What is the Center for Public Integrity?

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism. The Center is not an advocacy group. It is committed to comprehensive reporting on significant public issues to make institutional power more transparent and accountable, both in the United States and around the world. See our mission statement.

What is “Well Connected”?

“Well Connected” is the Center’s telecommunications and media project. The goal of the project is to provide the most comprehensive reporting possible on the business and legislative influences behind our nation's information networks. Among the topics of interest to the project include “Net neutrality,” media ownership, Hollywood’s anti-piracy “broadcast flag,” and telephone access charges set by state public utility commissions.

Center staff seek to accomplish the project’s mission by:

• Providing research resources for journalists, policy-makers, academics and the public.
• Educating journalists, policy-makers academics and the public to help them better understand pressing issues.
• Producing quality investigative reports.

The “Well Connected” project was officially launched on May 22, 2003, and has produced more than 30 reports and articles, including its cornerstone Media Tracker.

The Media Tracker is a searchable, online database that allows anyone to learn who owns the broadcast, cable and newspaper outlets serving any community in the United States. The project also seeks to provide local information about the deployment of broadband service.

The corporate pages within the Media Tracker provide information about the facilities owned by each company within the sector, their political contributions and lobbying expenditures. The top 48 media and telecommunications companies are featured with profiles that offer their policy agendas, corporate histories, and information on the stock ownership of major executives.

Using the Media Tracker and the Center’s other resources, the public can investigate, free of charge, how those owners are influencing political decision-making regarding telecommunications and media in Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, the executive branch, and state capitals across America.

For more information about the sources of information used in the Media Tracker, see our Methodology.

Who Funds the Project?

Funding for the Media Tracker and the “Well Connected” project has been provided by the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute, two nongovernmental philanthropic organizations. You can learn more about joining and making a contribution to the Center.