Search results for "FOI" ...
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Stakes High in state FOI Supreme Court case
Charles Davis explains what's at stake in the McBurney v. Young case.
Tags: None
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Big business, big influence
Davis discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in Citizens United. He says FOI advocates need to "demand more information" on the ways that "corporations exercise undue influence."
Tags: FOI; Citizens United; Supreme Court; campaign donations; lobbying
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Use it or lose it
Davis questions whether or not FOI advocacy is being affected by "shrinking newsroom budgets." According to recent survey results, FOI work is slowing and requests are diminishing. Unfortunately, the main reason given for the cutbacks is simply that "media and newspapers have no money for this."
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Sky-High Costs
Through the use of numerous FOI requests, Pfeiffer discovered that the alarmingly high cost of caring for mentally disabled residents in New York was actually "three to four times the actual cost of care." She also revealed that many patients were still living in "high-cost institutions," and that their release was being unnecessarily delayed. Pfeiffer also revealed that there where no audits or federal inspections of the institutions, which leads to an obvious "lack of oversight"
Tags: FOIA; Medicaid; health care; National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services; Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Medicare; New York; mentally disabled; CMS
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Medical Teamwork
David McCumber was part of a Hearst Corp. project that "documented the enormous national toll of death and injury from preventable medical errors." It was also revealed that hospitals report a very small number of their mistakes. Some other key findings in the Hearst project included the staggering statistic that 200,000 Americans die from "preventable medical mistakes" each year and that 20 states "have no medical error reporting at all."
Tags: hospitals; medical care; Patient Safety Organizations; FOI
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Hiden trauma
Thanks to FOI laws, requests by Andrew McIntosh of The Sacramento Bee allowed him to be able to report several flaws in the California EMT system. Some paramedics forged their EMT certification exams, while others show up to work high on drugs or alcohol. The paramedics often were not punished, or they served extremely shortened sentences.
Tags: EMT; Riggs Ambulance Service; paramedics; FOI; California
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FOI Files: Creative, Effective Requests
Davis reflects on the year in FOIA, as many of the big stories would not have been possible without the use of the freedom of information laws. From obtaining the emails of Missouri Governor Matt Blunt to the classification of nonviolent activists as terrorists, FOI laws helped reporters reveal these stories to the public.
Tags: FOIA; Maryland State Police; The Washington Post; Atlanta Journal-Constitution; The Kansas City Star; St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Newsday; school lunches
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Disparity of Repair: Race gap found in pothole patching
These three journalists from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel describe how they were able to do the story on Milwaukee's potholes because of existing city databases. They explore the challenge of working with such data. They discuss how the story began, and how the original thread lead to questions about the disparity in some repair times. They detail how they analyzed and mapped the data.
Tags: potholes; data analysis; city databases; public databases; FOIA requests; FOI; freedom of information; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; watchdog reporting; ArcView; Microsoft Access; Microsoft Excel; SPSS; regression analysis; Department of Public Works
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Documenting the Mayor's Office: Years of requests pay off
Persistent public records requests kept Detroit Free Press reporters on top of the stories coming out of the Mayor's office, even after the Mayor stopped returning calls. Elrick and Schaefer discuss the records they obtained, and how they informed the stories. They discuss the benefits of cross-referencing new documents with older records already obtained and analyzed.
Tags: public records; FOI; Michigan's Freedom of Information Act; Detroit Free Press; sunshine laws; Kwame Kilpatrick; Excel spreadsheets; document management
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Scandalous Text: Reporters kept digging for documents as rumors flew
Schaefer and Elrick discuss their investigation into Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. The Free Press obtained transcripts of text messages exchanged between Kilpatrick and his then chief-of-staff Christine Beatty. The two had lied under oath about the nature of their relationship, and gave misleading testimony about a deputy police chief. Schaefer and Elrick discuss the unique nature of this investigation and the challenges they faced exposing the cover-up.
Tags: perjury; Kwame Kilpatrick; Detroit Free Press; text messages; obstruction of justice; FOI; freedom of information; Michigan Freedom of Information Act; documents;