By Danny Schechter
Investigative reporting used to be the sexiest part of the news business, and the most respected. The mystique of the journalist as a crusading sleuth inspired generations to go into the business in hopes of becoming a dragon slayer in the service of truth, justice and the Pulitzer Prize. The fire to break exposés and make news burned in the heart of every journo.
A movie, "All the President's Men," was made that venerated the Washington Post's Woodward and Bernstein for helping to bring down the Watergate-era Nixon White House. Another legendary reporter of the era was the fearless Seymour Hersh, long-time New York Times fixture who helped expose the My Lai massacre and many other cover-ups that made page one. He became a legend for his ferocity and skill as a digger-upper of official secrets.
On September 7, a few days before hell erupted at the World Trade Center, Hersh, now with the New Yorker, was onstage at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for a symposium honoring the memory of muckraker Lorana Sullivan (1937-1999), one of the first women in mainstream financial journalism, who investigated the BBCI scandal for the Wall Street Journal and top London papers. Sy was holding forth along with Lowell Bergman, the former "60 Minutes" producer whose exploits in a tobacco investigation were portrayed by Al Pacino in the film The Insider, Diana Henriques of The New York Times and Stanley Penn, formerly with the Wall Street Journal. The panel was moderated by Chuck Lewis, who founded and runs the impressive Center for Public Integrity, which specializes in uncovering the dirt on politics and elections.
They were talking about the challenge of investigating international business in an era of globalization in which some multinational companies have accumulated more power than most governments. You would think that journalism students would be out in force with so many big guns on one stage.
Alas. Even the J-schools' dean, former reporter Tom Goldstein, was dismayed that so many stayed away. Perhaps they know something that those of us of an earlier generation are just learning — that investigative reporting is not given the respect or resources it once enjoyed. As virtually every speaker confirmed, there is less time and money allocated for real digging. News outlets have proliferated; enterprise journalism has not.
Many younger people just starting out fear they will never be able to command the resources that prestigious journalists working for well-funded, elite outlets do. Perhaps the idea of spending months on one story is intimidating. But still, you would think there would be more curiosity from those breaking into the business. The turnout was respectable, but there was far more gray hair than purple in the room.
And after you hear the panelists' battle stories, it is hard to be very optimistic about the direction the news biz is headed. For one thing, they agreed that corporate interests are becoming more powerful and less transparent. "I see corporations as a criminal state," Hersh said without equivocation. He called them undemocratic and described them as protected by squadrons of high-priced lawyers who conceal their strategies in documents written in "Serbo-Croatian." To understand what they are doing takes an "unbelievable effort," he said, recounting how several law firms threatened him and evaded his investigations at every turn.
The panelists agreed that ordinary Americans have no idea what most companies do, how they spend their money or how much they get away with. Hersh underscored this point in suggesting that most oil companies rake in fortunes off the top. He complained how hard it is to explain the various tax dodges, accounting practices and pricing strategies that are used to deceive the public and shareholders. "It is dense," he repeated, "dense." At the same time, with the backing of the New Yorker, Hersh has had the luxury of lots of time, significant support and acres of space to publish his findings. Nevertheless, even he concluded, "You have no idea. None of us do."
Discussions ranged over investigative techniques and sourcing--how to dig out info from government documents, disgruntled employees, dissatisfied shareholders and unhappy customers. Lowell Bergman too had tales of problems with companies he has worked for, including ABC and CBS. Jack Welch, the recently retired chair and CEO of General Electric, came in for special criticism for being revered by media outlets as a guru on the basis of a best-selling autobiography riddled with banalities. Peter Jennings' hagiographic interview with Welch was cited.
Will ABC Investigate NBC?
It was at that point that I rose to ask when business reporters were going to turn their attention to media companies. I said I doubted that we would ever have ABC investigating NBC or a guy like Welch, who Congressman Henry Waxman (a Democrat from California) believes influenced interfered with and NBC's decision to lead the pack in calling Florida early for Gore on Election Day, then retracting and going for Bush. I felt pretty self-righteous, not anticipating what would happen next.
A young journalist rose from across the room, revealing that she works for ABC News and had just completed an investigative report on Welch and GE's dumping of PCBs in the Hudson River, an environmental crime the U.S. government ordered the company to clean up at considerable expense after years of delay, lawsuits and PR campaigns.
Uh-oh. I sensed I was about to be made to seem like a fool for accusing ABC of not doing an investigation that they had in fact done. I feared that my credibility was about to fly out the window of an institution that a former dean had once described as "the Taj Mahal of American journalism." (I am not sure if she realized that the real Taj Mahal was built as a tomb!)
But, no, she had actually risen to be supportive, disclosing in a hesitant and spontaneous way that ABC's piece, reported by its investigative superstar Brian Ross, had never aired. It was killed!
Now that was a showstopper. The reasons it had been killed, she said, had to do with the network's other priorities the week it was scheduled — among them a new development in the then-long-running Gary Condit soap opera. ABC News held the GE story, only to find a week later that the Environmental Protection Agency was ruling against GE. At that point, network brass concluded that the story was no longer newsworthy. Rather than update it, they buried it the way GE had buried its industrial waste in the river. Welch's role never got a primetime airing.
At that point, Hersh turned on her, asking why she was even bothering to tell us this, as if network journalists publicly reveal every day how their work is censored. His attitude highlighted the huge gap between reporters who have made it and younger staffers who have less influence over corporate media enterprises in getting important stories aired.
Afterwards, after Hersh baited her and she realized the import of what she had disclosed, she at first wanted to retract everything, knowing she had spilled her guts in a room full of media people. She feared she would be fired. Fortunately, most of the journalists there, including myself (a former ABC producer), comforted her, telling her how brave she was. I also reassured her that ABC would never dare to dismiss her for being honest at a university media symposium. Let's hope that is true. More troubling is that despite all the journalists in the room, I still haven't seen her disclosure in print. Just to be safe, though she knows I am writing this, I am not going to name her. Isn't it sad for media people to live in the republic of fear?
One can only hope that more media workers summon up the courage to go public with the pressures they work under and their own anecdotes about how the media system has abandoned so much of its crusading mission.
It also disturbed me that a second panel, made up of reporters from TV and print in Britain, told a similarly depressing story about their fights to get support and airtime for investigations. The Observer's Greg Palast recounted lawsuits he is facing from a gold company tied to former President Bush that he believes ripped off the U.S. government and was complicit in the killings of African miners (read Laura Flander's article on the libel suit). His newspaper was threatened with ruinous lawsuits in a country where draconian libel laws still constrain a free and vigilant press.
I am talking about this pre-September 11 event because it illustrates a problem within media institutions that may get worse in the weeks ahead. The tension between media as a business and media as public service will be tested sharply as the world lurches toward a war where censorship and self-censorship are likely to increase and intensify.
The panel at the Columbia J-School was not an academic exercise but a portent of the needs and gaps in the coverage that surrounds us now. I didn't realize it then. I do now.
— Danny Schechter is the executive editor of MediaChannel.org. His latest book is "News Dissector: Passions, Pieces and Polemics, 1960-2000," from Akashic Books.
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