Public Education Center, Inc.

Public Education Center, Inc. (PEC) is a non-partisan 501(c)(3) non-profit that operates the National Security News Service (NSNS) and the Natural Resources News Service (NRNS). With philanthropic funding, our career journalists discover and develop exclusive national security and environmental stories that we convince the commercial media to complete and post on www. DCBureau.org ur website . Our goals are to strengthen democracy by creating a culture of interest and understanding for these topics in the media and public.

PEC investigates complex public interest topics that the commercial media traditionally neglects. Our reporters use their professional knowledge of the media to develop these under-covered and difficult subjects into significant stories that the commercial media can use and values. We offer our stories to the best reporters and producers on an exclusive basis. These journalists and their companies spend substantial resources to complete our stories for publication or broadcast. Our stories appear under the bylines of the reporters with whom we work, but they would rarely receive coverage without our efforts.

Our approach is cost-effective because we leverage our supporters’ funds to include the time and resources of the commercial media. We spend the minimum amount needed to research and verify stories, and then place them with major media outlets that pay the more expensive production bills. Other non-profits spend hundreds of times more on advertising campaigns or publicity events to reach the number of citizens we reach through the daily newspaper or evening news. PEC creates lasting democratic change by influencing public opinion and the policy community for a fraction of the cost.

For 15 years, our work has appeared on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and countless other papers. We have placed hundreds of stories with ABC’s “20/20,” “Nightline,” “Prime Time Live,” “World News Tonight;” CBS’s “60 Minutes,” “Evening News with Dan Rather;” NBC’s “Dateline,” “Today Show;” PBS’s “Frontline,” “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer,” Bill Moyer’s “Now;” and cable news networks like CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Our correspondents work with widely read magazines, including Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and Atlantic Monthly, and the international press, including the BBC, NHK (Japanese public television), and ASRD (German public television).

Wayne Jaquith founded NSNS in 1989 as a public education effort of the Council for a Livable World. In 1992, PEC was incorporated in the District of Columbia as a non-partisan organization to finance and administer NSNS. Using NSNS’s success as a model, PEC established NRNS in 1995.