By Greg Palast
Here's how the president of the United States was elected:
In the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida
Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katherine
Harris, ordered local elections supervisors to purge 64,000
voters from voter lists on the grounds that they were felons
who were not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out,
these voters weren't felons, or at least, only a very few
were. However, the voters on this "scrub list" were, notably,
African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the others
wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats.
Beginning in November, this extraordinary news ran, as it
should, on Page 1 of the country's leading paper.
Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the
United States, it ran on page zero — that is, the story was
not covered on the news pages. The theft of the presidential
race in Florida also was given big television network
coverage. But again, it was on the wrong continent: on BBC
television, London.
Was this some off-the-wall story that the Brits
misreported? A lawyer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission
called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to
disenfranchise black voters; the commission held dramatic
hearings on the evidence. While the story was absent from
America's news pages (except, I grant, a story in the Orlando
Sentinel and another on C-Span), columnists for The New York
Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post cited the story after
seeing a U.S. version on the Internet magazine Salon.com. As
the reporter on the story for Britain's Guardian newspaper
(and its Sunday edition, The Observer) and for BBC television,
I was interviewed on several American radio programs,
generally "alternative" stations on the left side of the dial.
Interviewers invariably asked the same two questions, "Why
was this story uncovered by a British reporter?" And, "Why was
it published in and broadcast from Europe?"
I'd like to know the answer myself. That way I could
understand why I had to move my family to Europe in order to
print and broadcast this and other crucial stories about the
American body politic in mainstream media. The bigger question
is not about the putative brilliance of the British press. I'd
rather ask how a hundred thousand U.S. journos failed to get
the vote theft story and print it (and preferably
before the election).
Think about "investigative" reporting. The best
investigative stories are expensive to produce, risky and
upset the wisdom of the established order. Do profit-conscious
enterprises, whether media companies or widget firms,
seek extra costs, extra risk and the opportunity to be
attacked? Not in any business text I've ever read. I can't
help but note that the Guardian and Observer is the world's
only leading newspaper owned by a not-for-profit corporation,
as is BBC television.
But if profit-lust is the ultimate problem blocking
significant investigative reportage, the more immediate cause
of comatose coverage of the election and other issues is what
is laughably called America's "journalistic culture." If the
Rupert Murdochs of the globe are shepherds of the new world
order, they owe their success to breeding a flock of docile
sheep, the editors and reporters snoozy and content with
munching on, digesting, then reprinting a diet of press
releases and canned stories provided by officials and
corporation public relations operations.
Take this story of the list of Florida's faux felons that
cost Al Gore the election. Shortly after the UK and Salon
stories hit the worldwide web, I was contacted by a CBS
network news producer ready to run their own version of the
story. The CBS hotshot was happy to pump me for information:
names, phone numbers, all the items one needs for a quickie TV
story.
I also freely offered up to CBS this information: The
office of the governor of Florida, brother of the Republican
presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of
the names of felons from voter rolls — real felons, but with
the right to vote under Florida law. As a result, thousands of
these legal voters, almost all Democrats, would not be allowed
to vote.
One problem: I had not quite completed my own investigation
on this matter. Therefore CBS would have to do some actual
work, reviewing documents and law, and obtaining
statements. The next day I received a call from the producer,
who said, "I'm sorry, but your story didn't hold up." Well,
how did the multibillion-dollar CBS network determine this?
Why, "we called Jeb Bush's office." Oh. And that was it.
I wasn't surprised by this type of "investigation." It is,
in fact, standard operating procedure for the little lambs of
American journalism. One good, slick explanation from a
politician or corporate chieftain and it's case closed,
investigation over. The story ran anyway: on BBC-TV. Let's
understand the pressures on the CBS producer that led her to
kill the story on the basis of a denial by the target of the
allegations. (Though let's not confuse understanding with
forgiveness.)
First, the story is difficult to tell in the usual 90
seconds allotted for national reports. The BBC gave me a
14-minute slot to explain it.
Second, the story required massive and quick review of
documents, hundreds of phone calls and interviews, hardly a
winner in the slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am school of U.S.
journalism. The BBC gave me two weeks to develop the
story.
Third, the revelations in the story required a reporter to
stand up and say the big name politicians, their lawyers and
their PR people were freaking liars. It would be much
easier, and a heck of a lot cheaper, to wait for the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission to do the work, then cover the
Commission's canned report and press conference. Wait! You've
watched "Murphy Brown," so you think reporters hanker every
day to uncover the big scandal. Bullshit. Remember, "All the
President's Men" was so unusual they had to make a movie out
of it.
Fourth, investigative reports require taking a chance.
Fraudsters and vote-riggers don't reveal all their evidence.
And they lie. Make the allegation and you are open to attack,
or unknown information that may prove you wrong. No one ever
lost their job writing canned statements from a press
conference.
Fifth — and this is no small matter — no one ever got sued
for not running an investigative story. Let me give you
an example close to home. The companion report to my
investigation of the theft of the election in Florida was a
story about Bush family finances. I wrote in the Guardian and
Observer of London about the gold-mining company for which the
first President George Bush worked after he left the White
House. Oh, you didn't know that George H. W. Bush worked for a
gold-mining company after he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992?
Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that this company has a
long history of suing every paper that breathes a word it does
not like — in fact, it has now sued my papers. I've gotten
awards and thousands of letters for these stories, but, honey,
that don't pay the legal bills.
Finally, there's another little matter working against U.S.
reporters running after the hard stories, papers printing them
or TV broadcasting the good stuff. I'll explain by way of my
phone call with a great reporter, Mike Isikoff of Newsweek.
Just before the elections, Isikoff handed me some
exceptionally important information about President Clinton,
material suggesting corruption in office — the real stuff, not
the interns-under-the-desk stuff. I said, "Mike, why the hell
don't you run it yourself?" and he said, "Because no one gives
a shit!" Isikoff was expressing his exasperation with the news
chiefs who kill or bury these stories on page 200 on the
belief that the public really doesn't want to hear all this
bad and very un-sexy news. These lambchop editors believe the
public just doesn't care.
But they're wrong. When I ran my first story in the London
Observer about the theft of the Florida vote, Americans by the
thousands flooded our Internet site. They set a record for
hits before the information-hungry hordes blew down our giant
server computers. When BBC ran the story, viewership of the
webcast of Newsnight grew by 10,000 percent as a result
of Americans demanding to see what they were denied on their
own tubes. Obviously, some Americans care.
And it's for them that I say, This is Greg Palast
reporting from exile.
— Investigative reporter and MediaChannel advisor
Greg Palast (gregory.palast@guardian.co.uk)
writes a fortnightly column, Inside
Corporate America, for The Observer of London (Guardian
Media Group). His stories about the purge of Florida voters
are collected on his Web site, http://www.gregpalast.com/.
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