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IP: "SMELLS LIKE TEXAS"
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 13:17:16 -0400
X-Sender: >X-Sender: spaf@128.10.241.20 Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 12:21:05 -0500 To: dave () farber net From: Gene Spafford <spaf () cerias purdue edu> Cc: Mari L Schupp <schuppm () earthlink net> I read the article "SMELLS LIKE TEXAS" that you posted about 10 days ago, authored by Greg Palast. I read some of the enclosed links to other stories, and then a day or two later got one of them via another mailing list. The article in question was on the "failure of the US News Media" and can be found at <http://www.mediachannel.org/views/whistleblower/palast.shtml>. Well, we've seen several postings about news media failures, and big-money interests' influence on news reporting, etc. So I thought I'd get a comment from one of the more thoughtful journalists I know, Dave Wilson. I sent the article on to him. He had some good comments about the nature of the media, and how it differs between print and WWW. Enclosed is his response, forwarded with his permission.Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 09:51:15 -0700 To: spaf () cerias purdue edu From: Dave Wilson <dave () wilson net> Subject: Re: Comment? Hi pal. I'm actually unpacked, so things are getting better <g>. I think there are indeed a couple of distinctions between the British press and its U.S counterpart that are rather interesting (I've recently spent some time in New Zealand, so I reached some of these conclusions over the past few months). But first, let me offer you an off the cuff critique of a basic allegation contained within the screed you sent me: It's factually incorrect. Let me quote: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.In fact, Florida is one of nine states that do not allow convicted felons to vote. Oops. I didn't ask Jeb Bush about this; I looked it up. (I'm not just a geek; I'm a geek with a political science degree <g>). So ordering felons off the voting roles is not illegal. The quickest way to get a reporter to lose interest in your story is to get the basic facts wrong. Now, if somebody is a felon from another state and that state has restored his civil rights after time served and that person later moves to Florida, the Sunshine State won't roll over and let said felon vote unless the felon presents documentation to the Florida authorities stating that the right to vote has officially been restored by the other state, or the felon effectively gets the Florida governor or legislature to effectively grant a kind of clemency. While that's not exactly nice, it's also not illegal. In recent months Florida has announced that it's officially changing its policy to automatically reinstate voting rights if you're a felon from a state where such rights are automatically reinstated, so no paperwork or appeal will be needed. But the whole felons don't vote thing has quite a long history in this country and it's one of the few things that will follow you around post-rehabilitation. I interviewed G. Gordon Liddy at his home in 1982 and asked him what bothered him most about his conviction and jail time for the Watergate break-in; he said not being able to vote greatly saddened him. At which point I burst out laughing and asked him if in light of that he now felt any differently about his attempts to disenfranchise millions of Americans. He laughed and showed me his gun collection. Actually, as he was quick to point out, convicted felons can't own guns, so Liddy had to give up his gun collection. He looked very sad as he told me this. Then he grinned and said, "*Mrs.* Liddy, however, has an *extensive* gun collection." Liddy and I go way back; I became so enraged when he started saying that there was a juror seated on the Watergate criminal trial who couldn't speak English that I filed a petition with the U.S. District Court twenty years ago to get the trial transcript unsealed. When the court did so, I triumphantly called Liddy at home -- yeah, his number is listed -- and invited him to meet me at the National Archives to pick up the transcript with me. We went over the documents during lunch at the National Gallery, where Liddy and his legal team ate during the trial. You can imagine how embarrassed I was when the transcript showed that one of my heroes, Judge John Sirica, was forced to interrogate juror number seven with the attorney for the Cuban burglars acting as an interpreter to establish a breach of the sequester. Even more bizarro, juror number seven happened to be a Cuban immigrant. He got tossed off the jury, but only after the Cuban defendants dropped their not guilty pleas. The whole thing still gives me the willies. Never heard that story? It's only been published in a couple of places. Like the wire services. It's my own little contribution to Watergate lore. My point in mentioning this tale is to underscore the hit and miss nature of the journalism business. Now, the Watergate stuff was old news when I got the transcript, so it's not strange that it didn't make the front page of the Washington Post. So I'm not bitter. Really, I'm not <g>. But even current stuff often falls through the cracks. For instance, I wrote a column March 15 explaining how the hacker community has developed very usable alternatives to DeCSS -- which was always kind of flaky anyway -- and I even told people how to find them. I've been practicing my testimony: "That's not a URL, your honor. That's a proper name. My understanding of the First Amendment -- at least as it was explained to me in my Constitutional law classes -- suggests that Congress cannot pass a law restricting the press from writing proper names. Although perhaps I'm mistaken, since I would have thought that would apply to URLs as well." Amazingly, the fact that people no longer use DeCSS to rip DVDs is never mentioned in any article about the current litigation revolving around DeCSS. Them's the breaks. Eventually, somebody important -- that would be somebody besides moi -- will write about these things, and the world will take notice. Greg Palast apparently thinks his colleagues aren't properly following his lead on important stories. He pats himself on the back pretty vigorously for his hard-nosed coverage of corrupt American politics, but I'd suggest he may be taking the easy way out. We colonials don't have to deal with the Official Secrets Act, which means we don't have to worry about winding up in jail for embarrassing the administration. Or did he miss the recent impeachment madness? Little lambs indeed. Palast's rant appears to claim that U.S. media outlets didn't note problems with voter lists prior to the Nov. 2000 election. That's ludicrous. Granted, most of the focus over the past year has been aimed at efforts to prevent fraudulent voting -- ballots from the graveyard, that sort of thing -- but plenty of newspapers noted that such attempts often kept people eligible to vote from voting. Virginia has had a lot of troubles with this, as has Illinois. How did I know that? Why, I read it in the newspaper. The fact is, Florida papers did indeed cover the felon story -- that is, people who were denied the right to vote who were not in fact felons, apparently because many of them shared a name with a felon and were then placed on a felon list -- including the St. Petersburg Times, routinely cited as one of the top ten papers in this country. It is also, as an aside, owned outright by a non-profit, the Poynter Institute, dedicated to the study of journalism. Making the Guardian less than unique in this regard. Mr. Palast never actually mentions how he got wind of the Florida felon story. Perhaps some anonymous tipster called him and read aloud from the Miami Herald. Why didn't national papers pick up the felon list problem until well after the election? Well, I'd argue that, absent any actual evidence to suggest a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise blacks or Democrats -- and, lets be clear about this, right now there is none, just investigations and lawsuits -- the Florida felon debacle was a local story until months later when we all realized that the presidential election was a statistical dead heat. And then we spent two months counting chad, watching angry mobs brought in and paid for by a certain political party trying to intimidate those in charge of the recount process, and tracking down rumors of whether JB was sleeping with KH. And then another three months trying to count the freaking ballots. The felon story, in short, only got on the national radar screen at the very end of that process, when we all figured out that less than 1,000 votes separated the winner from the loser. But my point, and I do have one, is this: I believe that one of the distinctions between the British press and mainstream U.S. press is that U.S. reporters *hate* being wrong. The Brits don't mind being wrong so much, as long as they occasionally beat their opponents to the scoop. Major U.S. newspapers, however, place a premium on accuracy and precision, which means that, yeah, we're less likely to go forward with a story without two independent sources verifying the facts. I can perhaps illustrate this by pointing out the eighth of a page devoted to corrections in a typical daily American newspaper, which a cynic would suggest carries the following subtext: "Apart from these few trivial paragraphs, everything else in yesterday's paper was 100 percent accurate." Hah. So, okay, the mainstream U.S. press is more cautious than the Brits. But there are alternative publications on both the left and the right that are more willing to push the boundaries, and, when it turns out they've nailed a story, the big guys will pick it up. The British press is, I would argue, far more gossipy in nature than the mainstream U.S. newspapers. I'd even be prepared to argue that the Web-based press has adopted the British model; lots of news on the Web is dripping with attitude, but light on actual facts. I've read the Guardian. Its pages are stocked with standard, "on the one hand, on the other hand" journalism ("Racial Tension Thought Cause of Riot") that could run on the front page of any U.S. newspaper. We call this stuff balanced and we call the people who write it reporters. It's important. But the Brits are far more fond of what U.S. papers would call news analysis or outright commentary than their U.S. counterparts. I would argue that this is what Mr. Palast does, and recently, it's what I've started doing for a living. It's a very liberating experience, and it's just as important to the electorate as impartial journalism, but I don't confuse it with straight reportage. If I should decide to declare that every word Mr. Gates says is a lie, including "a," "an," and "the," I'm certainly not going to chastise my journalistic brethren as corporate stooges for failing to gather round my bonfire. That's not their job, you see. The way it works is, they gots their job, and I gots mine. Their job is to fairly and accurately portray every facet of every position on the significant arguments of the day. My job is piling up wood. In a purely metaphorical sense, of course. Palast does make one important point, though not directly. Mainstream journalism in this country is dependent on authoritative sources, which can, on occasion, be a completely ineffective way of doing business if you're actually interested in understanding reality. (I once had an editor insist that there must be somebody in charge of the Internet; he was practically reduced to a state of catatonia when he finally accepted the fact that we couldn't get a quote from the chief executive officer running the show). This is why the dotcom story exploded: Everybody involved -- the companies, the bankers, the analysts, the investors, the industry, and the visionaries -- was pimping for everybody else. And journalists quoted them, so everybody involved -- except the journalists, poor saps -- made a pile of money, until, like some giant Ponzi scheme, the whole thing collapsed. I got into a bit of trouble with my former employers at the San Jose Mercury News in 1998 when Yahoo claimed to be profitable and my story -- in contrast to the stories of every other major newspapers out there -- said they weren't really making money. Note that I got in trouble because this was a news story and I led with my own analysis of the numbers, not the analysis touted by the analysts and official experts; those qutoes were in the story, but I didn't make them the lead. I got away with it because in fact the company wasn't making money, and truth, thank goodness, is an absolute defense for us. But people -- good people, mind you, solid journalists who were trying to do what was right -- were very, very unhappy with me; there was some suspicion that I was exhibiting bias. And I suppose I was, after a fashion, since I was continually cursing under my breath the lying sacks of fecal matter that were pumping up phony numbers. But I digress. Now that the bubble has collapsed, everybody's doing stories on those phony pro forma numbers that were used to justify claims of profitability and the insane stock valuations. Everything worked out okay for me, but I think in general saying the emperor has no clothes is not a great career strategy for a reporter, especially when everybody else is running around praising the emperor's fashion sense. Fortunately, everybody loves a good contrarian columnist. Life am good. In closing, I think Mr. Palast's basic claim that it's legal for felons to vote in Florida is false on its face. There's an old saying in American journalism: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. And here's another: Nothing ruins a good story like getting the facts. Warm regards. -dave At 11:25 AM 5/27/2001 -0500, you wrote:Hi, Dave. How's things? As I was reading this, I thought of you -- you have, in fact, spent time doing research to uncover stories, although your beat isn't the national political scene. So, I was wondering if you have any comment on this? (If you have time and interest -- this is so out of the blue....) Hope you're well, --spafDate: Sun, 27 May 2001 07:05:08 -0400 From: Mari L Schupp <schuppm () earthlink net> X-Accept-Language: en Subject: [BRC-NEWS] The Failure of U.S. Journalism -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [BRC-NEWS] The Failure of U.S. Journalism (fwd) Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 10:12:03 -0400 From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim () PANIX COM> From: Art McGee <radicalnegro () yahoo com> http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=33&row=1 http://www.mediachannel.org/views/whistleblower/palast.shtml Media Channel March 1, 2001 [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.] Silence of the Lambs: The Failure of U.S. Journalism By Greg Palast <gregory.palast () guardian co uk> 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'sGuardian 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 andtheir 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 otherweek in The Observer, London (Guardian Media Group). To reprint, to comment, or to read other Palast reports, go to www.GregoryPalast.com. Copyright (c) 2001 Gregory Palast. All Rights Reserved. [IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this list are solely those of the authors and/or publications, and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC). Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases, action alerts, and announcements are distributed exclusively via the BRC-PRESS list. As a subscriber to this list, you have been added to the BRC-PRESS list automatically.] [Articles on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and posted on other mailing lists, as long as the wording/attribution is not altered in any way. In particular, if there is a reference to a web site where an article was originally located, do *not* remove that.>>Unless stated otherwise, do *not* publish or post the entire text of any articles on web sites or in print, without getting *explicit* permission from the article author or copyright holder. Check the fair use provisions of the copyright law in your country for details on what you can and can't do.
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- IP: "SMELLS LIKE TEXAS" David Farber (Jun 29)