Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil just guts a Center for Public Integrity report card on state corruption. It found that New Jersey was the least corrupt state in the country—a result that should have flagged to CPI that something had gone awry with their survey.
That flagged it for Weil, at least, who looked into the methodology CPI employed:
For example, O’Dea gave New Jersey a top score of 100 percent when asked to evaluate this statement: “In practice, the state-run pension funds disclose information about their investment and financial activity in a transparent manner.”
How did she decide that? The questionnaire said to give a high score if such information was available online at little or no cost. Her notes, posted on the center’s website, say she asked someone at the New Jersey State League of Municipalities about this. “Very transparent,” her notes said. The center gave the state an “A” in the category of “state pension-fund management,” based partly on O’Dea’s answer to that question.
Now consider that, in August 2010, New Jersey became the only state ever sued for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC said the state for years lied to municipal- bond investors about the underfunded condition of its two largest pension plans.
Ouch.
(UPDATE: CPI’s executive director seriously disagrees. See his comments below)
— Mother Jones has a good video report on the prospects for algae as a clean, renewable fuel—something that Republican candidates are mocking the president for supporting:
How could the slimy green muck that grows in your aquarium and washes up on the beach be a future cornerstone of American energy independence? So when President Obama stood before the University of Miami recently and said algae could provide up to 17 percent of our transportation fuel, we wanted to know: Is he right?
— Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism writes about Paul Starobin’s report in the current issue of CJR on business journalists taking Wall Street speaking fees:
We are much easier to manipulate than we want to believe. Social psychologist Robert Cialdini, in his classic book: Influence: The Art of Persuasion, reported that people who received a gift as minor as a can of soda were more receptive to a sales pitch. There’s a reason drug companies would give doctors pens, note pads, and desk toys.
And journalists have a much more basic problem. Most financial reporters spend a lot of time with senior people in the industry. Big firms already can sway coverage by playing the access journalism game and by artful packaging that seeks to frame the debate (or if you are Jamie Dimon, you just go on loudly and confidently about things that aren’t true). And a few notable exceptions, like Larry Summers, people in positions of influence are usually pretty smart and persuasive. I wrote after my visits to the Treasury that it took a day of two to detox. Journalists are in this every day. It’s not hard to see that even ones who are well intentioned are likely to have the relentless barrage of propaganda influence their thinking (although there are quite a few writers that readers can easily name whose pretenses of objectivity is pretty thin).
— Here’s some fun color from a Wall Street Journal on the tallest apartment complex in the Western Hemisphere, newly opened in Lower Manhattan.
Some of the apartments will rent for $60,000 a month:
Above the 52nd floor at New York by Gehry, 50% of tenants earn more than $500,000 a year and 20% earn more than $1 million, Mr. Finn said. The concierge has entertained—and fulfilled—requests for everything from hiring Cirque du Soleil performers for a private dinner party to chartering a private plane for a lobster-tasting.
Read this smart Chrystia Freeland piece over at Reuters on how inequality spurs trickle-down consumption, and features this quote:
“The past 40 years have been the best 40 years for rich people in the history of rich people,’’ Kraus said. ‘‘There is a recognition that we’ve had a pretty good run and now something has got to be done.’’
I write in response to a sadly misinformed piece by Jonathan Weil attacking the State Integrity Investigation, which CJR has endorsed with no journalistic due diligence of its own. Let me be clear at the outset: The Center for Public Integrity and its partners Public Radio International and Global Integrity stand fully behind this report – and our surprising findings about New Jersey and the other 49 states. (www.stateintegrity.org )
Yes, New Jersey has a history of corruption, and, yes, it still has problems. But at the state level it now has some of the better laws in the nation on transparency and accountability. That is good news. Following the troubled administration of Gov. Jim McGreevey, New Jersey instituted a number of reforms: a major overhaul of ethics rules, new powers for the ethics commission and tough new regulations on procurement. New Jersey also boasts of extensive financial disclosure requirements for the governor.
Yes, it is counter-intuitive that New Jersey topped our ranking as the most transparent and accountable state in the country. Many media outlets have incorrectly interpreted this fact by asserting that the land of the Sopranos is the least corrupt. The State Integrity Investigation is not about corruption past, but a very deep look into the structures in place to mitigate corruption in the future. As it turns out, several states with histories of corruption scored higher on our ranking precisely because they have passed ethics laws with better transparency and accountability than many states that have no such laws on the books.
Mr. Weil misses this point entirely in his critique. He takes issue with three responses out of 330 integrity indicators for New Jersey and uses this to call into question an entire 50-state investigation with 16,500 data points. Such a critique is not serious and is journalistically irresponsible. For CJR to sign on without even checking with us or anyone else, is also journalistically irresponsible—if CJR is going to be a credible media reviewer, perhaps it should practice what it advocates for others—be fair, always ask for a response.
The truth about New Jersey is much more nuanced. We did not exonerate the state by any means. It earned a grade of B+. (http://www.stateintegrity.org/newjersey_story_subpage ) Much remains to be done to protect the public interest there, including improved criteria for selecting state judges, better asset disclosure statements by the judiciary, and improved public access to information on the financing of state candidates and parties. No state in our careful study got an “A” grade. Georgia got an ‘F” grade at number 50, along with six other states that failed (South Dakota, Wyoming, Virginia, Maine, South Carolina, North Dakota and Michigan).
It is critically important to understand that the investigation looked only at state-level government – not counties and cities. Mr. Weil missed this point as well. He also takes exception to the State Integrity Investigation’s methodology without ever understanding it. The survey was designed by our partner Global Integrity, which has honed its analysis of government transparency through investigations of more than 120 countries around the world during the past 10 years.
We hired reporters in every state to dig out our facts, then we had their reporting scrubbed by independent peer reviewers in each state. Weil conveniently fails to mention any of this. For example, the peer reviewer for New Jersey was Frank Scandale, former editor of The Record (Bergen County).
Our New Jersey reporter, Colleen O’Dea, is a veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering New Jersey and its politics. She conducted 26 interviews for the investigation in addition to researching more than 100 hard document sources (news clips, laws, statutes). We make all of our state information and peer reviews public on the website at
#1 Posted by Bill Buzenberg, CJR on Tue 27 Mar 2012 at 05:41 PM
(this comment is continued from #1)
...www.stateintegrity.org.
Mr. Weil seems particularly troubled by the 2010 SEC settlement with New Jersey over state pension funds. State Treasury officials confirmed to O’Dea that there had been problems during a past administration but the state had stopped using the problematic accounting method in 2007. The investigation is a snapshot of laws and practices as of September, 2011 – not based on past wrongdoings if they’ve since been fixed. Additionally, that snapshot showed that the Garden State is among the nation’s leaders in the transparency of its state pension fund investments.
Finally, Weil questions reporter O’Dea’s use of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities as a source. He appears to think this is a government agency. It is not. It’s an association of municipalities and lobbyists that have a stake in making sure the pension system is transparent since they have to pay into it for their members.
Our report is factual, thorough and accurate—I only wish columnists subscribed to the same degree of thoroughness and accuracy instead of shooting from the hip in self-confirmation of their own deeply held opinions. And, wouldn’t it be nice if a journalism review magazine would sometimes pick up the phone, send out an email, ask for a response and consider that maybe there is more to the story than you realized.
William E. Buzenberg
Executive Director
Center for Public Integrity
#2 Posted by Bill Buzenberg, CJR on Tue 27 Mar 2012 at 05:46 PM
Bill,
I'm sorry to disagree with you here. I think Weil was well within his rights as an opinion columnist on this one. You may not like how or what he thinks about your methodology or how he characterizes it, but I don't see that he's misrepresenting anything, much less incorrect about it. He raises reasonable (though arguable) points like how it makes sense to give a 100 percent transparency rating despite a recent mutual-fund scandal. You can say but that was outside our methodology, but his larger point is that it doesn't make sense to measure corruption risk without accounting for the current and historic level of corruption--and that that methodology undermines the report.
And while there's no hard and fast rule in criticism, I think it's fair for me to quote a piece and briefly summarize it without calling the organization it criticizes for comment.
#3 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Wed 28 Mar 2012 at 07:02 PM