DISPATCHES FROM EXILE
George,
Re: Do you imagine anyone is impressed by your extraneous verbosity?
Impressed, delighted, amused, rankled, angered, riled, shaken and stirred, provoked and repulsed.
Yes, George, I believe they are. They seem to be willing to say so, if ever so meekly, boldly, coldly or flatteringly.
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WHY DO SERIOUS PEOPLE WRITE FROM OFF SHORE?
Greg Palast, on of the most impressive investigative journalists of our age answers that and more:
gregpalast.com
Dispatches from exile
San Francisco Bay Guardian
sfbg.com
Wednesday, June 5, 2002
By Daniel Zoll
SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER the 2000 presidential election, as the nation was consumed with talk of hanging chads and butterfly ballots, investigative reporter Greg Palast unearthed a real Florida voting scandal: State elections officials had taken steps to purge thousands of people from the state's voter rolls, supposedly because they were felons. But most of the people, Palast's investigation discovered, were innocent. They were also predominantly black and registered Democrats. He concluded that the number of likely Gore voters mistakenly denied their voting rights would have been more than enough to change the outcome of the state's vote. Since the presidential election ultimately hinged on Florida, the questionable voter purge may have handed Gov. Jeb Bush's brother a victory.
Didn't hear about Florida's "faux felon" scandal? That might be because CNN, the New York Times, and the rest of the U.S. mainstream media missed the story. Palast, a California native, reports from England for the Observer newspaper and for BBC-TV.
For the past five years Palast has been scrutinizing, among other things, Bush's connections to the bin Laden family, energy deregulation, and U.S. involvement in Latin America. A selection of his dispatches from the U.K. can be found in Palast's new book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters (Pluto Press).
Although he has been marginalized by the U.S. press, Palast's reporting has earned him several prestigious British journalism awards, including the Financial Times David Thomas Prize. Palast, who rails against corporate greed and economic inequality, displays an activist's passion for social justice. But his assertions are usually backed up with solid investigative reporting. And somehow, whether it be secret World Trade Organization documents or Monsanto's internal files, the smoking gun often seems to mysteriously land on his desk.
Palast says his brand of reporting wouldn't fly at a mainstream U.S. media outlet. The reasons he gives are old news: American corporate-journalism bosses, increasingly beholden to Wall Street and the bottom line, fail to dedicate staff time and money for risky investigations, kowtow to official corporate and government sources, and ignore real news in favor of celebrity fluff.
"I am really in journalistic exile," said Palast, who appears June 16 at a Bay Area benefit. "If I want to report from the top of the nightly news, and if I want to report on page one of the most important papers, I have to do it in Britain."
Palast's knack for muckraking might be explained by his background in economics and corporate investigations. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, he dropped out of high school but says he managed to "talk his way" into UC Berkeley in 1970. After one year at Cal he moved to Chicago, where he worked for the steelworkers' union while crashing classes at the University of Chicago with Milton Friedman, the leader of the influential Chicago school of economics that gave rise to Thatcherism and Reaganism. There, he says, he "witnessed the birth of the new world globalization order."
Since then, Palast has spent most of his career researching and fighting big business for labor unions, consumer groups, and government agencies. Growing tired of what he calls the "spider-brained, commercially poisoned piece-of-crap reporting you get in America," he decided to start writing himself five years ago.
Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, who has been known to scoop the mainstream media in his weekly strip This Modern World, likes to point out to readers how sad it is that they have to get their news from a cartoon. Well, we should be equally ashamed that we have to learn the truth about the activities of U.S. corporations – not to mention our own presidential election – from a fedora-sporting expat across the pond.
Jim Crow in cyberspace
The 2000 presidential election exposed countless problems with balloting in Florida and the rest of the country. But few revelations were more disturbing than the allegation, first reported by Palast in the Observer (and later on Salon and in the Nation) that the state of Florida had used an inaccurate list in an effort to purge felons from the voter rolls. As it turned out, only a fraction of the 57,700 people on the list were ex-cons.
The source of the blacklist was a private firm called Database Technologies, which had been hired to "cleanse" the voter rolls of felons. Among other things, Palast discovered that DBT had failed to fulfill a key provision of its $4.3 million no-bid contract: it never confirmed the identity of the supposed felons on the list by "manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling." In February 2001, Palast brought his BBC cameras into the office of Florida Department of Elections director Clayton Roberts to ask him about the DBT contract. When Palast started asking some tough questions, Roberts tore off his mic and made a mad dash for his office. It was a landmark moment in television news, but unfortunately you couldn't see it on U.S. television.
The saga over the voter purges continues. Last week Attorney General John Ashcroft's office announced that "confusion and delays" in three Florida counties, not intentional denial of voting rights, may have led to some voters leaving the polls before they could cast their ballots. The Justice Department said it would bring lawsuits in three Florida counties. But the department's actions do not address Palast's findings – backed up by a 2001 U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigation – that the state may have wrongfully purged thousands of blacks from voter rolls.
Democrats last week accused the Bush administration of ignoring the evidence of voter purging and called for a wider probe. For his part, Palast says the Ashcroft actions are a sham designed to pre-empt a lawsuit by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and to do the least possible damage to Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, who is running for Congress, and Jeb Bush, who is up for reelection in the fall.
Meanwhile, Harris is finally responding to Palast's charges. She wrote a letter to the editor at Harper's magazine (which recently excerpted his book) that accuses Palast of distorting the events in Florida to support his "twisted and maniacally partisan conclusions." Harris tries to deflect blame by saying it was the state legislature, not her office, that required her to contract out the felon list and remove voters who appeared on the list.
Even so, Palast says Harris did not challenge his central premise. "She did not say that I was wrong.... she did not take issue with the fact that there were tens of thousands of black voters, mostly Democrats, knocked off the voter rolls before the election."
The outsider
Many of Palast's articles explore territory that will be familiar to regular readers of the Nation, among other alternative publications. But his Inside Corporate America column in the Observer is a reminder of what is often lacking from the business pages of America's leading newspapers – namely, critical, in-depth coverage of big business.
The situation is even more dire in U.S. television news, where the perspective ranges from corporate center (CNN, the broadcast networks) to right (Fox News Channel). We have nothing comparable to Palast's investigative reports on BBC-TV's Newsnight, which have exposed corporate influence at the WTO and uncovered Britain's "lobbygate" cash-for-access scandal. Palast's BBC broadcasts make Ted Koppel look like Ted Baxter.
Palast is the first to admit that British journalism has its own problems. For one, the country's draconian libel laws make it even riskier than it is in the United States for news organizations to take on powerful figures.
But, he says, it is no coincidence that the Observer (the Sunday sister paper of Britain's Guardian) and the BBC are run by not-for-profit organizations. He attributes his journalistic success to their willingness to give him the support necessary for big investigations, not to mention a wide audience.
"I get concerned that I come off like I'm some kind of grand, wonderful investigative reporter," he says. "That's a crock of shit. What I am is a guy who is lucky ... to have producers and editors who for the most part will let me report the stories and who will give me the money, the time, and the front pages."
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At www.GregPalast.com
gregpalast.com
you can read and subscribe to Greg Palast's London Observer columns and view his reports for BBC Television's Newsnight. Pluto Press has just released Palast's book, "THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons and High Finance Fraudsters." |
