Stories I’d like to see

1.  How does ProPublica do it? Can it scale?

I received an intriguing email alert last week from ProPublica – the non-profit organization that, according to its mission statement, does “journalism in the public interest.” The email announced that ProPublica’s “nursing home inspection” tool now has a completely searchable database of “140,000-plus” reports from government inspections of these facilities for seniors, many of which have been plagued by charges of poor or even abusive care.

That reminded me that as its fifth anniversary approaches, ProPublica deserves full-blown feature treatment.

The small, New York-based organization, which has already won two Pulitzer Prizes, has done a slew of amazing reporting projects that have combined old-fashioned shoe leather with ingenious use of modern technology to gather and present compelling stories and provide ongoing resource materials. It has tackled  subjects ranging from political ad spending to doctors getting payments from drug companies to presidential pardons to this nursing home project. And that’s all in addition to an array of killer one-off stories, such as its report on speaking fees paid to Chicago Tribune editorial board member and syndicated columnist Clarence Page by a group lobbying to be removed from a State Department terrorist list, or the story about Magnetar, the secretive financial firm.

ProPublica was founded in late 2007 with a $10 million grant from Herbert and Marion Sandler, the former Golden West Financial Corp chief executives who made a fortune when they sold the giant savings and loan to Wachovia Bank just before the mortgage bubble burst. Under the leadership of Paul Steiger, the former Wall Street Journal managing editor who conceived the project with the Sandlers, ProPublica has since attracted grants from other major foundations, as well as several hundred smaller individual donations.

Steiger now deploys 34 reporters, researchers and what he calls “data journalists.” Their impact is magnified not only by how cleverly they mine and present data related to important issues but also by the partnerships Steiger and his team have forged with other news organizations, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR and Politico. These outlets, which often contribute reporters to supplement ProPublica’s resources, co-publish the resulting work through their own channels.

I’d like to see a story about how Steiger and his team conceive projects, use technology (especially data mining and social media), assess the impact of their work and control quality. I’d also like to know how they divide editorial responsibility with their publishing partners and what mechanisms, if any, they have built in to hold themselves accountable to those who dispute their reports. After all, a non-profit that focuses on targets like nursing homes, major financial institutions or hydro-fracking (the alleged dangers of which have been a near obsession at ProPublica) could easily develop a God complex and consider itself infallible.

Beyond that, I’d like to know how ProPublica manages its finances and what its long-term business plan is. According to ProPublica’s website: “We spend more than 85 cents out of every dollar on news – almost the exact opposite of traditional print news organizations, even very good ones, that devote about 15 cents of each dollar spent to news.”

Of course that’s in large part because ProPublica doesn’t print or deliver physical products or pay squadrons of ad sales people.

Equally important, ProPublica can pick its spots rather than cover everything a typical newspaper feels compelled to report on. There’s a lot more I’d like to know about that model. Its reporters are paid well, so I suspect the discipline of  targeting carefully is the key. That could suggest important strategic lessons for more conventional news publishers who, at a time of declining resources, have typically chosen to spread those resources lightly across all beats, even-lighter news and news covered by everyone else, rather than focusing on harder reporting that counts and that people will remember.

ProPublica’s annual report says it runs on a yearly budget of about $10 million, and the funds seem to come mostly from year-to-year donations. Are there plans to build an endowment to ensure that the organization will be more than a passing trend subject to the whims and fortunes of annual donors?

With that in mind, how about a sidebar or another story exploring why, in light of ProPublica’s success in supplementing the dwindling resources and resolve of for-profit news organizations to do ProPublica’s high-octane reporting, someone like Steiger couldn’t scale this model dramatically. Why not try to go to 20 or 30 billionaires and remind them that democracy, good government and free markets depend on the honest-broker information that good journalism provides and get them to endow an average of $1 billion each to create a $20 billion “Democracy Through Journalism” Fund? Assuming a 5 percent annual return, that would allow for a billion dollars a year – 100 times what ProPublica now spends – and put 3,000 to 4,000 serious journalists on beats across the country. Could that work?

(Conflict note: ProPublica, uses Press+, the publishing e-commerce system that I co-founded and of which I am co-CEO, to solicit donations on its website.)

2. Defanging Ryan:

This important story by Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin and Jake Sherman published in Politico over the weekend is the best of many raising questions about Paul Ryan’s role in the Romney campaign. Rather than Ryan becoming the guy who offers conservative policy specifics to supplement Mitt Romney’s more general stump speech appeals, “the congressman’s supporters fear just the opposite has happened … The congressman’s role now is … a dutiful No. 2, tossing out attack lines … [M]any Republicans believe the solution is not more Mitt, but more Ryan.”

Well, I hope some campaign reporter is not going to make me wait for “Game Change II” or the next installment of the Politico e-book series about the campaign to take me inside and tell me who in the Romney campaign (or was it Romney himself?) had what conversations with Ryan before (or was it after?) he was chosen and told him he was going to have to lose all that wonky specificity because specifics were not the campaign’s strategy.

This is not only a matter of curiosity – of wanting to be a fly on the wall during what could have been some dramatic conversations. Knowing what happened here will tell us a lot about Ryan. There’s been much written and said by Ryan’s critics that what he epitomizes more than ideological determination is a Washington-style careerism that saw him arrive at the Capitol as an intern and make all the right moves and connections to become a leader of the congressional Republicans. How he reacted if he was told before he was chosen that he would have to change his act to get the number two spot is likely to shed some light on that, as would how he handled it, and continues to handle it, if he was only given those orders after he was chosen.

PHOTO: Vice Presidential Nominee Paul Ryan waves to supporters while holding a cup of coffee during a campaign stop at Cuban restaurant and coffee shop, Versailles, in Miami, Florida, September 22, 2012. REUTERS/Andrew Innerarity

1. The beef against ABC:

Most of us remember seeing or hearing about the multiple ABC news broadcasts beginning last March about how meat packers were adulterating the meat we buy in grocery stores and restaurants with a filler called “pink slime.” Other news outlets picked up on the controversy over the filler, which in fact had been reported on before, but which ABC took on as a crusade. Leading with Diane Sawyer’s flagship evening newscast, on which  she touted her team’s “startling investigation,” ABC did eleven separate broadcasts about “pink slime” over about four weeks. This culminated in cheerleading and self-congratulatory coverage of consumer groups responding to the ABC reports with campaigns to demand that the major grocery store chains boycott products containing “pink slime.”  It was as if Upton Sinclair and his epic novel “The Jungle” that took readers inside the gruesome meat packing plants of the early twentieth century had been reborn in the person of Sawyer and lead on-air reporter Jim Avila.

These multiple reports — hyped by online and social media reports from ABC producers and on-air people, along with promotions on its local news outlets — and the resulting consumer boycott campaigns had such a broad impact that the companies that produce “pink slime” saw their business plummet within a few weeks.

Last week, the leading “pink slime” purveyor, Beef Products, Inc., whose primary operations are in South Dakota, sued ABC. According to its complaint Beef Products quickly lost 60% of its business as a result of the ABC broadcasts and had to lay off 700 of 1,300 employees.

Most of the modest press coverage of the filing of the suit acknowledged the huge hurdles any plaintiff has in a country where the First Amendment protects not only free expression, but those, like ABC, whose expression angers its targets and even causes them ruinous economic harm. That’s true.

Some of the coverage, like this Wall Street Journal report, also focused on Beef Products’ invocation of a South Dakota law “that gives agricultural companies the ability to sue when their products are criticized,” and noted that beef producers had tried unsuccessfully to sue Oprah Winfrey in Texas using the same type of argument that she had disparaged meat products. That’s true, too.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. This case is not likely to go away quickly.

Sure, the meat disparagement claims obviously will not and should not survive First Amendment scrutiny, nor will Beef Products’ absurd claim that by cheering on a boycott of its products ABC was “tortiously interfering” with the company’s contracts with its customers.  (Actually, Beef Products claims that ABC called for the boycotts, which is not true. But even if it had, its First Amendment right to do so would easily trump this interference with contracts claim.)

But – and this is a big but – there are 13 counts alleging defamation in this complaint, and they are compellingly persuasive. In fact, they make ABC look terrible.

To be sure, the great fun in writing about litigation is that if both sides have good lawyers (and Beef Products’ lawyer is heavyweight former Chicago federal prosecutor Dan Webb), one side’s arguments can look persuasive until challenged by the other side. So, maybe Beef Products’ case will evaporate when ABC answers.

But as an aficionado of these cases, I can report that this is the most detailed, persuasive complaint of its kind that I have ever read.

After reading it — and, in fact, reading and re-reading its painstaking explanation of how the plaintiff’s product is produced and used — and then looking back at some of the ABC reports, I began to believe that it was Beef Products that was slimed. I actually found myself believing that this may not be “The Jungle, Part Two”; that what the company produces really is the “lean, finally textured beef,” or “LFTB” that Beef Products’ complaint says it is; that it is real meat, not “filler” or “gelatin,” as it was described on ABC; and that it is safe and has been deemed so by federal inspectors and officials who were not paid off or unduly influenced by corporate politics and lobbying.

Moreover, I was especially intrigued by the claims that ABC had blown off all the evidence Beef Products presented to the network’s producers saying that their first reports were wrong, and that ABC not only did not correct them on air, but stepped up its campaign against “pink slime.”  If that’s true, it could establish the kind of “actual malice” or “reckless disregard” for the truth that would put ABC in real legal jeopardy. Indeed, for me this is the most compelling part of the complaint: Beef Products alleges that it provided ABC with all kinds of evidence — including research papers from respected independent agencies and even testimony from the head of the Consumer Federation of America’s Food Safety Institute – refuting ABC’s take on “pink slime.”

Given the alarm sounded against “pink slime” by ABC and then by so many other news outlets and consumer groups that piled on, my buying into the idea that what Beef Products puts on our grocery shelves is actually “lean, finally textured beef” probably makes it seem like some of the slime has gotten into my brain. But I’ve read the 256-page complaint – which is a good place for a reporter to start before digging in and seeing what ABC’s answers are, including whether and why it chose to ignore the countervailing evidence that Beef Products offered.

Whichever side is right, there is already enough beef here for a terrific story that pushes beyond the ABC PR department’s standard response so far; that the suit “is without merit” and “we will contest it vigorously.”

2. Romney as debater:

As explained here in June, I’m still hoping for a good report on what exactly the rules are for the upcoming presidential debates and what the points of contention were when the two sides negotiated them. Who wanted the candidates seated versus standing at a podium? Who wanted more or less structure? Did both sides agree from the start that the second debate (on October 16) would be a town hall format?

Who wanted which debate subjects to come first, second, and third?  (It seems to me that President Obama won that negotiation, if there was one; foreign policy, which seems to be his strong suit and underscores his status as President, is the third debate topic, on October 22. That means it will be the debate closest in viewers’ memories as they think about their votes 15 days later.)

I’d also like to see a report reviewing how Romney did in his other one-on-one debates: when he ran against Ted Kennedy for the senate in 1994 and when he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002. We know he generally handled himself well in the multi-candidate primary debates this year, but how does he do when the focus is solely on him and one other opponent?

PHOTO: The beef product known as pink slime or lean finely textured beef is frozen on large drums as part of the manufacturing process at the Beef Products Inc. plant in South Sioux City, Nebraska March 29, 2012.   REUTERS/Nati Harnik/Pool

I always tell my students that the best stories come from what you’re most curious about. And for all the coverage of the presidential campaign we’ve been getting in print, online and on cable, my curiosity about what’s really going on in the battleground states and in their most evenly divided precincts hasn’t come close to being satisfied. With all the time and money CNN, Politico and the major newspapers are spending letting the usual suspects opine on the horse race, they should zero in on the people who count by doing some of the following:

a. The voters: Why haven’t the news organizations most heavily invested in campaign coverage selected representative samples of voters (undecided, as well as voters leaning to one side or the other) in three or four battleground precincts across the country – from Colorado to Ohio and New Hampshire to Florida – to ask them in focus groups what, if anything, is persuading them or turning them off? This should be video programming, but that doesn’t mean Politico or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (or even Reuters or Bloomberg) – in addition to the cable news networks – couldn’t do it, given that they all now have robust online video programming. There’s almost an infinite number of questions I’d want to hear these voters asked, among them:

Have field workers called or knocked on their doors? If so, what are the canvassers saying? Is it persuasive?

Which of the television ads bombarding these voters have had the most positive effect? Which have turned them off? Are they even still listening to any of them? Which is most memorable and why?

What speakers at the convention appealed to them or turned them off? Do they even know about the Clint Eastwood fiasco, much less care? Who made a more effective appeal to women or Hispanics?

What effect did Bill Clinton’s speech have? How about Marco Rubio or Chris Christie?

What effect has Governor Romney’s refusal to release a larger set of tax returns had? Have they heard and do they care about his Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss bank accounts? Do any think that President Obama is a Muslim, and do they care? What about the Solyndra scandal?

Do they share the media’s verdict that Paul Ryan stretched the truth in his convention speech, or that his budget plan could hurt future Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries? (Of course, the question should be asked a lot more neutrally than that, as in: “Did you watch Paul Ryan’s speech or hear about it? What did you think of it, and what do you think of his budget plan?”) Do they even know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid and understand the unambiguous severity of the Republican’s Medicaid proposals?

What’s their sense of the economy and its progress or lack thereof, and how much does it matter to them? Do they believe Governor Romney can cut the deficit, as he promises, without further burdening the middle class?

How much of an issue is abortion or gay marriage? What about Israel? Or terrorism and the killing of Osama bin Laden?

What about the likability of the two candidates and their running mates? And how much does that matter?

As they think about casting their votes, what do they pinpoint as the most important deciding factor in their decisions? If each had to explain his or her vote to a close friend, what would they say?

What about showing up to vote? Who might sit it out, and why? What could persuade them to turn out? A phone call that day? An offer of a ride to the polls? The option to vote early?

In fact, because the campaign will likely depend as much on turnout as on the late decisions of undecided voters, these focus groups should be sure to include registered voters weakly committed to one side or the other and unsure if they will vote at all, as well as true undecided voters.

Sure, we often see some of these questions covered in national or even statewide polls, but poll-results stories have little meaning and texture without this kind of personal, qualitative probing. They’re not nearly as interesting, and they tell us little compared with hearing the people who are actually going to decide the country’s path explain their take on all of these issues. In fact, presented with the right production packaging (perhaps splitting it into daily 10- or 15-minute doses over a week or two), this coverage could be downright compelling.

Besides, it’s a good bet that the campaigns themselves are doing exactly this kind of focus group research. Why should they know more than we know?

(Which reminds me: I’d also like to see a story comparing how the two sides’ focus groups of these voters compare. Did they produce the same conclusions that the losing side was just unable to act on effectively? Or did they draw differing conclusions, resulting in the losing side taking some wrong turns? Realistically, it will probably not be until after the election that this view from inside the campaigns’ most protected research is doable.)

b. The ground troops: What do the Romney and Obama troops in the field do all day?

How are they organized and scripted? How does what they say differ, if at all, from what the campaigns would want the rest of us to know they are saying? To what degree, if at all, do their targeted messages become pandering or appeals that would embarrass the national campaign?

How is what they hear fed back to the campaign strategists and to what effect?

What do they get paid, and how are they held accountable for productivity? How important are the unions in providing troops for the Democrats, and how important are business interests in providing people for the Republicans? What about the churches?

c. The money: With campaigns that together will spend in the billions before it’s all over and with so much of it concentrated on a relative sliver of the country, the economic effects on these localities have to be enormous (or, depending on your view of the role of money in politics, obscene).

Can a local car dealer advertise a sale in Toledo, Ohio or Jefferson County, Colorado on his cable system’s ESPN channel next week, or has he been crowded out of the market?

Which caterers are cashing in?

Is there any evidence yet that Obama’s overall cash-haul shortfall compared with Romney’s is forcing the president’s people to pull back or to pay local bills more slowly?

Which ad from each side has run the most? And how does its run compare with high-dollar marketing for a commercial advertiser? (And can we hear from a credible marketing consultant or academic who has studied the laws of diminishing returns in television advertising?)

Have lawyers been retained, and at what cost, to deal with any Election Day voting fights?

In short, exactly how is all the money being spent? Can we see a pie chart of all the expenses by category?

I like pundit cable chatter as much as any political junkie. But it’s time for Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer and Bret Baier, as well as the folks from Politico and the national newspapers and networks, to do a lot more work out where the real action is. Take us to the front lines, and bring us the real story.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama addresses supporters at a Labor Day campaign event at Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio September 3, 2012. REUTERS/Larry Downing

1. Use polls to monitor the effectiveness of campaign lies:

It’s great that many media organizations have been fact-checking the claims of the presidential candidates and holding them accountable for blatant distortions. But with all the money they are spending on polls, why can’t they poll whether the lies are working?

For example, why not ask voters whether they believe the charge that President Obama has eliminated the work requirement in the welfare program? Or if they now believe that Obama cut $700 billion from Medicare benefits? Or that the Romney/Ryan budget plan would actually gut the deficit instead of balloon it?

And although I don’t want to imply equivalency of misstatements in the two campaigns, because there isn’t, pollsters could also ask about this Obama-side whopper: whether people think Governor Romney’s Bain Capital indirectly caused the death of a woman by depriving her husband of health insurance?

2. 9/11 anniversary ideas:

As the 11th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks approaches, here are some ideas the press might want to pursue:

a. Mission creep and budget creep at the Department of Homeland Security. I’ve written in prior columns about how the Department of Homeland Security seems to keep expanding into areas not associated with securing the homeland. Its spending seems to reflect that: The first DHS budget in 2003 was $37.7 billion. This year it’s $50 billion, and it’s up nearly 20 percent in just the last four years. How come?

b. Why not a permanent Victims Compensation Fund? Most of the players involved, including the families of the victims, agree that the federal fund, set up by President Bush and administered by Kenneth Feinberg to compensate survivors as well as families of victims of the attacks, successfully prevented a litigation nightmare in which the courts would have been clogged, victims would have had their payouts delayed and plaintiffs’ lawyers would have had a bonanza. Yet we’ve done nothing to apply the lessons of a government program that actually worked. Rather than depend on the vicissitudes of the politics of a chaotic moment, why haven’t we codified provisions for another fund to be implemented should another terrorist attack happen, with carefully defined guidelines of what defines an eligible terrorist attack and who would qualify as victims? Has anyone in Washington tried to do that? If not, why not? And what does Feinberg think?

c. A privatized TSA? The current Republican platform calls for the functions of the Transportation Security Administration to be transferred to private corporations, which is how airport security was handled before 9/11. However, in the pre-9/11 world the airlines were in charge of hiring the private security firms that checked people through at the airports, with little government regulation and little attention paid to anything other than moving people through the lines with no hassles. The Republican platform would have the Department of Homeland Security strictly regulate the private companies that would replace the TSA employees – as is done at most airports in Europe.

In fact, a few airports in the United States, including San Francisco, have been allowed to experiment with that approach, and it seems to have worked, providing more cost-effective and customer-friendly service with no apparent security compromises.

It would be good to see stories exploring the merits and demerits of each approach.

d. Private-sector winners and losers. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, companies from Lockheed Martin to Raytheon to GE, as well as all of the major consulting firms and a slew of small businesses and startups, plunged into what quickly became a new homeland security industry. The new industry in turn created squadrons of lobbyists with a new specialty.

So who are the big winners? Who are the losers? How come? And which members of Congress sitting on newly important committees with jurisdiction over various aspects of homeland security accumulated new power?

3. Missing the nuts and bolts of the stimulus:

The New New Deal – a terrific book just out by Time senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald – is an encyclopedia of stories that most other reporters missed every day for the past three years because the stories were as unsexy as they were important. Grunwald zeroes in on the nuts and bolts and trials and tribulations of implementing the president’s 2009 stimulus package. (See, I told you it’s not sexy, just hugely important.)

His account explains how things work and don’t work in Washington. For example, I’ve always wondered how the Obama people blew even the simple branding of the stimulus, and Grunwald provides all the details, including how they ended up with a logo for the too-small signs that adorn the stimulus act’s projects that is as unappealing and indecipherable as the name of the act itself. (Seriously, why didn’t they use the title of Grunwald’s book instead of “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”?)

My favorite story is Grunwald’s six-page description of a program in the Department of Energy intended to create lots of jobs and make long-lasting, nationwide improvements in energy efficiency by weatherizing – as in caulking windows and doors – 600,000 low-income homes. It seemed like a simple, logical way to deploy $200 million of the stimulus. But it was sidetracked by a tangle of red tape and bureaucratic fights, into which was thrust Claire Broido Johnson, a hard-driving young Harvard MBA and entrepreneur lured into the Obama change mission.

In Grunwald’s fly-on-the-wall account, Johnson faces off against career bureaucrats who sneer at her fervor and delight in finding obstacles to put in her way. For example, they dredge up the question of whether a 1930s law, much beloved by labor unions, requiring the federal government to pay “prevailing wage” on federal construction projects applied to workers caulking windows and, if it did, how and how quickly that prevailing wage could be determined. (It took months.)

Books like this, written a year or more after the events, have multiple advantages. Perspective is easier to come by. And getting people to talk after they’ve left their jobs, or at least when they’re not in the thick of starting them, is also a lot easier. Nonetheless, these are the kinds of stories we should have been reading all along.

Unlike covering government agency announcements or congressional mud fights, or looking for leaks of personnel appointments or firings, these are the stories that make government correct itself in real time by raising issues and holding people accountable. And they’re the stories that give credit to and encourage people like Johnson – who made her 600,000-home goal but is quoted by Grunwald at the end of this section as saying: “I’ll never work for the federal government again.”

As we approach either a second Obama administration or a new Romney administration, editors and producers should be thinking about how to gear up for this kind of coverage. It really matters. If Grunwald’s work is any indication, it can make for a lot of good reads, too.

Conflict disclosure: Although I do not know Grunwald, his editor at Simon & Schuster is my editor and longtime friend. Also, in his reference notes in the book, he refers in a complimentary way to the book I wrote last year about education reform and President Obama’s Race to the Top. 

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (C) greets the audience at a campaign rally in Jacksonville, Florida September 1, 2012. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

In the wake of the Todd Akin firestorm, Mitt Romney and a flip-flopping Paul Ryan have emphasized that their anti-choice stance excludes rape. In a Romney administration, abortions would be outlawed except in the case of women who have been raped, the Republican ticket has promised.

So here’s an idea, first suggested by my daughter and one of her friends: Who’s going to be the first reporter to ask Romney or Ryan how that would work? How would they implement that exception?

Would a woman’s rapist have to be convicted in court? How would that work, given that in most criminal cases it takes longer than nine months from when the crime is committed to catch the criminal (assuming the criminal is caught), prepare charges and reach a verdict. In fact, the window would be significantly less than nine months; it would start from when the pregnancy is discovered and end somewhere around the 16 to 20 weeks left during which abortions can be performed most safely.

Or would the exception be triggered just on the woman’s say-so? (Maybe that’s part of what the mentally challenged Akin was talking about when he referred to “legitimate” rape.)

Or would there be some kind of new quasi-judicial process falling somewhere between a full-fledged trial and a simple statement of victimization? Would each state have to set up a new tribunal to handle these “cases”? Who would be the judges or juries? What evidence would be admissible? Would there be an adversary engaged to challenge the woman’s claim and whatever evidence she offers? Who would that be? Could those challenges include references to her prior sexual history? Would there be criminal penalties for perjury? And, if as the Republican platform decrees, the outlawing of abortion should be implemented via a “human life” amendment to the Constitution, would Romney suggest that language defining rape and how it would qualify for the exception also be written into the Constitution? How would he craft language establishing that a fetus that is the product of rape is not a human life?

If each of these scenarios seems so absurd that it leaves Romney or Ryan tongue-tied when asked these simple, practical questions, maybe that says something about getting the state involved in these decisions, let alone rewriting the Constitution to codify them.

Beginning in 1976, a federal statute known as the Hyde Amendment inserted government into a sliver of this issue, with results that cannot be satisfying to either side. The Hyde Amendment generally forbids federal funding for abortions except in cases of rape or incest or when the woman’s life is in danger. The blog post last week by the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews found that states generally require a doctor’s certificate or a police report for women to qualify for the rape exception. However, Matthews reported, quoting from a study from Ibis Reproductive Health, that “over half of eligible abortions — that is, of pregnancies due to rape or incest or in cases where continuing the pregnancy would threaten the mother’s life — conducted for Medicaid beneficiaries were not reimbursed by the program. By and large, hospitals and doctors who did not get Medicaid reimbursements said that the paperwork for getting the money was too onerous, and it was easier to fund the procedures from nonprofit groups that focus on assisting low-income women with abortion funding.” In other words, the abortions happened anyway, but the exception provided for in the law was typically not implemented. In other cases, Matthews reported, women seeking coverage under the exception could not meet the paperwork requirements and, because they were not able to pay for an abortion, gave birth to babies they claimed were the product of rape.

Matthews concluded by quoting Stephanie Poggi, the executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, as saying: “Basically these exceptions don’t work. It’s really a myth that there is coverage that is still provided.”

The Romney-Ryan exception presents far greater challenges because it is not simply about insurance coverage. The only issue under the Hyde Amendment is who pays for an abortion for a woman on Medicaid, not whether any abortion for any woman can happen. Thus, women are exponentially more likely to seek the exception under the Romney-Ryan plan than they have under the Hyde Amendment. And those opposing abortions would be equally more likely to contest those exceptions to prevent what they view as murder.

So these are hardly tongue-in-cheek questions. Nor is the broader question, which only the late Tim Russert ever regularly asked anti-choice politicians: With Romney and Ryan planning to make any abortions that are not subject to their rape or incest exceptions a federal crime, what is the specific prison term they would impose on offending women? And if they would penalize only doctors, wouldn’t that undermine the enforceability of the law as well as their stated principle that abortion is murder?

Suppose I steal my neighbor Jill’s flat-screen television and install it in my living room. Jill or one of her friends who knows about Jill’s missing television comes over to my house a few days later, notices the television and asks, “Hey, isn’t that Jill’s television?”

I immediately confess. “Yes, it is,” I say. “I’m really sorry. It was a mistake.”

Jill or any interested observer or even the police might ask, “What do you mean by ‘mistake’? Did you mistakenly break into her house and mistakenly haul her huge flat-screen into your living room and set it up on the wall?”

Well, so far, most of the press seems content to let a colleague – Fareed Zakaria, who writes for Time and the Washington Post and has a Sunday CNN talk show – get off with exactly that explanation for stealing something. In this case, the theft was plagiarism.

As has been widely reported, it was discovered the week before last that Zakaria’s essay in that week’s edition of Time and on an accompanying blog post on CNN.com about gun control had a key, fact-filled paragraph that was almost identical to a paragraph in an April issue of the New Yorker by Harvard professor Jill Lepore. Two other important paragraphs, while not nearly as word-for-word, basically track what Lepore wrote. The three paragraphs – tracing the surprisingly long history of gun control laws in America – are by far the meatiest and seemingly most original parts of Zakaria’s 11-paragraph Time column.

After media reports – which started with a blog post by Newsbusters, a conservative media watchdog organization -detailed the apparent copying of Lepore’s work, Zakaria issued the following statement on August 10:

“Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.”

Following that statement, Time and CNN said they were suspending Zakaria pending their own investigations; both statements said or implied that they were seeking to find out how Zakaria’s “mistake” happened and, more important, whether any of his other work might have contained similar lapses. The Washington Post, noting that his column was “on vacation” in August, said it, too, would investigate his prior work but that his column was expected to resume in September.

Just six days later, Time and CNN announced that their investigations were over and Zakaria was being reinstated. Here’s what Time’s statement announcing that all is forgiven said:

“We have completed a thorough review of each of Fareed Zakaria’s columns for Time, and we are entirely satisfied that the language in question in his recent column was an unintentional error and an isolated incident for which he has apologized. We look forward to having Fareed’s thoughtful and important voice back in the magazine with his next column in the issue that comes out on September 7.”

Time, CNN and Zakaria owe their readers and viewers a lot more than that, and the rest of the press should be embarrassed if it lets those statements end the story.

What was the “unintentional error”? Other cases of plagiarism in the digital age have been explained by a writer cutting and pasting something someone else has written into what he or she is writing and then forgetting to put it in quotes and attribute it. That excuse is dubious enough, but here – as well documented by Atlantic.com (which attributed its discovery to a reference in a National Review Online article) – Zakaria’s self-described “mistake” or “lapse” was doctored a bit with slight changes in language in the key paragraph and with more changes in the offending paragraphs that followed. These alterations strongly suggest that this was no accident, that he intentionally used Lepore’s work, and instead of attributing it thought he would cover his tracks by tinkering with some of her words.

Or at least that’s what I will think until some reporter sits down and asks Zakaria exactly those questions and gets a full and verifiable explanation of exactly what his “lapse” was – and then asks Time and CNN to explain exactly what their six-day “investigations” consisted of.

On Monday, the New York Times took what was at best a perfunctory stab at pinning Zakaria down in a story by Christine Haughney, headlined, “A Media Personality, Suffering a Blow to His Image, Ponders a Lesson.” As with prior Times coverage , Haughney dwelled on the pressure Zakaria has put himself under as he juggles two columns, a TV show, regular tweeting, writing books and doing paid speaking gigs. “Many writers now market themselves as separate brands, and their journalism works largely as a promotion for more lucrative endeavors like writing books and public speaking,” she explained. The “lesson” Zakaria says he had learned from the incident, she concluded, was: “There’s got to be some stripping down” of his frantic schedule.

However, Haughney did spend one paragraph getting Zakaria to describe what his “mistake” was in plagiarizing Lepore:

“The mistake, he said, occurred when he confused the notes he had taken about Ms. Lepore’s article – he said he often writes his research in longhand – with notes taken from ‘Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,’ by Adam Winkler (W.W. Norton, 2011), a copy of which was on his desk at his CNN office.”

That explanation raises more questions than it answers, none of which are covered in Haughney’s article, and which other reporters should pursue.

Zakaria’s chief offense was in using as his own Lepore’s description and analysis of what the Winkler book says. Even if the book was “on his desk,” did he read it? Does he actually have any notes from his having read the book? Or did he confuse what the source of his notes was because he misremembered reading the book? And how could the notes from Lepore’s New Yorker piece have been mistaken for notes taken from the Winkler book, if the notes refer to the book just the way Lepore does? Why would he think notes taken from a book would describe the book and its author?

Did the Times reporter ask to see those notes, not just to understand what happened but also to verify that they exist? Did the Times reporter ask to interview Zakaria’s editor or anyone else on the Time or CNN staffs? Did the reporter ask to interview the Time and CNN “investigators”? Someone should.

These may seem like tough questions, but imagine the mainstream press’s tough questions if a politician tried this kind of simple, trust-me explanation. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine critics of the mainstream media charging that the “lesson” Zakaria says he learned is not too far afield from Newt Gingrich’s explanation, mocked appropriately by the press, that he cheated on his wife because of all the pressures he was under trying to do good for his country.

Zakaria also told the Times that he had reluctantly hired a research assistant to help him handle the workload, but that the assistant did not draft his articles. If his more complete explanation turns out to be that he is taking the bullet for a research assistant, readers at CNN.com and Time deserve to know that, too, and deserve to know what he’s doing to cut down on his workload so that he can be fully responsible for the work that bears his name. And reporters deserve to know the name of the research assistant, not to embarrass him or her but so that they can interview him or her to verify the story.

However, if it turns out that this was more than a paper mix-up or a researcher’s rookie mistake, and that the pressures of all those paying gigs actually made Zakaria steal Lepore’s work – something for which he could have been thrown out of the two universities (Harvard and Yale) that adorn his resume – CNN and Time should explain why he’s being forgiven and what he’s doing to cut down on his workload and multiple payrolls. More than that, reporters should press CNN and Time on why even one commission of what, along with fabrication, is journalism’s most basic breach of trust gets a pass. Would I be able to explain to the police that my flat-screen might be stolen, but I swear everything else in my house was bought honestly?

The same Times story that initially referred to his busy schedule, noted that Zakaria had been criticized for giving basically the same paid graduation speech at two commencements this spring. I’m not sure how bad an offense that is, but it does raise another question: Where, other than at universities, has he been such a busy paid speaker? Has he been paid to speak to groups — such as those representing major industries or international constituencies (a group that seeks enhanced free-trade agreements, for example) — that have special interests related to issues he reports about or whose leaders have been covered in his writings or on his TV show?

A column by David Carr in the Times, also on Monday, compared Zakaria’s transgression to those of Jonah Lehrer, who was found to have plagiarized his own work by recycling it in the New Yorker, among other places, and also to have fabricated quotes in his best-selling book, Imagine. Declaring Lehrer to be the far worse actor – which based on all the available evidence is clearly true – Carr wrote this about Zakaria: “He apologized, was suspended, and Time and CNN investigated whether there was a deeper problem and decided there was not. He was reinstated on Thursday. End of story.”

Really?

1.   Quick questions for Paul Ryan:

It’s too bad Bob Schieffer didn’t get to these questions for Paul Ryan on 60 Minutes last Sunday night:

Have you calculated how much the average American enrolled in Social Security would have lost in the 2008-2009 market collapse if he or she had been allowed to move those funds into private stock accounts, as your 2004 Social Security privatization plan would have encouraged? Does that change your view of whether we should move Social Security in that direction?

In his recent profile of you in the New Yorker Ryan Lizza says you were “embarrassed” by the Bush years and by the votes you cast in support of deficit-widening programs such as the extension of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. Which votes, including that one, would you take back? And, more important, would you now urge a President Romney to move to repeal prescription drug coverage if you are elected?

You were on the Simpson-Bowles commission but, along with the two other House Republicans and two of the three House Democrats, you voted against the commission’s plan, which as you know was a compromise that called for cuts in benefits and spending as well as increases in tax revenues. Don’t you think that kind of basic compromise is necessary?

As you know, Governor Romney paid a tax rate of 13.9 percent on his adjusted gross income in 2010. What do you think a fair tax rate would be for someone in his income bracket? And how does that compare with what he would have paid if the Ryan budget plan had been in effect?

2. How does the welfare law’s work requirement really work?

The controversy ignited by a Romney campaign attack ad over whether the Obama administration is really trying to eliminate the requirement that welfare recipients get jobs raises a question I haven’t seen answered amid all that’s been reported so far: How does this work requirement actually work?

As Michael Crowley pointed out in this smart post on Time.com, requiring the poor to find work is especially difficult for “low-educated black and Hispanic workers, who in some urban areas face unemployment rates approaching a stunning 25%.”

So what exactly does the welfare reform law pushed by Republicans and signed by President Clinton in 1996 mandate? I know states have some latitude in applying it; in fact, it’s the question of how much latitude to give them that has sparked the Romney campaign’s charge that President Obama wants to scrap the requirement altogether by letting states waive it, which he denies. But how does the law actually operate in the various states? Can people still get checks if they only demonstrate that they are seeking work or being trained for work? For how long? And what are the definitions of seeking work or training? Let’s have a look at some real cases, and then let’s examine how the waivers being talked about would actually apply. Not only is this now a relevant campaign issue; it’s also an overdue story about how those hurt the most by the Great Recession are being treated by their government.

3. What’s happening in the Olbermann-Current litigation?

It’s now been four months since former Current TV marquee anchor Keith Olbermann sued Current and co-founders Al Gore and Joel Hyatt for $70 million for firing him. The complaint, sprinkled with Olbermann’s trademark over-the-top rhetoric, leveled assorted charges of incompetence, fraud, and other misconduct against Gore and Hyatt. For its part, Current TV filed a cross-complaint, charging Olbermann with breach of contract.

So, it might be time for some reporter to check in with each side’s lawyers – or, for better quotes, if not better information, with Olbermann himself – to find out what’s happened since, including whether any depositions have been taken or any documents exchanged, all of which should be part of the public court record.

4. The Facebook IPO suits?

Speaking of lawsuits, what’s happening with all the complaints filed against Facebook, its underwriters and Nasdaq following its poorly received and even more poorly executed IPO last May? As I wrote then and as the brothers Winklevoss know, “Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have proved in the past to be tough defendants who don’t cave.” That could set this case apart from the typical suits like this, in which the corporate defendants pay off the plaintiffs’ lawyers with a quick settlement. As Facebook’s stock continues to struggle following disappointment with the revenue growth numbers reported in the company’s first post-IPO earnings statement, have the plaintiffs dug in harder? What about the defendants?

PHOTO: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R) stands as his vice president selection, U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) speak at a campaign event at the NASCAR Technical Institute in Mooresville, North Carolina August 12, 2012. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

It was widely reported last week that the Ford Foundation has given The Washington Post a $500,000 grant to hire four extra reporters for a year “to work on special projects related to money, politics and government,” according to a staff memo issued by the Post’s top editors. This followed a May announcement that the foundation had given a million dollars to the Los Angeles Times to expand coverage in areas ranging from local immigrant communities to the state prison system.

These reporting initiatives are worthy endeavors aimed at fortifying great newspapers whose profits have been savaged by the rise of the Internet. However, The Washington Post Co (though not the newspaper) is still quite profitable. The company reported operating income of $77.8 million in the first half of this year. In fact, the Post Co division that owns a group of local television stations is enjoying boom-time revenue this year because of the flood of 2012 political advertising; operating income in that unit increased 43 percent in the first half of this year over last year.

The Post Co also owns the Kaplan education business, and although Kaplan’s for-profit universities are suffering because of a government crackdown on abuses related to marketing and student loan commitments, its test preparation division has shown improved results.

So why didn’t the grant givers at Ford tell the Post to get its parent company to boost its SAT or LSAT coaching fees by 50 cents or a dollar if it needed that $500,000 so badly? Or chop the bonuses of senior executives a bit? Or siphon off ad revenue from those booming television outlets (whose shows include The Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills), or dip into the profits its cable-television systems get from people buying adult movies?

The Tribune Co, which owns the Los Angeles Times, has been in bankruptcy, but that’s only because the current financial-investor owners took on a crushing debt burden to overpay the prior owners of the company’s media properties. The Los Angeles Times itself is still profitable, as are its other divisions, including, for example, the broadcast division that owns local television stations such as WPIX in New York, which features the Jerry Springer Show at 11 a.m. every weekday.

If the paper needed that million dollars so badly, why couldn’t the company ask Springer to cut his syndication fee a bit? Or why not divert some profits from its broadcast of Gossip Girl? Even more easily, the grant givers at Ford could have suggested that Tribune grab some of the dollars gushing in from political ads being bought on its television stations in Denver or Miami, both of which are in hotly contested swing states?

Of course, in the context of big business realities, these are naïve questions. Even the biggest or richest conglomerate – and the Post Co and Tribune are neither – has to insist on each business unit being self-sustaining. The company’s shareholders ultimately won’t tolerate treating one division in the family like a charity. But why should a third party, the Ford Foundation, step in and become the benefactor? Besides, the Los Angeles Times makes money.

When Henry Ford set up his Foundation, did he really intend to help bail out over-leveraged financial investors in a media conglomerate? And is the New York Times not getting these Ford grants because it is doing so well by charging readers for online access that, at least on a relative basis, it doesn’t need the money? Or is the Times about to get some of the Ford money, too? Has the Times sought a grant? What about other newspapers?

A thoughtful reporter ought to find out how the newspapers involved and the people at Ford have approached these issues. Why do they think it makes sense to donate to profit-making companies that have resources of their own but seem not to value the work being funded as much as Ford does?

There are all kinds of other questions related to the grants, including how conflicts are going to be handled and disclosed when the news organizations cover Ford or its hundreds of other grantees around the world.

And how will Ford judge the results when the one-year term of the grants is up? Sure, improved coverage of the areas where the funded reporters are working is likely, but what will that prove? With that in mind, does Ford view this as an experiment that could lead to a non-profit news organization, fully funded by Ford and maybe some partner foundations, covering areas it believes need to be covered? What are the long-term implications – including issues related to conflicts – of that kind of funding model?

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – whose primary purpose, unlike the multidimensional Ford Foundation, is to support journalism – thus far (to my knowledge) hasn’t given grants to conventional for-profit news organizations, preferring instead to fund research and experiments intended to develop alternative, self-sustaining models for good journalism. What do officials there think of the Ford grants?

David Halberstam’s landmark 1979 book The Powers That Be was an awestruck look at the clout of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post (along with Time and CBS). That these two once-mighty newspapers have now accepted charity is a big deal.

PHOTO: Television personality Jerry Springer arrives at the 34th annual Daytime Emmy Awards in Hollywood, California, June 15, 2007. REUTERS/Fred Prouser

1. What happened with Romney’s audit?

On Sunday, Mitt Romney – while promising ABC he would “go back and check” to see if he had ever paid less than the 13.9 percent in income taxes he reported paying in the only return he has released so far – volunteered that he had been audited in the past by the IRS. So, the next question needs to be, “Governor, when you were audited, did the IRS then require you to pay additional taxes, and, if so, would you specify the discrepancy between what you claimed and what the IRS determined was the appropriate tax? And was more than one year of returns audited? If so, what were the results of those other audits?”

2. Aurora and risk:

When I saw reports in the wake of the Aurora massacre that theater chains are thinking about how they might implement new security measures to restrict who can bring what into a theater, I was reminded of a story I read recently about what happened in the aftermath of a horrific air crash 16 years ago.

Most of us have only a dim memory of TWA Flight 800, the Boeing 747 that exploded over the Atlantic shortly after leaving Kennedy Airport for Paris on the night of July 26, 1996.

An investigation found that the oxygen had ignited in the jet’s fuel tank, and that this was probably caused by excessive heat because the plane had been sitting for hours on a hot summer runway before taking off. But despite all the headlines and speculation in the days immediately following the crash, attention faded, and not much was done until July 16, 2008 – 12 years after the accident. Only then did the Federal Aviation Administration get around to issuing an order that airlines had to retrofit thousands of potentially vulnerable planes with a safety feature designed to prevent the kind of explosion that downed Flight 800.

However, according to this report in the trade e-newsletter Aviationpros.com published two weeks ago on the 12th anniversary of the crash, it turns out that the airlines still haven’t installed the required flammable suppression systems on most of their planes. In fact, they may not meet the FAA’s 2014 deadline for retrofitting just half of their jets and a 2017 deadline to retrofit all of them. That’s right: The FAA set the deadline for 2017, 21 years after the explosion. And the airlines aren’t going to make the changes even by then.

According to the Aviationpros.com report, the airlines blame Boeing, which they say has not “certified the kits and service instructions needed for certain models of its aircraft.” The FAA has fined Boeing $13.57 million. That’s less than two hours of revenue for a company with $68.7 billion in 2011 sales. A Boeing spokesman told Aviationpros.com that the company has now “provided the service instructions to the FAA concerning the … aircraft that are the subject of the proposed penalty,” but offered no explanation for the delay. The rule involves 1,830 Boeing planes and 900 Airbus planes. Airbus met the deadline.

It may be that the lackadaisical approach by the aviation industry and its regulators to fixing the planes is because there’s a quiet consensus that the Flight 800 disaster was a fluke and that the security fix – which costs $92,000 to $311,000 per aircraft, according to the report – is more about cosmetics than a sensible cost-effective investment in actual safety. After all, despite the lag in installing the new system, no other planes are known to have gone down in 16 years in an accident like Flight 800’s.

Or it could be that the airlines have been able to put short-term profit ahead of safety because the industry and its lobbyists succeeded in pushing back the regulators as broader public attention faded. That seems to be how the business lobby succeeded in beating back new regulations recommended by security officials following 9/11 in areas ranging from the storage and shipment of dangerous chemicals to cyber-security.

But imagine the headlines and expressions of outrage from politicians that we’d see in a nanosecond if another plane did go down this way. (And imagine the slam-dunk lawsuits.) Similarly, imagine the handwringing and recriminations the morning after some deadly chemicals went missing or got blown up in transit, or a cyber attack crippled our air traffic control system or our power grids.

What does this have to do with the Aurora killings? Yes, someone ought to dig into the Boeing retrofitting story and see whether it’s a case of regulators asleep at the switch or a matter of everyone tacitly slow-walking what they believe is needless hassle and expense. But beyond that I’d like to see a thoughtful look at how we tend to overreact to the risk of the day but then forget what we were worried about as the memory fades and a new risk takes center stage.

Why, for example, would we now consider posting security guards at theaters but not at shopping malls? And how does the expense and hassle of security checks at either place versus the actual safety benefit compare with the expense and hassle versus the actual safety benefit of limiting the availability of assault weapons and 100-round magazine clips?

To take another example, soon after 9/11, the FAA forced airports to eliminate parking spaces that were too close to a passenger terminal. The fear was that a bomber would park a car filled with explosives near the terminal and kill people at the airport. (Yes, the 9/11 terrorists were suicide bombers on planes, not terrorists hoping to leave a bomb in a car near an airport and set it off without hurting themselves, but in the days after 9/11 everything about air travel was a priority.) But what’s so special about an airport? Anyone can park a car inside most shopping malls and many office towers, and right next to most sports stadiums.

This broader story would look at how we deal with disasters and risks and the ways we can make our reactions to threats more rational. It could start by listing the five most overrated risks – situations where we spend too much time and money – and the five most underrated, and examine in each case how and why we have gotten the balance so out of whack.

3. Let’s go inside the IRS:

Both this report from the New York Times about an outside panel of expert art appraisers that advises the Internal Revenue Service about the value of art left in taxable estates, and this piece in the Washington Post about how the IRS may act to tighten regulations on tax-exempt so-called social welfare groups that are financing millions in political advertising but don’t have to reveal donors, illustrate a major reporting gap: We need a comprehensive story or a series of stories taking us inside the IRS.

Using the social welfare organization loophole as a departure, we’d want to know who signs off when the IRS changes a regulation or its interpretation of a regulation that can, as in this case, have enormous impact. The Post article quotes a Washington tax lawyer as saying that the Treasury Department, of which the IRS is a unit, has to approve. Do political appointees at Treasury have a direct role? What about the White House? And what are some other pending issues related to these kinds of regulatory deliberations that are below the radar but similarly significant? Which corporations or people would be most affected, and what are they doing about it?

As for the high-stakes art appraisals, does the IRS have other expert panels that help the bureaucrats deal with equally esoteric issues – such as the value of complicated financial derivatives, or patents, or foreign real estate – that can determine millions or even billions in tax revenue? How are the panels chosen? What authority do they have? How are conflicts vetted?

More generally, how does the IRS – which faces off against corporate tax departments stocked with dozens or even hundreds of highly paid lawyers and accountants – recruit its own sophisticated talent? And what are the rules governing whether that talent can move through the revolving door to the other side?

Speaking of staffing, opponents of Obamacare argued that enforcing the individual insurance mandate would require the hiring of thousands of new IRS agents. Now that the mandate has been upheld, what are the actual plans for enforcement, including new personnel?

Other question abound. How does the IRS keep up with changing technology? How are returns chosen to be audited? How has the agency’s approach to customer service changed and improved or declined over the years? How does it test the customer-friendliness of its instructions and documents?

This is the one agency that touches every American. We should know a lot more about its people and how they work.

PHOTO: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his wife Ann wave to people on the street before his meeting with Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk at the Old Town Hall in Gdansk, Poland, July 30, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed

The press is missing a trick in continuing to ask Governor Romney only whether he’s going to release more than his most recent tax returns. That allows him to say either yes or no (for now, it’s no), which produces no information. So no news gets made. But there are lots of other ways to get at the Romney tax issue by asking him a variety of different questions, for which even a refusal to comment would be news.

All these questions should begin with something like this: “Governor, we know you feel that releasing additional tax returns will invade your privacy and that of your family and, as you have asserted, allow the Obama campaign to pick through thousands of pages and come up with more distortions and half-truths. So if you are not going to release the returns, could you just tell us this:

Reporters could then choose from among these follow-on questions:

1. In the last 10 years have you ever paid less than 10 percent of your adjusted gross income in federal income taxes? If you don’t know offhand, could you ask your accountant to tell us? (On different days reporters could substitute 7 percent, 5 percent or 2 percent as the benchmark.)

2. Governor, in the last 10 years what is the highest tax rate you have paid? If you don’t know, could you ask your accountant to tell us?

3. Governor, could you ask your accountant simply to release the percent tax of your adjusted gross income you paid in each of the last 10 years? Or could he simply release the two pages of your form 1040 for each year, but to preserve your privacy redact everything on all pages except your signature and line 37 (adjusted gross income) and line 61 (total tax owed); we will calculate the percentages.

4. Governor, what would you guess your average tax rate has been in the last 10 years? If you don’t know, could you ask your accountant to tell us?

5. Governor, have you ever used offshore entities to receive and/or shelter income in a way that has lowered the taxes you have owed the United States?

6. Governor, could you ask your accountant to provide an estimate of how much you and your family will save if all of the Bush tax cuts are extended through 2013?

7. Governor, could you provide us with an estimate of how much the most controversial current tax benefit related to someone in your situation – the treatment as capital gains of carried interest paid to partners in private equity funds for income that was not derived from any capital actually invested – has saved you and your family in the last 10 years?

8. Governor, could you tell us what specific tax benefit or so-called loophole that you have taken advantage of over the last 10 years you would propose to eliminate, and could you ask your accountant to tell us how much you have saved from that benefit?

PHOTO: U.S. Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney gives a statement to reporters gathered at Middlesex Truck and Coach after he toured the facility during a campaign event in Roxbury, Massachusetts July 19, 2012. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi