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Resources for Newspaper Students

What happens when investigative reporters do their job...too well?

Keeping the Reporters in Line

Reporting scandals...also means scandals about reporting. Some recent scandalous examples of censorhip, silencing, marginalization and campaigns against investigative reporters.

Some useful sources:

Project Censored's website for the top "censored" stories of the last few years.
Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into the Buzzsaw:Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press. Amherst, NY; Prometheus Books, 2002.

Greg Palast on the 2000 elections.
Greg Palast reports for BBC News and the Guardian (UK) because he can't publish his hard-hitting investigations in the US media. See his BBC Newsnight report, "What really happened in Florida?" You can find both a transcript and the video on the BBC website. In a number of places, in particular in his best-selling book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast details evidence that Florida officials ordered the illegal purge of over 50,000 voters from the voter registration rolls, using unverified data from a Republican-connected firm, DBT (Database Technologies). They were purged on the grounds that they were ex-felons and Florida law deprives ex-felons of voting rights, but in fact very few were felons and about 54% were African American and "most of the others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats." The story ran on p.1 of the Guardian in England shortly after the election, but was not ocvered in the US either in print or broadcast media until after the US Civil Rights Commission report on the Florida election used Palast's documents to report the election abuses. See also a short account by Palast in "Into the Buzzsaw," pp. 65-75 (from which the quote was taken).
See Palast's early article in The Nation.

Chiquita Banana
Mike Gallagher and Cameron McWhirter of the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote an extensive investigation of Chiquita Corporation's alleged corrupt business practices in Latin America. (Cincinnati Enquirer 5/3/98). Gallagher made extensive use of company voice-mail messages, in which he was helped by a Chiquita employee. After Chiquita threatened to sue the Enquirer, Gallagher was fired for stealing Chiquita property. The Enquirer retracted the story, not challenging the facts, but claiming in a front-page apology that the series presented an unfair picture of Chiquita's business practices.

See Bruce Shapiro's account in Salon's Media Circus, "Rotten Banana: While the media race to condemn the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who broke into Chiquita's voice mail, they're forgetting who the real villain is." Shapiro points out that many of the charges of criminal and corrupt practices did not depend on the stolen voice mails--evading laws limiting foreign ownership, use of private security guards to brutalize plantation workers, exploitative wages and inhumane conditions on the plantations, spraying of toxic pesticides on fields while workers are present leading to at least one death.

See Gallagher's and McWhirter's articles on various websites.

Gary Webb's Dark Alliance
Gary Webb's Dark Alliance, a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News, exposed drug running by the Contras, the US-supported guerrillas who attempted to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Webb's series claimed that the Contras sold cocaine to finance their activities, introduced crack cocaine in LA ghettoes; that government officials knew about this and did nothing about it. The San Jose Mercury News put the material on its website, which include vast amounts of evidence not in the print edition, at that time an innovative use of a newspaper website. After attacks on the series in leading media and government denials, Webb, an award-winning investigative reporter, saw his newspaper publish an apology, take down the Dark Alliance website and order all digital files destroyed. Webb resigned from the Mercury News and is now an investigator for the California State Legislature.

The series began on 8/8/96. Webb wrote a book about it: Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion is available for sale on-line. Webb was slipped a CD ROM of the website publication and you can find it here on Webb's website.

A short account of the story by Webb is in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into the Buzzsaw:Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press. Amherst, NY; Prometheus Books, 2002.

Farther back, see Seymour Hersh's Pulitzer-prize winning investigation of the My Lai massacre, out of print but available for sale on the web.
Seymour Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. New York, 1970.
--Cover-Up. The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4. New York, 1973.