion in 2011, pocketing $26 billion in profits.

What the gulf spill has taught us is that no matter how bad the disaster (and the environmental impact), the potential consequences have never been large enough to dissuade BP from placing profits ahead of prudence. That might change if a real person was forced to take responsibility 2014 or if the government brought down one of the biggest hammers in its arsenal and banned the company from future federal oil leases and permits altogether. Fines just don’t matter.

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, April 19, 2012, 8 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Albert H. Teich / Shutterstock.com

The article A Punishment BP Can’t Pay Off appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued the first-ever national air pollution regulations for fracking on Wednesday. First proposed in July 2011, the final rules have been welcomed by environmental groups as a much-needed initial move in reducing pollution and protecting public health from the toxic chemicals involved in the oil and natural gas drilling process. But many cautioned it was just a first step.

“It sets a floor for what the industry needs to do,” said attorney Erik Schlenker-Goodrich of the Western Environmental Law Center. “The reality is we can do far better.”

Over the past few years, more information has come out about fracking’s potential harms to the environment and human health, particularly relating to the risk of groundwater contamination.

In addition to the many potentially toxic components of the highly pressurized fluid injected into the ground during the natural gas drilling process, fracking can also release cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and greenhouse gases like methane into the air. The federal government has made moves to tighten regulations, and we’ve chronicled the history of those regulations.

The EPA’s new rules don’t cover most of those issues. Instead, they address a single problem with natural gas: air pollution.

“These rules do not resolve chronic water, public health and other problems associated with fracking and natural gas,” Schlenker-Goodrich said.

The agency is actually barred from regulating the impact of fracking on groundwater because, in 2005, Congress exempted fracking from the Safe Water Drinking Act. Congressional proposals to give the EPA more oversight have so far failed.

With the new rules on air pollution, the EPA rejected an industry request to exempt some wells with low emissions of toxic compounds but did give drilling companies more time to comply. Notably, the final version provides a two-and-a-half-year transition period (rather than the 60 days in the original proposal) that gives drilling companies until 2015 to comply with the strictest regulations.

The industry lobbied hard for the delay, and its reaction to the rules have been mixed.

A spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil industry trade group, said it is still reviewing the new rules but said it’s happy with changes from the original proposal that will allow companies to “continue reducing emissions while producing the oil and natural gas our country needs.” Another industry group told The New York Times that the rules are too strict and could “make exploring in new areas cost-prohibitive.”

A key rule targets one large source of air pollution 2014 the burst of gas released during the first few days after a well is first tapped but before production begins. The EPA requires that companies start using “green completions,” a technology that captures the released gas and fumes in tanks and transports them via pipelines to be sold as fuel. (The Natural Resources Defense Council has a good breakdown of the process).

Many drilling companies already use green-completion systems. One natural-gas company recently told Bloomberg that the system doesn’t cost the company “any more than just venting the gas into the atmosphere.” The EPA says that once companies buy the necessary equipment to separate and collect the released gas, they could actually make up to $19 million a year selling the captured gas.

“By ensuring the capture of gases that were previously released to pollute our air and threaten our climate, these updated standards will not only protect our health, but also lead to more product for fuel suppliers to bring to market,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a statement.

For the next two and a half years, in addition to trapping the gas, companies are allowed to burn off, or “flare,” the excess gas, which reduces air toxins but is wasteful because the gas can’t be resold. Peter Zalzal of the Environmental Defense Fund said the EPA rules give companies an incentive to adopt the green-completion technology instead of flaring.

by Lena Groeger ProPublica, April 19, 2012, 11:09 a.m.

Image Courtesy of   Adrian Kinloch

The article The EPA’s First Fracking Rules 2014 Limited and Delayed appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

April 19: This story has been corrected.

This story was co-published with PBS Frontline.

This is how I — a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics — became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups.

One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course.

After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100 multiple choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets.

As soon as I finished the test, a screen popped up saying that I had passed, earning me an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials.

For another $50, ACFEI mailed me a white lab coat after sending my certificate.

For the last two years, ProPublica and PBS “Frontline,” in concert with other news organizations, have looked in-depth at death investigation in America, finding a pervasive lack of national standards that begins in the autopsy room and ends in court.

Expert witnesses routinely sway trial verdicts with testimony about fingerprints, ballistics, hair and fiber analysis and more, but there are no national standards to measure their competency or ensure that what they say is valid. A landmark 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences called this lack of standards one of the most pressing problems facing the criminal justice system.

Over the last two decades, ACFEI has emerged as one of the largest forensic credentialing organizations in the country.

Among its members are top names in science and law, from Henry Lee, the renowned criminalist, to John Douglas, the former FBI profiler and bestselling author. Dr. Cyril Wecht, a prominent forensic pathologist and frequent TV commentator on high-profile crimes, chairs the group’s executive advisory board.

But ACFEI also has given its stamp of approval to far less celebrated characters. It welcomed Seymour Schlager, whose credentials were mailed to the prison where he was incarcerated for attempted murder. Zoe D. Katz 2013 the name of a house cat enrolled by her owner in 2002 to show how easy it was to become certified by ACFEI — was issued credentials, too. More recently, Dr. Steven Hayne, a Mississippi pathologist whose testimony helped to convict two innocent men of murder, has used his ACFEI credential to bolster his status as an expert witness.

Several former ACFEI employees call the group a mill designed to churn out and sell as many certificates as possible. They say applicants receive cursory, if any, background checks and that virtually everyone passes the group’s certification exams as long as their payments clear.

Some forensic professionals say the organization’s willingness to hand out credentials diminishes the integrity of the field.

“I am insulted by it,” said Dr. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist for Maryland’s chief medical examiner office and the vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. “They seem like an organization that’s all about the money.”

Robert O’Block, ACFEI’s founder, vigilantly defends the group’s work, saying it has helped make forensics more accessible. He told ProPublica and PBS “Frontline” that the ACFEI credentials are not designed to qualify experts in court and emphasized only a judge can make that determination.

O’Block also said he’s been unfairly criticized by other professional groups that compete with ACFEI in certain regards, including the AAFS, Weedn’s group.

“I have been fighting for 20 years for an open educational certification and accreditation in forensic examination,” O’Block wrote in an email. “But they have painted me as the bad guy.”

* * *

The judges who must determine whether to qualify a witness as an expert face an alphabet’s soup of organizations with differing standards. Some, like the American Board of Criminalistics, vet members extensively, requiring them to pass intensive board exams to demonstrate their skills. Others, as noted in the NAS report, are far less stringent.

Experts in the field worry that inconsistent standards and training for forensic examiners can lead to miscarriages of justice 2014 to the guilty walking free and the innocent being locked up or worse.

“There are a lot of people practicing, but there’s no assurance that they have the requisite training and board certification to see if they do have the skills to do the practical [work],” said Dr. Marcella Fierro, one of the NAS report’s authors and the former chief medical examiner of Virginia.

Under state and federal rules of evidence, judges decide whether prospective expert witnesses can testify, but they sometimes rely heavily on the titles and letters around someone’s name.

“Credentials are often appealing shortcuts,” Michigan circuit court judge Donald Shelton said. Fancy titles can have a disproportionate effect on juries, he added. “Jurors have no way of knowing that this certifying body, whether it’s this one or any other one, exacts scientific standards or is just a diploma mill.”

O’Block, 60, founded the organization that grew into ACFEI in Branson, Mo., in 1992, after being rejected for membership by a credentialing organization for forensic handwriting experts.

As chronicled in “United for Truth,” ACFEI’s self-published history, his goal was to create an alternative group open to those with all levels of experience. “It didn’t matter that he, himself, was not then one of the anointed handwriting experts,” the book says, “because he already knew that he was an expert at making things happen.”

O’Block launched his first credentialing programs while teaching criminal justice at the College of the Ozarks. Initially, the fledgling operation offered correspondence certifications in forensic document examination and behavior profiling for $100 apiece.

Over time, the organization expanded its offerings, adding dozens of courses to certify applicants in various aspects of forensics, from counseling to nursing to accounting. Applicants must become members of ACFEI to become certified; on top of my course fee, I paid $165 in membership dues.

O’Block also founded related associations that offer credentials in other fields, including psychotherapy and integrative medicine. One, the American Board for Certification in Homeland Security, attracted a powerful new client: the Defense Department. Since 2008, the U.S. Navy has paid more than $8.5 million for sailors to obtain credentials in such specialties as “Disaster Preparedness” and “Sensitive Security Information” through a program separate from the one for forensics.

Today, there are two entities that go by the ACFEI acronym 2014 the original, which is a non-profit, and a related for-profit company called the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute of Forensic Science. O’Block is president of both and, according to tax filings, received total compensation of more than $430,000 in 2010.

ACFEI and its related entities have continued to expand under O’Block’s leadership, growing to about 20,000 members combined, despite periodic controversies.

In 1998, when ACFEI proposed offering an online doctorate in forensic science, dozens of forensics professionals and educators wrote to the Missouri Board of Higher Education to protest the plan. “The questions are suitable for a grade school child,” wrote one. ACFEI dropped its application.

Then, in 2002, the story broke about the cat. O’Block remains vexed by what he calls a “stunt” orchestrated by a member of a competing professional organization.

“First of all, ACFEI did not certify a cat2026[It] certified a human being who used fraudulent credentials and called himself Dr. Katz,” O’Block wrote in an email.

Since then, O’Block said, ACFEI has changed its verification process, requiring applicants to submit multiple professional references and be placed on provisional status while their application is pending.

Two days after I passed the Certified Forensic Consultant exam, I received an email from ACFEI asking me for additional materials. I emailed the group my references, a resume and a scanned copy of my college diploma. Less than an hour later, I received an email saying I could start using my forensic consultant designation.

None of my references was contacted by the group.

According to a statement provided by ACFEI’s attorney, that step was deemed unnecessary in my case.

“Professional references are requested in the event questions arise concerning an applicant’s eligibility for the credentialing program in which they are applying,” the statement said. “Since applicant clearly met the requirements for the Certified Forensic Consultant program, professional references were not contacted.”

* * *

Among forensic professionals, there continues to be fierce debate over the quality of ACFEI’s courses — and what being certified by the group actually signifies.

ACFEI advertises itself as an educational institution and markets its certificates as building up holders’ value as witnesses in court. Expert witnesses are typically paid for their testimony.

The page on its web site for the certification I obtained 2014 Certified Forensic Consultant 2014 says, “The CFC credential contributes to the weight of an individual’s testimony relating to qualifications, knowledge of the scope of the issues, the validity of the evidence presented, application of specialized knowledge to the facts in the case, and the relevance of the evidence to the issues in the case.”

But both O’Block and Wecht, the group’s official spokesman, stressed that ACFEI certificates alone don’t make you an expert.

“It’s designed to make somebody feel good, to make them feel they’ve accomplished something, and I would hope they have,” Wecht said in an interview. “Does it really qualify them to be the expert in a particular field? No.”

Wecht also dismissed the notion that the group’s use of “college” in its name could be misleading. “That’s a play on words,” he said. “Nobody believes for one moment that it is a real college.”

In an interview and an email, O’Block defended ACFEI’s credentialing programs by saying the group held seven outside “accreditations and approvals.”

But ACFEI is not recognized as an accredited institution of higher learning by Missouri, where it is incorporated, or by the U.S. Department of Education, which maintains a registry of accredited schools.

A number of organizations, such as the California Board of Registered Nursing and the American Psychological Association, recognize ACFEI as a provider of continuing education. But that’s not the same as institution-wide accreditation, said Leroy Wade, the Assistant Commissioner of the Missouri Board of Higher Education.

“There’s really no oversight that regulates the CE providers in general, at least not in this state,” Wade said. “You can’t put any stock in the fact that an organization states it’s a continuing education provider.”

Several former ACFEI staffers say they came to question how the group writes and administers its exams.

John Bridges was hired as ACFEI’s president and chief executive in 2010 after decades in government, most recently as an administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He left ACFEI after just nine months, frustrated, he says, by the group’s practices.

“Based on my perception of what went on related to standards and quality, it operated like a certification mill,” he said.

Though ACFEI offers both basic courses and more advanced, specialized certificates, Bridges said, its exams are designed so that anyone can pass. He put the failure rate at less than 1 percent.

“If you want to be validated by somebody,” Bridges said, “this organization will validate you.”

O’Block initially said that ACFEI did not keep pass/fail rates for its exams. Later, the group’s attorney said it did keep such statistics, but he did not provide them upon request.

Other former employees said it was routine for low-level staffers to write exams for ACFEI and its related organizations based on textbooks in subject areas in which they had no expertise.

Tania Miller worked for six months as chief association officer for the American Psychotherapy Association, an ACFEI sister group, beginning in fall 2010. A few weeks into her job, she said, she was asked to author an exam to certify forensic counselors. Miller’s background was in marketing and graphic design. She said she declined to write the exam. ACFEI did not respond to questions about Miller.

The Forensic Consultant test I took focused primarily on rules of evidence and courtroom procedure. Some questions required specialized knowledge (i.e., Which rule is known as the “Admissibility of Expert Testimony” rule in the Federal Rules of Evidence? Answer: 702), but ACFEI’s study packets helped me fill in the blanks, making it basically an open-book exam. The rest of the questions relied largely on common sense (i.e., When providing testimony, which of the following should you NOT do? Answer: Cross your arms and joke with the jury.)

ACFEI did not answer questions about what level of expertise it requires of those who write its exams. According to its catalog, some of the exams are authored by prominent specialists, including Wecht.

O’Block vehemently denies that ACFEI is a diploma mill, saying the group has thousands of satisfied members. He has filed five lawsuits in the last year against individuals 2014 mostly bloggers 2014 who have posted statements O’Block claims are defamatory about his organizations. One is pending. The others have been dismissed by courts or at the parties’ request after bloggers agreed to take down posts.

Wecht, whose signature appears on some ACFEI certificates (including mine), said he didn’t know how applicants did on the group’s tests, but emphasized that the group’s program is mostly about fostering enthusiasm for the field.

“The purpose of the organization is to encourage people who are interested in forensic science to learn more, to study more,” he said.

* * *

To critics, the greatest concern about ACFEI is the potential that the organization is giving legitimacy to expert witnesses who don’t warrant it.

Among the thousands of people that ACFEI has certified is one particularly controversial expert in forensic pathology: Dr. Steven Hayne.

Hayne, the longtime pathologist for the state of Mississippi, performed the autopsies in two shocking 1990s cases in which three-year-old girls were abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered.

In both cases, Hayne testified he had observed bite marks on the young girls. He said he had called in a forensic dentist who confirmed that the marks were human and matched them to dental impressions from the defendants in each case. These findings aided in the convictions of Levon Brooks for the first murder and of Kennedy Brewer for the second. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison. Brewer was sentenced to death.

After the men spent more than 30 years combined incarcerated, the Innocence Project recovered DNA evidence that led investigators to the real killer. He confessed to both crimes, but denied biting the victims.

Hayne no longer conducts autopsies for the state, but continues to give testimony as an expert witness. Testifying in March 2010 in Lamar County Circuit Court, Hayne was asked what board certifications he held. “I’m board certified in anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, forensic pathology and forensic medicine,” he replied.

Hayne has credentials in anatomic and clinical pathology from the American Board of Pathology, considered the gold standard, but not in forensic pathology, the branch of medicine focused on the mechanics of death. For that, he cites his Certified Forensic Physician credential from ACFEI and certification in forensic pathology from the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic Surgeons.

When attorneys for the Innocence Project submitted a wide-ranging complaint about Hayne to the Mississippi board of licensure, they cited Hayne’s reliance on these organizations to allege he had misrepresented his credentials.

“Certification by these organizations is not at all what the medical community and public understand when a doctor claims to be ‘board certified,’” the complaint said, referring to ACFEI and the other group.

Citing ongoing litigation, Hayne declined to be interviewed by ProPublica and PBS “Frontline” beyond confirming that he is certified by ACFEI. He has sued the Innocence Project for defamation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.

Wecht acknowledged he knew of Hayne by reputation, but told ProPublica and PBS “Frontline” that he had not known Hayne was certified by ACFEI.

* * *

In its 2009 report, the National Academy of Sciences called for several measures to address systemic flaws involving forensic examiners and expert testimony.

Certification should be mandatory for forensics professionals and should be overseen by a centralized credentialing agency, the report said.

One of the report’s primary authors, Harry T. Edwards — a federal appeals court judge for the District of Columbia 2013 said these changes were critical to imposing rigorous standards on the field..

“There are certifiers, but it’s not what you and I are talking about — that is, real certification programs that train, give serious tests and will revoke your license and affect your job and ability to testify in the event that you do something wrong or fail,” Edwards said in an interview. “That doesn’t exist now.”

Despite the controversies that dog it, ACFEI may aspire to fill that role. In a promotional video filmed after the NAS report’s release, Wecht said its findings presented the group with a unique opportunity.

“We can play a role, the challenge has been issued,” he said. “The NAS report can be a blessing to our organization.”

I’ve never tested whether my $495 forensic consultant credential from ACFEI would carry any weight on the witness stand.

Asked about my certification, O’Block responded this way:

“Congratulate Leah for passing the CFC,” he wrote in an August 2011 email. “That course was designed as entry level to educate professionals about the justice system.”

Wecht said he doubted that having the certificate on my resume would be enough to persuade a court to allow me to give expert testimony. Any decent lawyer, he said, could easily cast doubt upon my qualifications.

“A kid right out of law school would say, 2018Ma’am, just exactly what is your training?’” Wecht said. “The point I’m making, you see, is that that piece of paper doesn’t mean that much.”

Leah Bartos graduated from UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in May 2011. Since then, she’s been a reporter-in-residence at the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley.

Andrés Cediel, the producer of PBS Frontline’s “The Real CSI” and Lowell Bergman, the film’s correspondent, contributed to this report.

Update (4/19): ACFEI has posted a response to our collaboration with PBS “Frontline” on its website. It defends the value of the group’s programs and says the pass rate on ACFEI exams is 86 percent.

Correction: This story identified Henry Lee as a pathologist. Lee has a PhD in biochemistry, but is not a medical doctor.

by Leah Bartos, Special to ProPublica April 17, 2012, 11:30 a.m.

The article No Forensic Background? No Problem appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

News organizations cultivate a reputation for demanding transparency, whether by suing for access to government documents, dispatching camera crews to the doorsteps of recalcitrant politicians, or editorializing in favor of open government.

But now many of the country’s biggest media companies, which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations, are flexing their muscle in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending.

The corporate owners or sister companies of some of the biggest names in journalism 2014 NBC News, ABC News, Fox News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and dozens of local TV news outlets 2014 are lobbying against a Federal Communications Commission measure that would require broadcasters to post political ad data on the Internet.

As we have recently detailed, political ad data is public by law but not easy to get because it is kept only in paper files at each station. The FCC has proposed fixing that by requiring broadcasters to post online the details of political ad purchases, including the identity of the buyer and the price.

(ProPublica has been inviting readers and other journalists to send in the files to be posted as part of our Free the Files project.)

Over the past few months, several major media companies have dispatched top executives or outside lobbyists to the FCC to oppose the proposed rule or to push a watered-down version, disclosure filings show. (The FCC will vote on the issue April 27.)

Among them are:

• News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal and Fox News;
• Walt Disney, which owns ABC News and ESPN;
• NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast and includes NBC News;
• Allbritton, which owns several TV stations and Politico;
• Gannett Broadcasting, a division of Gannett, which owns USA Today:
• Post-Newsweek Stations, the broadcast division of The Washington Post Co.;
• Belo Cos., which owns 20 TV stations;
• Cox Media Group, which owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Austin American-Statesman and other newspapers and TV stations;
• Dispatch Broadcast Group, which owns Ohio and Indiana TV stations;
• Barrington Broadcasting Group, which owns several TV stations around the country;
• The E.W. Scripps Co., which owns TV stations and newspapers, including The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.;
• Hearst Television Inc., which owns 29 stations;
• Raycom Media, which owns TV stations;
• Schurz Communications, which owns newspapers and TV stations nationwide.

(ProPublica has published stories in partnership with many of these news organizations, and has an agreement with NBC’s owned and operated TV stations for pre-publication access to our news apps and a contribution by NBC to ProPublica.)

In a speech this week at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski excoriated the broadcasters as working “against transparency and against journalism.”

The industry’s opposition to the transparency proposal has sometimes been heated. In filings submitted to the FCC in January and March, Allbritton Senior Vice President Jerald Fritz raised the specter of “‘Soviet-style standardization” of ad sales if political ad files are required to be put online in a single format.

In a February meeting with the FCC, Walt Disney executives complained about the “logistics and burden” of putting the political ad information online.

That month, executives from Disney, NBC and News Corp. argued in a meeting with FCC officials that posting the political ad data would allow “competitors in the market and commercial advertisers [to] anonymously glean highly sensitive pricing data.”

Television stations must by law offer political candidates the lowest rates on ads. Broadcasters have argued that making this information available online 2014 and not just at stations 2014 would hurt their ability to negotiate with other advertisers.

Advocates for the online disclosure rule have countered that the political ad information is already public by law and the measure would simply make the existing disclosure rules relevant for the Internet age. Advocates have also pointed out that keeping paper files in electronic form should actually be more efficient for stations.

Allbritton, NBC and Walt Disney did not respond to requests for comment on the FCC chairman’s charge that they have positioned themselves “against transparency and against journalism.” News Corp. declined to comment.

Some media companies have also pushed a watered-down proposal to post only some of the public political ad data, and to put it up on individual station websites instead of a central FCC website.

Washington lawyers representing the other companies fighting the rule 2014 Barrington Broadcasting, Belo, Cox, Dispatch, E.W. Scripps, Gannett, Hearst, Meredith Broadcasting, Post-Newsweek Stations, Raycom Media and Schurz Communications 2014 lobbied FCC officials in February, March and again this week.

The group suggested that instead of putting the full, itemized political ad data online, stations would post aggregate data once a week.

“What we were saying is, if you want the public to be informed about what’s being bought at what price, maybe there’s a simpler way to do it,” Mary Jo Manning, an attorney representing the group, told ProPublica. “Transparency is giving people information that is useful.”

But when the FCC pressed the group for details on its plan, the stations said they opposed posting even the aggregate data in a single format prescribed by the FCC. They also opposed posting the data on a central FCC website, saying they wanted to post the limited data only on the stations’ own websites. If enacted, both of those stances would make it more difficult to get and analyze the data.

Since there is a one-week sunshine period ahead of FCC votes, today is the last day that interested parties will be able to lobby the commission before its public meeting April 27.

by Justin Elliott ProPublica, April 20, 2012, 10:50 a.m.

Image Courtesy of    Walter G Arce / Shutterstock.com

The article Meet the Media Companies Lobbying Against Transparency appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

One of the most talked-about “dark money” groups of the election released its tax returns yesterday, showing it raised almost $77 million from fewer than 100 donors over 19 months. Most of the money spent in its first year went directly to political ads or grants to other groups.

The returns are the first glimpse showing how much money has been raised by Crossroads GPS, launched by GOP strategist Karl Rove in mid-2010.

(Here are the full returns, for both 2010 and 2011. We’ve marked interesting bits. If you spot something we haven’t, let us know.)

By choosing to include the number of donors and the amounts of some of its larger donations, including one of $10.1 million in the first year and another of $10.1 million in the last seven months of 2011, the group was somewhat more transparent than the IRS requires.

Still, Crossroads GPS, also known as Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, retained plenty of mystery 2014 namely, their donors’ identities.

There are no donor names, no clues as to whether they are individuals, companies or trade groups, and no hint as to whether there are repeated donors from year to year.

Nonprofits like Crossroads GPS, classified by the IRS as “social welfare” organizations, are not required to disclose their donors, even if those organizations spend money on political ads. That is why they are sometimes referred to as “dark money” groups.

Yesterday, two campaign-finance watchdog groups again called for the IRS to investigate the tax status of Crossroads GPS. Critics have complained that the group and others like it use the IRS social-welfare status as a fig leaf to be able to hide the names of donors. The IRS says a social-welfare nonprofit, or 501(c)4, must have social welfare as a “primary purpose” but has never defined what that means. Most groups interpret this to mean social-welfare nonprofits can spend up to 49 percent of their money on politics.

Crossroads GPS spokesman Jonathan Collegio responded to critics by sending an email message with the subject line “Snarky comments” that pointed out that some of the group’s critics are nonprofits that also don’t disclose their donors. In another email, he compared what the group does to how environmental and labor groups have operated for decades.

Although similar nonprofits engaged in politics in past elections, their use exploded in 2010, particularly in tandem with super PACs, taking advantage of federal court rulings that paved the way for a new role for outside-spending groups in elections.

The IRS doesn’t comment on individual groups but is expected to give more scrutiny to politicking social-welfare nonprofits this year, considering the major role the groups are expected to play in the election. Together with its affiliated super PAC, American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS hopes to raise $300 million, primarily to help defeat President Barack Obama and to elect Republicans to Congress.

Crossroads GPS reported 64 donors in its first year, between June 2010 and May 2011, including four who gave $10.1 million, $5 million, $4.5 million and $4 million. There were 32 donors in the last seven months of 2011, including two who gave $10 million and $4.3 million. It’s unknown whether any of them were repeat donors.

Between June 2010 and May 2011, Crossroads GPS spent about $42.3 million, including about $15.9 million directly for political ads and another $15.9 million on grants to 12 like-minded nonprofits and trade groups.

The $15.9 million that Crossroads GPS gave in grants coincided with the midterm 2010 elections. The money included $500,000 to the American Action Network, the conservative nonprofit that once shared an office with Crossroads GPS and American Crossroads, and $4 million to Americans for Tax Reform, formed by anti-tax activist and GOP heavy hitter Grover Norquist.

Federal Election Commission records show that these groups, as well as five other grant recipients of Crossroads GPS, spent money on political ads, directly or indirectly, in the 2010 election cycle. The grant money that groups received from Crossroads was earmarked for non-political activities.

In its 2011 filing, which covers the last seven months of the year, Crossroads GPS reported spending almost $22.4 million, including $1.7 million on political ads, including this anti-Obama ad. It gave only one grant, of $50,000, to a charity called the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The organization describes itself as “D.C.’s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.”

by Kim Barker ProPublica, April 18, 2012, 6 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Sachyn

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