| Greg Palast Interview Part 2 The problem is Sept. 11 took away our innocence. The question is will it take away our blinders. The U.S. press does not seem capable of wanting to dig. Lapp�: Now why is that? From an outsider looking in, you have the BBC, a news organization owned by the government, and you have the American media, which has this great tradition of Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate. They are independent organizations that are not answerable to any government organization. Why is there this chasm between investigative reporting in the U.K. and in America? Palast: Well, first of all you hit a good one. Woodward and Bernstein, which everyone comes back to, was three decades ago! What has happened in thirty years? When have we had a story in thirty years that has come close to that? I gave a talk with Seymour Hersh, who is one of the guys who broke the My Lai story. That was thirty years ago. He cannot work for an American newspaper. He writes for the New Yorker magazine. Think about that. One of our best investigative reporters in America, he has won at least two Pulitzer prizes, can�t even work for an American newspaper. What is going on? Investigative reporting is so rare in America we had to make a movie out of it. I was on a panel at Columbia University School of Journalism and there was a reporter who worked on both continents who said that the odd thing he found was the worst thing you could be called in an American newsroom is a �muckraker.� Someone who looks like they are going after someone, someone who looks like they are getting too enthusiastic about going after someone. No one likes that guy. Look what happened to Lowell Bergman. As soon as he said, �gee we really have to push a story that will make corporate America a bit unhappy.� They killed it. After all 60 Minutes for the most part does mostly small potatoes stories. Small-time operators are the ones basically in their sights. But when they took on a big operation like tobacco they killed the story. I can tell you other stories with 60 Minutes that are just insane that have gone by the boards. I did a story about George Bush�s connections to a brutal gold mining company out of Canada. And 60 Minutes said, �Oh we want to do a big story.� And I said, �Oh, no you don�t.� And three days later they said, �Oh, we can�t do that story.� Lapp�: Why? Palast: They�re gutless. No one has ever advanced their career in the last thirty years by coming up with a great investigative piece. That is a way to get unemployed. Anyone who thinks it�s all �Murphy Brown� and �All the President�s Men� out there is wrong. That�s the fantasy. That�s all television and the movies. It�s not in the newsrooms. If you say what I want to do is expensive and difficult and involves getting inside documents, and upsetting the established order, you are not going to get anywhere. Businessmen are the hardest ones to go after. You can go after a crooked politician but go after a corporation . . . Lapp�: And their lawyers will bury you . . . Palast: Well, we have the First Amendment, which by the way there is no First Amendment in Britain. There is no freedom of speech or the press. Very difficult here legally, even though culturally it�s easier to report the news here in Britain, even though you don�t have the protection. But there is a great fear in the U.S. of corporate power, which I think has a lot to do with losing advertisers. There is a legal question because they can�t win lawsuits but they can cost you a lot of money. You are looked at like some kind of left-wing, muckraker, conspiracy nut if you decide to go past an official denial and say, �I don�t accept that. I want to see a document.� I got to tell you, I have seen this over and over again: my story on the Florida elections - one of the things I found out was that Jeb Bush had deliberately excluded at least 50,000 voters, 94% of them democrats, because they had been convicted of a crime in another state. Now Florida under the U.S. constitution and its own constitution they cannot do that � punish someone for a crime in another state by taking away their right to vote in Florida. You can�t do that. They know that. When we spoke to Jeb Bush�s functionaries they said we know we can�t do that, and then quietly they said, but we do it anyway under instructions from our superiors. The papers I was working for said, �Well, Jeb Bush denied it.� And flat out denial from an official was enough to stop all these investigations. Dead cold. I was with Salon.com. They killed the story. And it was only later when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said I was correct, and then the state of Florida admitted what they did, and then I was vindicated. The New York Times did a story about how gold mining companies out of Nevada have tremendous influence over the Bush administration. Nowhere in the story did they mention that George Bush Sr. was on the board of the biggest gold mining company in Nevada. They didn�t mention the name of the company. Here they are doing a story on gold mining in Nevada and they don�t mention the name of overwhelmingly the biggest company in Nevada, which by the way is called Barrick. And it had on its advisory George Bush Sr. It left out the name of the company and the fact it had on its board a former president. How did that happen? I can tell you because that company sued my paper when I ran a story, and I have the same lawyer as The New York Times. You can bet that The New York Times figured out it was going to cost them money or create controversy. God forbid you create controversy, that would be considered disastrous in a newsroom. When you get a letter from a lawyer who says we disagree, the story gets blocked. The Globe and Mail, which is the number one paper in Canada, was going to run the story. I was told that the top people in the Globe and Mail killed the story. So you have absolute direct corporate influence killing stories. Most reporters understand that it is not a career-maker to have these letters coming in. In other words, you never want to have your story killed. Because if your story is killed by corporate big shots, from then on you are marked as a troublemaker and a problem, and your career is in deep trouble. When a guy like Seymour Hersh can�t get a job with an American newspaper. When Lowell Bergman has to work in the PBS ghetto. When Greg Palast has to work in exile, there is a pretty evil pattern here. What you see is institutionalized gutlessness. I�m pissed off about it because I want to come home and work. My kids have British accents. I wanna get home already. Lapp�: On that note, we�ll wrap up. It seems that with this new war all of these trends you have talked about are getting worse. Do you have any hope for the future of journalism? Palast: My only hope for the future of journalism is one word: the Internet. The big boys are trying to grab it and seize it and control it and own it and stop it and freeze it and fill it up with corporate, commercialized crap and junk. But it is still the conduit of the real information, the real news. You are always being warned about things you read on the Internet. But be warned what you read in The New York Times. At least when you read the Internet you know you are getting all kinds of voices, some nuts, some real, and you evaluate it. The problem with something like The New York Times is it is coming to you as the stone-cold truth. It isn�t true that Bush would have won Florida anyway. When the people voted they voted for Al Gore. He should have been inaugurated as president, not because I like him, but because he got the vote nationwide and in Florida, and they knew it and they didn�t tell you that. I can tell you right now the information I broadcasted on the BBC about the chilling of the investigation of the FBI and the CIA of the bin Laden family and the Saudi royal family, and I have more coming up, I can tell you that information was given to The New York Times. They didn�t use it. It was given to 60 Minutes. Not that they aren�t going to use it. It�s like my story about the elections. They run it seven months later in the back of the paper. Or it�s just like the Florida vote count. If you go to The New York Times web site you can get all the information that shows that Gore won, but they either don�t run it, or eviscerate it, or they give it to you chopped up and spin it so the order of things are not disturbed. I can�t tell you all the reasons why that happens. I�m not sure myself. I think a lot of it is these guys hang out together. They go to the same clubs and they go to each others� daughters weddings. It makes me ill. It makes me want to throw up when I watch Tom Brokaw, that fake fucking hairdo, go to dinner with Jiang Zemin at the White House. He�s a reporter. What the fuck is he doing eating spring rolls with a dictator? He should be reporting the story not breaking bread with the powers-that-be. These guys can�t seem to find the distinction between being in with the power and reporting on it. So there you go. Lapp�: Thanks so much. |
Home Interview Part 2 |