The Medill School of Journalism's Washington Program, which I co-direct, has taken on ambitious investigative projects for years, but the
Pentagon Travel project unveiled Wednesday reflects how our new curriculum's focus on telling stories across platforms helps shape work with data.
Medill, with the help of adjunct lecturer Stephen Henn, acquired a decade's worth of records listing trips Pentagon employees took that were paid by private interests. To make the information available to the public, we partnered with the
Center for Public Integrity and created a searchable database.
The database, which was released Wednesday along with
a 10-part Medill series of stories with interactive graphics, audio and photos, gave students an opportunity to learn how to create databases, analyze information through computer-assisted reporting and tackle a difficult, complex subject that little is known about, even among U.S. Department of Defense officials.
"Students in fall and spring quarters tackled the tough job of talking to Pentagon employees and private interests about a practice that is allowed under Pentagon rules, but has not seen the light of day until now," said Professor Ellen Shearer, the director of Medill in D.C.
The analysis found that Pentagon officials took about 22,000 private interest sponsored trips between 1998 and 2007 at an estimated cost of $26 million.
Even before the database was publicly released, Medill reporters checked on
a former Army surgeon accused of falsifying research in favor of medical technology giant Medtronic Inc., which
The New York Times wrote about in May. The reporters found he had taken 16 trips costing nearly $14,000. Medtronic paid for all of the trips while he was on active duty between 2003 and 2006.
Here are some additional highlights related to the project and the database, which is intended for journalists and citizens to use:
- As 2008 Medill graduate Sara Sargent reported in a story for the project, the list of companies funding these military trips has a common theme -- big pharmaceuticals, including names such as Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson, Inc. The data revealed that the medical industry represented at least 40 percent of the 22,000 Department of Defense trips. The trips cost more than $26 million and were sponsored by foreign countries, nonprofits and private industries.
- 2008 graduate Frank Carlson, who now works at PBS' "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," said: "Very often in computer-assisted reporting classes, teachers substitute arbitrary or invented metrics for real world scenarios. In our case, however, we had access to original data nobody else had seen, so this meant there was the potential we'd find irregularities that mattered, not just in an academic sense but in the world of consequences. The playing field was open, and we were basically free to pursue whatever ideas we thought would prove fruitful and could justify to our editors."
Carlson added that when sifting through piles of paperwork that have never been organized in this way, the groundbreaking discovery didn't jump out at them. "But this illustrates an important point: while journalists often search for conflict, the reality is that much of investigative journalism is crunching numbers, looking for clues, double checking your numbers and then realizing all of that may ultimately lead nowhere. That doesn't invalidate the process, it only shows why it can be such an expensive venture and why honing these skills through application is so important," Carlson said.
- Carlson and 2008 graduate Rob Runyan wrote a story revealing that the military took about 1,500 trips paid for by foreign countries during a 10-year period that ended in October 2007. The trips, which cost foreign governments more than $2.6 million, vary from a $200 trip to Mexico to an eight-day, $15,000 tour of Southeast Asia that Adm. Michael Mullen and six of his staff took. Mullen, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore as part of what's called a counterpart visit.
While it's important to note that students found most trips were within the bounds of federal law, the law also stipulates that payment is not permitted for travel that is "essential or required to carry out an agency's statutory and regulatory functions."
How that distinction is made is unclear when it comes to trips that top officers take to countries around the world, many of which are of strategic interest to the U.S.
Matt Mansfield is an associate professor for Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and the co-director of its Washington program. I've added Matt's tagline, which he requested we do before...
