Examiner Shames Pentagon Contractors

The Examiner has been practicing a little civic-spirited journalism over the past week, trying to gin up some support for the lagging Pentagon Memorial Fund, which had raised about $6.5 million toward its $20 million goal.

Writing in a special editor’s note last week, Editor John Wilpers said, “We need to turn to ourselves. Many of the victims were our friends or neighbors. We need to turn to our communities. This was an attack on our city. And we need to turn to those with business connections to the Pentagon–for whom the Pentagon is key to their success.”

Yesterday a special Examiner “shame-on-them” investigation found that the vast majority of Pentagon contractors (only six of the top 30, for instance), including all three companies who lost employees in the 9/11 attack, haven’t contributed donations to the Fund.

The article noted a few odd coincidences, though. For instance, the day after the Examiner called to ask Northrop Grumman–ranked third among defense contractors with $11.89 billion in fiscal 2004–whether it planned to donate to the Fund, the company pledged a cool quarter mil to the Fund.

The fundraising drive, which included a special section last week and leveraging the paper’s two local media partnerships with WMET radio and ABC-7/WJLA-TV, is part of a special brand of civic-minded journalism the Examiner brand is hoping to build in the communities it serves.

In conversations, Wilpers is shameless about saying that the paper will be a good neighbor–it’s one of the things that will establish the Examiner as a trusted member of the community.

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