Keynote: Roberta Baskin, Executive Director, Center for Public Integrity

Event summaries from Globalization Week Spring 2005

Date: Wednesday, April 6th
Time: 7:00pm-9:00 pm
Location: Lindner Commons, 6th Floor, Elliott School of International Affairs, 1957 E St NW

Ms. Baskin was Globalization Week 2005's Keynote Speaker. She presented a riveting discussion of investigative journalism and its sometimes troubling relationship with corporate-owned media outlets.

Roberta Baskin has a long and illustrious career as an investigative journalist. Her reporting has led to public awareness about certain issues, Congressional hearings, and sometimes changes in regulations and laws. She has testified before Congress six times regarding her reports. For example, when drug testing began to become popular, there were six major companies that were responsible for the majority of the lab testing. Ms. Baskin decided to test their accuracy and sent urine samples to each company. The results indicated a 60% error rate. This story led to Congressional hearings and eventually new certification requirements for drug testing laboratories. Similarly, the EPA had reported a zero risk of radon in homes in the Washington, DC area. Ms. Baskin found a radon testing company in California to run tests to verify this statement. Far from zero risk, the results showed that over 30% of homes had elevated levels of radon, and some had extremely unhealthy levels. This story also led her to testify before Congress.

Ms. Baskin worked for CBS for eight years as an investigative journalist for the primetime news. She had a personal goal to write one international story per year, but at the time, CBS was in the process of closing many of its international bureaus. As she explained, the attitude was "nobody cares about the rest of the world, you should do stories about America." However, Ms. Baskin believes that the closing of the international bureaus is weakening international reporting. International bureaus staffed reporters with knowledge of the region, language skills and contacts, but now when reporters are deployed to a country to cover a story, they are often without these important attributes.

Nevertheless, she was able to do the international stories, accomplishing her goal of one per year. She had heard that German brewing companies were having a problem with nitrosamines, a known carcinogen, in beer. She decided to find out whether American beer companies were suffering from a similar problem. These companies systematically denied the problem and claimed ignorance in how to remove the nitrosamines. Her report made the public aware of the problem and led to FDA rules regarding nitrosamines in beer. Another time, Ms. Baskin had discovered that the soccer balls sold in the US came from a small village in Pakistan and were primarily sewn by children. Struck by the dichotomy of American children who were using the balls for recreation and the Pakistani children who were kept from school to be workers, Ms. Baskin decided to investigate. She faced a lot of resistance and denial from the factory owner in Pakistan, but after confronted with the evidence, the owner said regarding child labor, "If it happens, it happens beyond our face." Ms. Baskin sees her job as bringing issues to the front of one's face. This report led to an international outrage and a campaign called "Fair Ball." This campaign sought fair working conditions and an end to child labor, and led to soccer balls being one of the first truly fair-trade products.

The story that eventually led to Ms. Baskin's resignation from CBS involved her research of abuse of women workers in Nike factories in Vietnam. She found that women were not getting paid the minimum wage, which in Vietnam is $40/month for a 6-day work week. As she explained, they are getting exploited but we are being exploited, too, by having to pay over $100 for a pair of Nike shoes. She also uncovered abuse of the women in the Nike factories and heard their personal stories. However, she had an extremely difficult time convincing CBS executives that this was a story worth airing. She was eventually able to successfully argue that a US company that exploits its employees is indeed news-worthy to American audiences. Indeed, as soon as the story aired, it immediately ignited a Nike boycott and anti-sweatshop movement across college campuses. She was then supposed to update this story in July. But the update was never aired because in the meantime, Nike and CBS had struck a deal regarding the upcoming Nagano Olympics. The story regarding abuse in the Nike factories in Vietnam was axed and CBS reporters were seen on-air wearing blue Nike jackets. Ms. Baskin was horrified by this because she felt that putting journalists in a corporate logo violated CBS news policy but also undermined journalistic integrity. She wrote a letter to CBS executives decrying this partnership, but in return she was demoted and removed from primetime news. Eventually she left CBS entirely.

Today, several years later, Roberta Baskin is the newly appointed Executive Director of the Center for Public Integrity. Her attraction to the center is the way in which its employees describe their love for the one place where they are able to work on long-form, hard-hitting, serious, time-consuming projects that would be canned at most other media outlets. Investigative reporting is the most expensive kind of reporting that the media does. It is often the first budget item cut from a media source. The Center for Public Integrity does the work for local media outlets that can no longer afford their own investigative journalists. The Center has just released a database that will inform the public all about lobbying, which in some ways is the most powerful part of government because it works in the shadows without much transparency. This database, therefore, will be an important tool for the public to learn about which companies are lobbying, how much money is being given, and to whom is it going. The Center also oversees the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a group of 92 award-winning journalists around the world who collaborate on investigative reports.

Ms. Baskin's discussion of her career highlights fascinated and inspired the audience who stayed long after to ask her questions.

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