Fw: Silence of the lambs: the failure of U.S. journalism

[gerald bracey <gbracey@EROLS.COM>]

This should get your blood flowing this a.m.  Although less important on a
national scale, the same thing is happening in most media reports about
testing.

Jerry Bracey


----- Original Message -----
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Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 11:57 PM
Subject: Silence of the lambs: the failure of U.S. journalism


> SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: THE FAILURE OF U.S. JOURNALISM
>
> By Greg Palast
> March 1 2001
>
> <www.mediachannel.org/views/whistleblower/palast.shtml>
>
> Investigative reporting about voting rights violations
> in the US have been page one news---in Britain.
> MediaChannel advisor and journalist Gregory Palast who
> writes for the Observer and reports for the BBC is
> fighting mad   about the disinterest shown by U.S.
> outlets in stories that are making waves worldwide. He
> pulls no punches and he does name names. Palast's report
> on what happened to his reporting is the latest media
> "whistleblower" story   on mediachannel.org
>
> 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.
>
> Award-winning investigative reporter Gregory Palast's
> column, "Inside Corporate America" is published every
> other week in The Observer, London (Guardian Media
> Group).
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