Untitled Document
Fascinated by the arcane world of federal farm
subsidies? Want to know who’s getting what from the good ol’
U.S. Department of Agriculture?
Here’s the good news: You don’t have to
be a fast-moving investigative reporter or an Ivy League grad to get the
scoop.
The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit
pro-environment, anti-subsidy group based in Washington, D.C., has put
together an extensive database, available on the Web at farm.ewg.org/farm,
that lets users track the top recipients of farm subsidies from 1995
through 2005.
Culled from USDA records, the database is
an
easy-to-use source of information. The latest database was posted on June
12. Media organizations have leaned on the EWG’s
research for more than a decade now, and most, like the Associated Press,
credit the group, a leading critic of farm-subsidies programs, for the
information. Not the State-Journal
Register, though: The Springfield
daily’s recent two-part look at subsidy programs said that it got its
information from “federal databases,” “federal
records,” and “government databases,” but the data it
presented — including the names of corporate recipients of subsidies
— matched EWG’s. E-mails to the SJ-R, asking which government databases it relied on for its
stories, went unreturned.
Donald Carr, press secretary for the EWG, says that
the group asks news organizations that use its data to give it credit.
THIS CORRECTION WAS PUBLISHED ON AUG. 9
Our story telling readers how they can use the Environmental Working Group’s online database on federal farm subsidies drew a protest from Barry Locher, editor of the State Journal-Register. Locher says that we accused his newspaper of relying on, but
not crediting, the EWG as a source of information for its recent two-part series on farm subsidies. In its reports, the SJ-R said that it relied on “federal databases,” “federal records,” and “government databases.” Our story [“True grit,” Aug. 2] said that the information the SJ-R used “matched” the EWG’s, which, for some readers, implied that this was its
source. We regret the implication. Our story also said that the SJ-R did not respond to e-mails from our reporter asking which government databases it relied on for its stories. Those e-mails from Illinois Times
did not say that we were seeking comment for
publication, nor did they correctly identify the intent of the query. We regret this journalistic lapse.
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2007.
