Center for Public Integrity Wins Polk Award

Long Island University has named the Center for Public Integrity winner of the first George Polk Award for Internet Reporting for Windfalls of War, a six-month excavation of American postwar contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The Polk awards are among the top prizes in American journalism, named for a CBS slain in the line of duty.)

The Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit, non-partisan institute dedicated to investigative reporting, filed 73 Freedom of Information Act requests in pursuit of its study and put a staff of 20 to work on the project. It's not over yet: Charles Lewis, executive director, said the center is still in federal court suing the State Department and the Army Corps of Engineers. Among the "Windfalls" findings:

• More than 70 American companies and individuals had won up to $8 billion in federal contracts
• Those companies had donated over $500,000 to the Bush presidential campaign, more than they gave to any other politician over the last dozen years
• Nearly every one of the 10 largest contracts went to companies employing former high-ranking government officials or individuals with close ties to those agencies or Congress.
  

The Online Journalism Review has an interview with Lewis, including much more about the Center's history and projects. See the Center's own site, publicintegrity.org, for the latest news and its book-length reports, including Lewis's The Buying of the President 2004, already looking at Sen. John Kerry's financial contributors.

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