|
Investigating
Religion: From Finances to Faith-based Organizations
By Don Lattin
No hands were raised when
the computer teacher asked his class of
religion reporters “how many of you got
into journalism to do math?”
“Didn’t think so,” said
David Donald, a training director at the
National Institute for Computer-Assisted
Reporting. “Math is not exactly our strong
suit.”
Donald was addressing twenty
religion writers gathered for a two-day
training session titled “From Finances to
Faith-based Organizations.” It was sponsored
by the Center for Religion, the Professions
& the Public and run by the Investigative
Reporters and Editors, Inc., a professional
organization known in the news business
as IRE.
The September 6-7 seminar,
held in Salt Lake City at the annual meeting
of the Religion Newswriters Association,
offered mathematically challenged journalists
some quality time with Excel and Access,
two Microsoft programs used by many investigative
reporters.
According to Donald, a
basic familiarity with Excel, a computerized
spreadsheet, and Access, a data base manager,
“should be a skill required of all reporters
on every beat.”
“No one gets a pass,” he
said. “Like it or not, we are awash in numbers
these days.”
Excel can be a useful tool
for analyzing budgets – whether you’re investigating
a local church or the federal government.
To prove his point, Donald surfed the Web
and pulled up a church budget that All Souls
Episcopal Parish had innocently posted on
the Internet.
Budget stories are often
about finding the winners and losers of
the latest fiscal year. Excel made it easy
to see the percentage change for the various
church programs at the Episcopal parish
used in Donald’s PowerPoint demonstration.
Donald -- a former high
school teacher, college instructor and reporter
at the Savannah Morning News in Georgia
-- paced back and forth as he lectured to
20 reporters seated behind IRE-supplied
laptops.
“Who are they taking money
away from and where is it going?” Donald
asked.
“Parish life has been slashed.
Spending on personnel is down nine percent.
They are spending 22 percent more on worship
activities. What does all that mean? I
don’t know. It’s just a tip. Now you have
to go and find out.”
Donald said the No. 1 Rule
in working with budgets or other data is
to never assume the numbers you’re given
are correct.
When it comes to budget
stories, Donald said, too many journalists
rely on the press releases and the spending
summaries put out by the organization they’re
writing about. It’s easy for organizational
spin-meisters to manipulate numbers with
little tricks like using an average instead
of a median when describing changes in spending
patterns.
“You need to know how their
flak (public information officer) arrived
at a number,” he said. “You accept their
math at your own risk. Look for internal
consistencies in the data. Don’t assume
numbers are hard cold facts. Numbers can
be very squishy. You can let them spin the
story or you can do the work yourself by
doing a little analysis.’’
Again, he used the randomly
selected budget from All Souls Parish to
make his point.
By using Excel to check
the calculations on the church spread sheet,
Donald discovered that the parish spent
nearly $10,000 more than they claimed in
their budget totals. And that was the difference
between a balanced budget and church operating
in the red.
Were the folks at All Souls
fudging their numbers? It certainly looked
like it.
“You’ve got to do this.
You’ve got to check their math,” Donald
said. “Don’t assume they have a expert so
they must know what they are doing.”
Of course, the miscalculation
could have been an innocent mistake. In
this case, however, it didn’t look it because
Excel revealed that whoever prepared the
budget summary didn’t actually add up one
key column of numbers. He or she just simply
inserted a “total spending” number that
was close enough to the “total revenue”
figure to make the budget look balanced.
But before heading over
to the parish for an interview with the
rector or finance director, the inquiring
reporter should take a copy of her analysis
and their original spreadsheet. That’s the
No. 2 Rule of journalistic number crunching
– never work off the original spreadsheet.
“If you are going to accuse
them of something based on the data, the
first thing they will say is, ‘You changed
the data.’ The second thing they will say
is, ‘You are a reporter. You don’t know
how to do that analysis. You’re a reporter.
You can’t do math.’ Then you say, ‘Yes I
can. Here it is. Show me what’s wrong with
my analysis.’ ”
Number crunching is not
the reason most journalists – especially
religion writers – choose their vocation.
They want to tell human stories. At the
same time, all good journalism is investigative
journalism. And while religion reporters
may cover the “faith-based” world, that
is not an excuse to ignore that fact that
there are facts that are important when
writing about faith.
“Our mantra at IRE,” Donald
said, “is to have ‘a document frame of mind.’
The document doesn’t change its mind or
change its story like human sources. Documents
won’t claim ‘I never said that.’ ”
At the same time, dealing
with documents and voluminous data can
be an intimating process. That’s where
budding Woodwards and Bernsteins need to
call up Microsoft Access.
“You need to choose the
right tool for the job,” Donald said. “Spreadsheets
like Excel are glorified calculators,” he
explained. “Data base managers are glorified
filing cabinets. But they are great retrieval
systems.”
Reporters certainly do
need a good retrieval system when trying
to make use of the mind-boggling amount
of data now available on the Internet.
Some Web sites with large
data bases and other resources for religion
writers include:
Data base managers really
come in handy when mining for nuggets of
information posted on the massive government
Web sites operated by agencies like the
Internal Revenue Service (www.irs.gov),
the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov),
or watchdog groups dedicated to financial
accountability in the non-profit world.
They include:
In addition, Investigative
Reporters and Editors, Inc. and the National
Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting
has put together a wide variety of user-friendly
data bases, including:
-
Consolidated
Federal Funds Reports: A database
of all federal money that goes to states,
counties and local agencies, including
Social Security payments, grants and
direct loans.
-
-
Federal
Grants/FAADS: The Federal Award
Assistance Data System, maintained by
the Census Bureau, includes all federal
financial assistance award transactions.
-
Federal
Audit Clearinghouse: The Single
Audit database is a great tool for journalists
to examine local non-profits and state
or local government agencies that receive
substantial assistance from the federal
government.
They can be accessed for
a small fee at http://www.ire.org/datalibrary/databases/databases.php
All nonprofit organizations
seeking nonprofit status must file a document
with the IRS. Those filing can all be found
on line, but they may or may not contain
much useful information.
Churches are exempt from
filing tax returns with the IRS, but many
church-affiliated agencies and other charitable
operations are required to file an IRS 990
form. They are required to make them available
to anyone who visits their offices, but
they can also be accessed on the Internet.
Reporters can also go directly
to the IRS site and use a data base manager
like Microsoft Access can instantly filter
through millions of records and narrow your
search down to a particular agency or all
nonprofit charities operating in a particular
city.
So what kind of stories
can these investigative tools produce? Here
are some examples cited in Donald’s presentation:
Carolyn Tuft of the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch used the Missouri
Open Records law to obtain documents showing
that TV evangelists Joyce Meyer and her
family “have received millions in salary
and benefits from her worldwide ministry
in recent years.” The details were included
in a property tax dispute involving the
tax status of the ministry’s headquarters.
Linda Stewart Ball and
Paula Lavigne of the Dallas Morning News
used migration data and parish records to
find that in the last ten years, a 50-year
trend has been reversed. In 1952, 60 percent
of Collin County’s religious followers were
Baptists, and Catholics were almost statistically
extinct. During the 1990s, Catholicism became
the largest faith in the county, with 34
percent by 2000. Church records showed that
most of the newcomers are not of Hispanic
descent. “They’re all Yankees,” said one
priest.
Don Lattin of the San
Francisco Chronicle used tax and property
records to show that a Southern California
charity called the Family Care Foundation
has “deep, ongoing ties” with Family International,
an evangelical Christian sex cult formerly
known as the Children of God. Foundation
directors were linked to the Family via
property records, Internet domains and other
ties.
David Kaplan of U.S.
News and World Report detailed how the
White House is implementing a secret policy
to fund Islamic schools, mosques, think
tanks and media around the world.
Matt Canham of the Salt
Lake Tribune used documents obtained
through a public records request to show
that the Mormon share of Utah’s population
hit is lowest level (62.4 percent) since
the Church of Jesus Christi of Latter-day
Saints started keeping membership numbers.
Of course, not all the
documents reporters need can be found on
the Internet or through official government
requests. That’s where the human reporting
skills enter the investigation.
“It’s important that the
get to know the people who can give you
documents, who can leak stuff to you,” Donald
said. “They tend not to be the people at
the lowest level or at the top of an organization.
They are people in the middle level who
very much believe in the mission of the
organization. They take their work very
seriously and don’t like bishops or priests
abusing power anymore than we do.”
Source cultivation is important
work on any beat.
“It’s great when they just
call you with it tip, but you can also get
to know them. Let them get to see you as
a person. This works better face to face
than on the telephon..
“You are a reporter and
your job is to ask them questions. Let your
personality or your persona come out,” Donald
added. “If you don’t have a personality,
make up one. Create a persona that seems
to work for you, but make it as real as
you can.”
At least one religion writer
at the Salt Lake conference came away from
different understanding of her craft.
“It gave me a fresh and
more critical attitude towards covering
the beat,” said Jenny Green of the Ottawa
Citizen. “Religion stories encourage
us to be a little nicer than we might usually
be to, say, politicians or cops, where our
stance is adversarial. This reminded me
that we are reporters, not theological apologists."
|
