[Sosfbay-discuss] Palast: U.S. media have lost the will to dig deep

[JamBoi]

U.S. media have lost the will to dig deep
L.A. Times
A changed news culture has let several important investigative stories
slip through the cracks.
By Greg Palast, GREG PALAST is the author of "Armed Madhouse: From New
Orleans to Baghdad -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House
Gone Wild."
April 27, 2007

IN AN E-MAIL uncovered and released by the House Judiciary Committee
last month, Tim Griffin, once Karl Rove's right-hand man, gloated that
"no [U.S.] national press picked up" a BBC Television story reporting
that the Rove team had developed an elaborate scheme to challenge the
votes of thousands of African Americans in the 2004 election.

Griffin wasn't exactly right. The Los Angeles Times did run a follow-up
article a few days later in which it reported the findings. But he was
essentially right. Most of the major U.S. newspapers and the vast
majority of television news programs ignored the story even though it
came at a critical moment just weeks before the election.

According to Griffin (who has since been dispatched to Arkansas to
replace one of the U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department), the
mainstream media rejected the story because it was wrong.

"That guy is a British reporter who accepted some false allegations and
made a story up," he said.

Let's get one fact straight, Mr. Griffin. "That guy" is not a British
reporter. I am an American living abroad, putting investigative reports
on the air from London for the British Broadcasting Corp.

I'm not going to argue with Rove's minions about the validity of our
reporting, which led the news in Britain. But I can tell you this: To
the extent that it was ignored in the United States, it wasn't because
the report was false. It was because it was complicated and murky and
because it required a lot of time and reporting to get to the bottom of
it. In fact, not one U.S. newsperson even bothered to ask me or the BBC
for the data and research we had painstakingly done in our effort to
demonstrate the existence of the scheme.

The truth is, I knew that a story like this one would never be reported
in my own country. Because investigative reporting — the kind Jack
Anderson used to do regularly and which was carried in hundreds of
papers across the country, the kind of muckraking, data-intensive work
that takes time and money and ruffles feathers — is dying.

I've been through this before, too many times. Take this investigative
report, also buried in the U.S.: Back in December 2000, I received two
computer disks from the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine
Harris. Analysis of the data, plus documents that fell my way,
indicated that Harris' office had purged thousands of African Americans
from Florida's voter rolls as "felons." Florida now admits that many of
these voters were not in fact felons. Nevertheless, the blacklisting
helped cost Al Gore the White House.

I reported on the phony felon purge in Britain's Guardian and Observer
and on the BBC while Gore was still in the race, while the count was
still on.

Yet the story of the Florida purge never appeared in the U.S. daily
papers or on television. Until months later, that is, after the Supreme
Court had decided the election, when it was picked up by the Washington
Post and others.

U.S. papers delayed the story until the U.S. Civil Rights Commission
issued a report saying our Guardian/BBC story was correct: Innocents
lost their vote. At that point, protected by the official imprimatur,
American editors felt it safe enough to venture out with the story. But
by then, George W. Bush could read it from his chair in the Oval
Office.

Again and again, I see this pattern repeated. Until there is some
official investigation or allegation made by a politician, there is no
story.

Or sometimes the media like to cover the controversy, not the
substance, preferring an ambiguous and unsatisfying "he said, she said"
report. Safe reporting, but not investigative.

I know some of the reasons why investigative reporting is on the
decline. To begin with, investigations take time and money. A producer
from "60 Minutes," watching my team's work on another voter purge list,
said: "My God! You'd have to make hundreds of calls to make this case."
In America's cash-short, instant-deadline world, there's not much room
for that.

Are there still aggressive, talented investigative reporters in the
U.S.? There are hundreds. I'll mention two: Seymour Hersh, formerly of
the New York Times, and Robert Parry, formerly of the Associated Press,
who uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal. The operative word here is
"formerly." Parry tells me that he can no longer do this kind of
investigative work within the confines of a U.S. daily newsroom.

One of the biggest disincentives to doing investigative journalism is
that it jeopardizes future access to politicians and corporate elite.
During the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial, the testimony of Judith
Miller and other U.S. journalists about the confidences they were
willing to keep in order to maintain access seemed to me sadly
illuminating.

Expose the critters and the door is slammed. That's not a price many
American journalists are willing to pay.

It's different in Britain. After the 2000 election, when Harris' lawyer
refused to respond to our evidence, my BBC producer made sure I chased
him down the hall waving the damning documents. That's one sure way to
end "access."

Reporters in Britain must adhere to extraordinarily strict standards of
accuracy because there is no Bill of Rights, no "freedom of the press"
to provide cover against lawsuits. Further, the British government
fines reporters who make false accusations and jails others who reveal
"official secrets."

I've long argued that Britain needs a 1st Amendment right to press
freedom. It could, of course, borrow ours. We don't use it. 

___________________

JamBoi: Jammy, The Sacred Cow Slayer
The Green Parties' #1 Blogger
http://dailyJam.blogspot.com

"To the brave belong all things"
Celt's invading Etrusca reply to nervous Romans around 400BC

"Live humbly, laugh often and love unconditionally" (anon)

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