Hello from Berlin to Peter,
Colleagues and Students:
Ah, Greg Palast.
Every time I read him I get the
same feeling. There is a scene in the Godfather when the character Virgil
Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) asks Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden) to frisk Michael
Corleone (Al Pacino) while they are packed in a car. McCluskey leans over the
seat and struggles and strains to find a weapon while they both contort
themselves. When he is done,
McCluskey says something like: “I’m getting too old for this.”
Greg Palast makes me feel old.
Because while his style of delivering news – a mix of persuasive facts and
evidence and snotty, cruel tabloid-style comments – might be the way of the
future, I won’t be joining him for the ride.
For a moment, I’ll set aside the
issue of language and civility. I may simply have to come to terms with the fact
that my probably quaint ideas about how you do and do not talk to others – even
through a news article – are probably 19th century relics.
But what about the stories
themselves? How do they hold up?
This is not an easy question,
precisely because of the way he writes them. Absolutely dead-on evidence of
possible official misconduct is almost always there. But that evidence is often
sprinkled piecemeal into the polemic. I suppose I am tired of having to decode
Palast’s stories and separate the wheat from the chaff. In fact, I just read the
story that Peter so kindly forwarded and I felt a little like I was reading a
computer file in which the words have become accidentally jumbled. I eventually
got the clear line of argument and evidence, and I eventually got appropriately
indignant, but not without some effort. I’m not sure that clear arguments and
evidence emerge most effectively out of tabloid snark-talk.
Neither do I find Palast that
witty. That is my problem. It seems
that in a violent and angry and unsubtle age, sledgehammer “wit” has become the
new “subtle.” I am sure it will find its readership. To Palast’s credit, it has.
It’s just not my cup of Diet Pepsi.
Which leads to the meanness. I do
feel more and more quaint these days. Perhaps some crimes and corruption do call for making fun of people
in highly personal ways. Maybe when the subject of a story starts to cry, and
that subject is implicated in corrupt acts, it is appropriate to make fun of
their crocodile tears. I really don’t know. I just know I don't have it in me. I
can see carefully and
devastatingly building a case of crimes and corruption. Just not the personal
stuff.
Whenever I read Palast and his
fascinating stories, I always have the same fantasy: Why can’t he put out two
columns? Column #1 would be for those who enjoy the unfunny polemic in which the
evidence is buried and Column #2 would have only the evidence. That way his
piece would impact both his loyal readers and those of us who share the
indignation but not the taste for his style of reporting.
Steve
I don't know how many of the younger members of this list have heard of
Greg Palast, an American-born investigative journalist who works for the BBC and
the Guardian newspaper. His reporting is also collected in books like "Armed
Madhouse," which has been a New York Times bestseller.
Here is a recent piece by him. I thought you would find it interesting as
an example of an unusual journalistic approach. Palast adopts a feisty,
even nasty voice, which he links to hard-core investigative reporting and tough
questioning.
The question of forging a journalistic style that mixes passionate
indignation with solid facts is ever more important as the mainstream profession
struggles to find a voice that will engage citizens -- especially young
citizens, who increasingly get their news from "fake news"& satiric
journalism. The American Journalism Review's current cover story provides a
measure of the concern <
Http://www.ajr.org/>. It asks
what the profession can learn from Jon Stewart. But it's no easy thing to
combine the professional code of objectivity with excited/exciting reporting
emerging that carries an attitude and isn't afraid to call absurdity and
evil what they are.
In this context, what do you all think of Palast's work? Is it a
viable, affective journalistic approach?
One more thing -- The enclosed piece is about the issue of the GOP using
"caging lists" to disenfranchise voters, particularly African-American voters.
The piece has the details, but here's the striking thing. If you get interested
in this problem, and go to Lexis-Nexis to see what has been in the papers, you
will find essentially _no_coverage by the US press. (The single, puzzling
exception was the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Press. Go figure. But try searching
"caging lists" and "election" and see what you get.
Maybe the problem of "caging lists" is total nonsense. Read Palast's piece
and see what you think. But it isn't nonsense, and the extraordinary silence of
virtually the entire journalism establishment demonstrates how the
press keeps truly controversial issues (like the possibility that the 2004
election was fixed) completely out of public discussion (even as it does many
laudable, excellent projects).
---------- Forwarded message
----------
From: Greg
Palast <
[log in to unmask]>
Date: Jun 18, 2007 12:51
PM
Subject: The Tears of a Clone - Conyers Closes in on Karl and his
Rove-bots...
To: [log in to unmask]
The Tears of a Clone
Conyers Closes in on Karl and his Rove-bots
...
By Greg Palast
| June 18, 2007
Special to BRAD BLOG
Boo-hoo! I made Tim Griffin
cry.
He cried. Then he lied.
You remember Tim. Karl Rove's right
hand (right claw?) man. The GOP's ragin' cagin' man.
Griffin is the
Rove-bot exposed by our BBC Newsnight investigations team as the man
who gathered and sent out the infamous 'caging' lists to Republican state
chairmen during the 2004 election.
Caging lists, BBC discovered, were
used secretly as a basis to challenge the right to vote of thousands of citizens
- including the homeless, students and soldiers sent overseas. The day after BBC
broadcast that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, sought our
evidence on Griffin, Tim resigned his post as US Attorney for Arkansas. That job was a
little gift from Karl Rove who made room for his man Griffin by demanding the
firing of US prosecutor Bud Cummins.
Last week, our cameras captured
Griffin, all teary-eyed, in his humiliating kiss-off speech delivered in
Little Rock at the University of Arkansas where he moaned that, "public service
isn't worth it."
True. In the old Jim Crow days in Arkansas, you could
get yourself elected by blocking African-Americans. (The voters his caging game
targeted are - quelle surprise! - disproportionately Black
citizens.)
But today, Griffin can't even get an unemployment check. When
he resigned two weeks ago following our broadcast, the cover story was that the
voter persecutor-turned-prosecutor had resigned to work for Presidential wannabe
Fred Thompson. But when Thompson's staff was asked by a reporter why they would
hire the 'cagin' man,' suddenly, the 'Law and Order' star decided associating
with Griffin might take the shine off Thompson's badge, even if it is from the
props department.
Griffin, instead of saying that public service "isn't
worth it," should have said, "Crime doesn't pay." Because, according to experts
such as law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 'caging,' when used to target Black
voters' rights, is a go-to-prison crime.
By resigning, Tim may not avoid
the hard questions about caging - or the hard time that might result. When I
passed the first set of documents to Conyers (a real film noir moment, in a New
York hotel room near midnight), the soft-spoken Congressman said that,
resignation or not, "We aren't done with Mr. Griffin yet..."
Tears Not Truth
Back in Little Rock, when asked
about caging, Rove's guy linked a few fibs to a few whoppers to some
malefactious mendacity. That is, he lied.
"I didn't cage votes. I didn't
cage mail," Griffin asserted.
At the risk of making you cry again, Tim,
may I point you to an email dated August 26, 2004. It says, "Subject: Re:
Caging." And it says, "From: Tim Griffin - Research/Communications" with the
email [log in to unmask]. RNCHQ is
the Republican National Committee Headquarters, is it not, Mr. Griffin? Now do
you remember caging mail?
If that doesn't ring a bell, please note that
at the bottom is this: "ATTACHMENT: Caging-1.xls". And that attachment was a
list of voters.
In last week's pathetic farewell, Mr. Griffin averred
that the accusation he was involved in caging voters, "Goes back to one guy -
whose name I won't mention." (FYI, Mr. Griffin: My mother calls me, "Gregory.")
Yes, I first reported the story for BBC London - back in 2004
which, as Griffin correctly noted, it was ignored by my US press colleagues
until, as Tim put it, "I became embroiled in the US Attorney thing." By 'the US
Attorney thing,' I assume you are referring to your involvement in firing and
smearing honest prosecutors and grabbing one of their salaries for yourself.
You say, Mr. Griffin, that the unmentionable reporter, "Made [it] up out
of whole cloth." You flatter me, Mr. Griffin. We could not possibly be so
creative at The Beeb as to construct the thousands of names of voters on your
caging lists.
And by the way, we don't have just one of your "caging"
emails, but scores of them.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you
for sending them to us - even if that was not your intent. You copied your
caging missives to ' [log in to unmask].' Mr. Doster was Chairman of the
Florida Bush campaign - but that address was not his but John Wooden's
pretending to be the Bush campaigners. Wooden then sent your notes to
me.
Rove in Range
By the way, Mr. Griffin, if
you want an explanation of 'caging voters,' just read an email dated February 5,
2007 by...Tim Griffin.
In that email, Griffin references the Bush
campaigns mailing out thousands of letters. The letters returned ('caged') as
undeliverable were used as the GOP's supposed evidence that these were
"thousands of fraudulent voter registrations." These voters were subject to
challenge. However, these caging lists of "fraudulent" addresses, like the 2000
"felon" lists which in fact contained no felons, contained no fraudulent voters.
But that wouldn't necessarily save them from the massively successful Republican
voter-challenge campaign.
During the appearance he made in Arkansas last week , Griffin said he'd
never heard of 'caging.' "I had to look it up," he said. Griffin discovered that
"caging" is "a direct mail term."
I don't doubt Griffin's ignorance.
Griffin's just a good ol' boy, a former military lawyer, who wouldn't know
direct mail terminology from a hole in the ground. Until he went to work for the
RNC.
So where did Tim get this direct mail term he used in his emails?
Well, before Karl Rove signed on with George W. Bush, he owned Karl Rove & Co ....a direct mail firm. Rove made millions
making up lists of voters, doing more 'caging' than a zoo-keeper.
Am I
saying caging-expert Rove had something to do with the allegedly illegal caging
games of his boy Griffin? Does a bear...?
Mr. Griffin wouldn't answer
BBC's requests for comment. So I suggested to an Arkansas local, Luther Lowe, a
former army reservist and himself a victim of a challenge to his vote, that at
the Little Rock send-off for Griffin, he ask the fallen US Attorney about Rove's
involvement in caging. Lowe did so, politely. Griffin wove, ducked, blathered
and blubbered. But wouldn't answer.
Maybe a subpoena would encourage a
Griffin response. And a grant of immunity from the Conyers committee. That's
Rove's nightmare. Because unless Griffin joins Alberto Gonzales in Club Amnesia,
Griffin has a lot to tell us about Mr. Rove and targeting Black voters.
Will he? It's not Conyers' style to hunt down Rove. The congressman is
not, despite what Republicans say, a partisan hit man. He is, however, one
tenacious legislator who told me he would like his committee, "to follow where
the evidence leads."
But that's not necessarily going to happen. Conyers
told me he sees the evidence in the prosecutor firing investigation leading to
the much bigger, nastier issue of voter suppression - in simpler terms, fixing
elections.
Unfortunately, many on his committee from both parties see
the hearings as limited to the single issue of the firing of prosecutors. They
want to scrutinize the elephant's trunk but refuse to acknowledge it's attached
to an elephant: election rigging. Racially poisoned, direct-mail driven,
computer implemented election rigging.
But Conyers may get there yet, to
the issue of elections manipulation. I didn't get that from the Chairman (too
circumspect to let his future intensions slip out). I got it from the Big Bubba.
When I ran into Ol' Silver Eyes himself at an Air America soiree, Bill Clinton
(man, he's gotten thin!) told me, "When we really get going on these prosecutor
hearings, when we really dig deep, we're going to get right to the issue of
voter suppression."
But what do you mean "we," Bill? Conyers is dean of
the Congressional Black Caucus, which has an abiding concern and painful
experience with illegal vote suppression of all types: caging, purging,
challenging, lynching. But whether Conyers can convince his committee, mostly
members of the Congressional White Caucus, to "dig deep" on vote suppression, is
an open question.
In the meantime, Conyers has convinced his committee
to drop subpoenas on Harriett Miers (the lady tight with Griffin, Rove and,
notably, George W. Bush) and Sara Taylor, Rove's Gal Friday. Conyers,
methodically, determinedly, is circling in on Rove, "Bush's Brain," a man known
to surrender the corpses of his allies in place of his own (eh, Mr. Libby?). No
wonder Griffin's in tears.
So here's a hanky, Mr. Griffin. This
unnamable reporter would rather you save your tears for Randall Prausa. The
African-American soldier was on active military duty when he ended up on one of
your caging lists, what you term a suspected 'fraudulent' voter subject to GOP
challenge because he was not home to get his fraudulent, 'Welcome, voter,'
letter from the GOP.
Can you guess, Mr. Griffin, why Prausa wasn't at
home? Well, unlike Messrs. Rove and Bush, Prausa was serving his country
overseas.
And that's what caging is all about. If you're Black, you get
shipped to Baghdad and you lose your vote. Mission Accomplished, Mr. Griffin.
Mission Accomplished, Mr. Rove.
===
The confidential Griffin
e-mail, "Subject: Re: Caging," is reproduced in Greg Palast's New York Times
bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House
Gone Wild. Available at www.GregPalast.com
Also: Catch the film of Randi Rhodes
and Greg Palast on "Bush's and Giuliani's favorite vultures," the men with
connections to the Bush Administration who have siphoned off the money meant for
Africa's poorest. Video online here.
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Peter Parisi, Ph.D.
Dept. of Film & Media
Studies
Hunter College
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"People don't change. They just find out who they are."
-- Ray Skean