Where, Oh Where Has the Muckraker Gone?

By Michelle Chihara, AlterNet. Posted April 17, 2002.

Gregory Palast may be "the best investigative journalist you've never heard of," as his book jacket trumpets. He may also be someone who's getting good at tooting his own horn.

Either way, Palast is an American citizen who writes about corporate America -- from Britain. He says that he left the States because he couldn't get the American press to publish his exposes. In London, his stories about government and corporate abuse of power make front page headlines in the dailies, and he has a regular TV show on the BBC's Newsnight.

Now, Palast is finishing up the American leg of the tour for his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The book may prove to be Palast's entry into American consciousness. It's catching up with Michael Moore's bestseller, "Stupid White Men," on the Amazon sales ranks (Moore's book is heavily indebted to Palast's reporting; Palast has joked that they should tour together). With an appearance on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect, an excerpt in Harper's magazine (and here on AlterNet), and countless radio spots, Palast's day in the sun Stateside may have arrived.

What, then, has been the problem on this side of the Atlantic?

"I tear my hair out about this stuff," Palast says, almost jovially over Indian food. "But I have three words for you: Time. Risk. Money." Investigative work is costly and expensive. In his book, Palast asks, "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."

Of course, Palast has been published, a little bit, Stateside. Here, he is best known for breaking a story that revealed how thousands of black voters were kept off the voting rolls in Florida in the last presidential election. He opens his book with this: "You could call this book: What You Didn't Read in the New York Times. For example, five months before the November 2000 election, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida moved to purge 57,700 people from the voter rolls, supposedly criminals not allowed to vote. Most were innocent of crimes, but the majority were guilty of being Black."

Salon.com followed up on this story, awarding Palast's work their "Political Story of the Year" award. The Nation and the Washington Post then also ran with it.

So why is Palast still complaining? Because the Washington Post, he says, published the story 8 months after he sent it to them.

That lag may have made a crucial difference. "For that particular story, there were underlying political reasons why major newspapers didn't want to upset the election of George Bush," says Ben Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly and former dean of the graduate school of journalism at UC Berkeley. "If they were going to make a big investigative noise about it, it had to be soon enough, i.e., before the Supreme Court really chose the next president." Those eight months, in other words, were the difference between a story with "legs" and a crippled story.

"In London," Bagdikian continues, "there are newspapers that cover the whole political spectrum from right to left ... Therefore, stories that have strong economic and political connotations are more apt to be revealed in one or more of the major papers, simply out of ideological interest." And as Palast notes, in contrast to most American media outlets, "my paper, the Guardian, and its Sunday sister the Observer are the world's only leading newspapers owned by a not-for-profit corporation, as is BBC television."

So the Post's crucial lag time is why Palast still has beef. "You know, I should be grateful to the Post," he says. "But I'm sorry, if it was news in June [2001], how could it not have been news in November [2000], when the ballots were still being counted?"

Palast doesn't really seem sorry. Instead, he seems amused by the anger he provokes both in other journalists and people in power. The following fan mail is included on the fly leaf in his book: "Your Bullshit axe to grind with Bush is just another example of how far a punk ass loser will go to slander our president." He also includes a front page photo of him in the London Mirror with the headline "THE LIAR." Palast seems to get a kick out of this stuff.

Not all journalists think it's an outrage that Palast's work doesn't get more play here. The Columbia Journalism Review found Palast's complaints "annoyingly self-righteous," in their review of the book Into the Buzzsaw, a collection of articles by journalists whose investigative stories were buried. Karen Rothmyer, a veteran journalist who also happens to be the managing editor of The Nation, doesn't think that Palast's inability to catch fire in the U.S. points to any systemic problems. "I just don't buy that thesis," Rothmyer says. While there's room for improvement overall, Rothmyer says that Palast is "one of a lot of people who do this kind of stuff. He does some good work, other people do good work."

When pressed for examples of an American version of Greg Palast, Rothmyer says, "I'm not thinking about any particular individual. The Wall Street Journal's stock in trade is exposing scandals in the business community. Anyone on the left should never let a morning go by without making sure to read it. The other business press, the Times did some great stuff on banking scandals in Russia. So each of them takes their turn at doing great stuff. It tends to be individual reporters who are on a beat, really digging and getting a good story .... There's a lot of good reporting on what American companies do."

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