Charles Lewis stories from The Center for Public Integrity

'Honor and privilege' to work with Mike Wallace

National Amusements Inc. — 2012-04-16T09:55:51-04:00

On Saturday, April 7, 2012, one of the most extraordinary broadcast journalists in American history died at the age of 93. Mike Wallace piqued those in power for more than half a century, nowhere more famously than on the CBS News program "60 Minutes," between 1968 and 2008.

I first met Mike in 1984, when he called me out of the blue one day and asked if I had any interest in working for "60 Minutes." I had been an off-air investigative reporter at ABC News in Washington for more than six years, and I was restless. Within weeks, I had quit my job and moved my wife and daughter to the New York area. I worked as a producer for Mike Wallace at "60 Minutes" for roughly five very exciting and very difficult years, before quitting abruptly in late 1988. Why I broke a four-year contract and left — and how and why I later started the Center for Public Integrity — is a story for another day.

But my favorite investigative exposé with Mike at "60 Minutes" — and there were many great, poignant moments in which the powerful wilted under the lights and his fearless, tenacious questions — was actually my last piece as an associate producer to him, working closely with Lowell Bergman, eight years older than me, who I had met and worked with at ABC back in 1979. I proposed that we produce an investigative segment about a corrupt public school superintendent in Appalachia.

Weeks later, on the eve of filming the story with two camera crews and producer Lowell Bergman and Mike Wallace, we were at our motel, 20 miles away in an adjacent county, eating dinner together, when we were interrupted and invited to a large room in the back of the restaurant, filled with at least two dozen citizens of Clinton County. They had heard "60 Minutes" is in town, and had driven over to secretly tell us about the conditions they had been living through.In developing the school superintendent story, first broken by Richard Whitt of the Louisville Courier-Journal, about the “czar of Clinton County,” I became more sensitive to the physical environs and my own conspicuous presence on the ground there. Robert Polston, with 23 of his relatives on the public payroll and already under investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Education, ruled over perhaps the worst school system in America. It was the lowest-ranked school system in Kentucky, which itself was ranked dead last among all 50 states. There, in the then second-poorest county in the nation, I was followed wherever I drove, and I once met some brave citizens behind a cemetery after midnight, carefully parking my rental car with out-of-town (Jefferson County-Louisville) license plates far away. These nervous whistleblowers were justifiably quite worried about losing their jobs or worse, one of them actually offering me a “piece,” which I quickly realized was a handgun (nothing gets by me). I politely declined, joking that I would probably “shoot my foot off” with it. All the while we talked, a car recognizable to them kept circling the area, seeking to learn where I had gone and with whom I was talking. My indelibly etched memory of this town is that the trees and houses almost seemed to have eyes, especially after dark.

None of these were people I had ever met or interviewed. Some of them broke down and cried. We heard harrowing stories of sexual assault, of arson against people “not with the program,” of federal money for handicapped children never being spent for that purpose, their parents told to keep them at home because there was simply no money to teach them. It was almost indescribable, and, of course, it made a huge impression on Mike, who had just arrived on the scene. Later that night, after we had begun to settle into our motel rooms, we were visited and urged by the Kentucky State Police to leave the area immediately because they said they had received an explicit death threat made against us.

Leaving, though, was out of question to us, and, indeed, the next day at the last school board meeting before the November elections, we let the cameras roll. When confronted by Mike with the questions I had written — what about those 23 relatives on the payroll; do any of these board members ever disagree with you; what about those handicapped children — Polston’s perspiring face turned red, and he literally started chewing his tie while talking. Mike’s piercing public questions (Polston had weeks earlier declined our request for an on-air interview) seemed to embolden some of the citizens to confront Polston directly, all of which we recorded.

Because of the resultant nationwide attention and embarrassment caused by our story — starkly exposing very credible allegations of misappropriation of funds, forgery of government documents, voter fraud and payroll padding — within days Superintendent Robert Polston was removed from his position by the Kentucky governor. It remains the most personally gratifying and inspiring investigative story I’ve ever worked on, because not only were we shining a light on rampant, outrageous corruption, but we also were directly helping the people who had been personally victimized for many years.

What is stunning today is that the viewership of "60 Minutes" during those years was as high as 40 million Americans, and the fact that Mike Wallace did hundreds of segments in his long career, scores of them of that investigative ilk.

Days after our time filming that story in southern Kentucky, Mike began going every day to the Westmoreland v. CBS trial courtroom. While Gen. William Westmoreland eventually withdrew his libel lawsuit against the network for its "CBS Reports" documentary about the Vietnam War, the experience was searing for Mike, who also tried to oversee scripts and cut pieces in the evenings and weekends. After months of that kind of stress and exhaustion, he suffered a nervous breakdown and even attempted suicide. But soon, with the help of medication and the excitement of his work, he was back in the saddle, traveling nonstop, his presence as forceful and indelible as ever.

Mike and I stayed in touch over the years after I left "60 Minutes," and in January 2008, a few months before he turned 90, he kindly agreed to sit down and allow me to interview him in New York for an online, multimedia production (and eventual documentary) called Investigating Power, which will be presented publicly for the first time on April 25, online and at the National Press Club. The project documents “truth to power” moments in contemporary U.S. history and the journalists behind them.

In our interview, Mike, not surprisingly, was becoming forgetful and was not as razor sharp as he had been decades earlier, but, nonetheless, much of what he said was still very insightful. And in light of his passing, I am releasing two video vignettes from our two-hour conversation — one about his friendship with Richard Nixon, the other about his world exclusive interview during the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

Part of Mike Wallace’s legacy is the Knight-Wallace Fellows program at the University of Michigan, generously supported by Mike and Mary Wallace for many years and ably directed for three decades by veteran journalist Charles Eisendrath. Every year 15 to 20 Knight-Wallace Fellows decompress and commiserate in the Wallace House before returning to the journalistic trenches.

Mike and his stellar team of producers won 21 Emmy Awards, and according to CBS, he (and they) received five DuPont-Columbia journalism and five Peabody Awards. In June of 1991, he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. He won the Paul White Award in 1993, the highest honor given by the Radio and Television News Directors Association. And he won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award grand prize in 1996. See The New York Times’ fine coverage of his remarkable life, in text and video.

Mike Wallace will go down in history as the finest on-air investigative interviewer on the most popular and most honored network television news program in U.S. history. At "60 Minutes," he set the gold standard for gutsy, "tough but fair," go-for-the-jugular questioning, and he showed the world and the profession how investigative television news could look, should look.

Despite our serious professional and personal differences, what I learned from Mike was and remains incalculable. And every producer who worked with him knew that, while it might be an excruciating journey, the final product would be superb, because when you got back to the editing room, you almost always would have great material to work with, thanks to his strong presence and adroit interview style.

It was an honor and a privilege to know and to work with him.

False pretenses

Iraq — 2013-05-15T10:39:13-04:00

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:

On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney's assertions went well beyond his agency's assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, "Our reaction was, 'Where is he getting this stuff from?' "
In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year." A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn't been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn't requested it.
In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: "Sure." In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of "compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda." What's more, an earlier DIA assessment said that "the nature of the regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear."
On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team's final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.
On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement "probably is a hoax."
On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources." As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named "Curveball," whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had "decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government]."

The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion.

It was during those critical weeks in early 2003 that the president delivered his State of the Union address and Powell delivered his memorable U.N. presentation.

In addition to their patently false pronouncements, Bush and these seven top officials also made hundreds of other statements in the two years after 9/11 in which they implied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda. Other administration higher-ups, joined by Pentagon officials and Republican leaders in Congress, also routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.

The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, "independent" validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq.

The "ground truth" of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, for example, Bush acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: "It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual "ground truth" regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who's Who of domestic agencies.

On the other hand, a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials, have publicly — and in some cases vociferously — accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence. In the end, these critics say, it was the calculated drumbeat of false information and public pronouncements that ultimately misled the American people and this nation's allies on their way to war.

Bush and the top officials of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on inside the Bush White House in that period. Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government's pre-war intelligence — not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials. And, of course, only four of the officials — Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz — have testified before Congress about Iraq.

Short of such review, this project provides a heretofore unavailable framework for examining how the U.S. war in Iraq came to pass. Clearly, it calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims of bad intelligence.

Above all, the 935 false statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What did they know, and when did they know it?

Statement of Charles Lewis, Executive Director

2011-09-16T15:02:22-04:00

Good morning. The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that does investigative reporting and research on public policy issues in the United States and around the world. Since 1990 the Center has produced more than 250 investigative reports and 13 books. In the past seven years, the Center's work has been honored 26 times by the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and other respected organizations.

The Center is funded by foundations and individuals and the sale of our publications. We do not accept advertising or contributions from companies, labor unions, governments or political parties. We do not take positions or lobby on specific policy or legislative matters. The names of our major donors and other information about the Center are available on our award-winning Web site, www.publicintegrity.org. We gratefully acknowledge support for this project today from the Town Creek Foundation, the New York Community Trust—Everett Philanthropic Fund, and Vincent Ryan.

Late last year, after utilizing 20 researchers, writers and editors over six months, filing 73 Freedom of Information Act requests and even suing the Army and the State Department, we issued a report entitled Windfalls of War, which chronicled and posted online all of the available major Pentagon and State Department contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The report, since updated four times, won the prestigious George Polk award. Substantively, it placed the large, controversial contracts won by Halliburton and its subsidiaries in overall context, definitively revealing that Vice President Dick Cheney's former company has been awarded by far the most taxpayer money in Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes with no bidding. The report also documented how Halliburton and all of the top 10 Iraq/Afghanistan U.S. contractors have also been major political influence players in Washington, spending millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying.

Tracking the Iraq and Afghanistan contracts whetted our appetite to go both broader and deeper, which brings us to this morning. Today we are releasing an exhaustive, unprecedented Center report entitled, Outsourcing the Pentagon: Who's Winning the Big Contracts. For the past nine months, a team of 23 researchers, writers and editors, led by project manager and respected author Larry Makinson, has examined more than 2.2 million contract actions totaling $900 billion in authorized expenditures over the six-year period from fiscal year 1998 through fiscal 2003 (Oct. 1, 1997—Sept. 30, 2003). Our prime source was the Pentagon's own publicly available but obscure procurement databases.

From that, we identified and have profiled online the biggest Defense Department contractors—all 737 of them, including several thousand of their subsidiaries and affiliates—who have received at least $100 million in contracts over the past six years, with breakdowns of each company's total contract dollars, the types of contracts they won, the competition they faced, a list of their key subsidiaries, analysis of their lobbying and campaign contributions, and a list of the chief products and services they sold to the Pentagon. We have then cross-meshed this information with at least two other massive federal data sets, campaign contribution records and lobby disclosure documents, in addition to interviewing dozens of people and filing more than a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests. Again, our Web site is www.publicintegrity.org or this massive study can be accessed directly through www.pentagonspending.org.

From the executive director

2011-11-29T15:42:07-05:00

Good morning. Please allow me to spend a couple of moments talking about the Center for Public Integrity. We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that does investigative reporting and research on public policy issues in the United States and around the world. Since 1990 the Center has produced more than 250 investigative reports and 12 books and in the past seven years has been honored 21 times by the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and other respected organizations. Called "the center for campaign scoops" by the New Yorker magazine, the Center won the Sigma Delta Chi Public Service award for breaking the Clinton White House "Lincoln Bedroom" scandal in 1996, and The Buying of the President 2000 first disclosed that Enron was candidate Bush's top career patron.

The Center is funded by foundations and individuals and the sale of our publications. We do not accept advertising or contributions from companies, labor unions or governments. We do not take positions or lobby on specific policy or legislative matters. The names of our major donors and other information about the Center are available on our award-winning Web site, www.publicintegrity.org. We gratefully acknowledge the support for this project from the Victor Elmaleh Foundation, Edith and Henry Everett and the Popplestone Foundation.

Today, we are announcing the release of The Buying of the President 2004: Who's Really Bankrolling Bush and His Democratic Challengers – and What they Expect in Return. The book, published by HarperCollins, is the third in a series we began here at the Center for Public Integrity back in 1996. This is the only book of its kind, containing investigative profiles and personal histories of the major presidential candidates. In other words, this is the inside skinny about the candidates that you won't see in their campaign ads or on their Web sites.

A team of 53 researchers, writers and editors at the Center for Public Integrity gathered and analyzed thousands of national and local news articles dating back decades, tens of thousands of pages of government data obtained from the Federal Election Commission, the Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and many other federal and state agencies, and we interviewed more than 600 people, including former President Jimmy Carter, and former presidential candidates Robert Dole and John McCain. As part of the Center's trademark "no-stone-unturned" approach, we created several internal computer databases, including one containing about two million campaign finance records of the presidential candidates that allowed us to convert federal, state and soft-money records into "Top Ten Career Patron" lists, ranking the top sponsors of each candidate's career. The Center filed the most Freedom of Information Act requests on a single investigative project in its 14-year-history – 200 requests to more than 100 federal agencies – and we received more than 10,000 documents.

Before getting into our specific candidate and findings, I have a few observations. Our electoral process is broken, with about half or more of America's eligible voters not voting in every federal election cycle. After the Florida recount debacle, in which the likes of Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe lectured us on how to conduct democratic elections, we still do not have a single, standardized system of voting throughout the nation. The campaign process has become so expensive that it limits the talent pool available today to only millionaires or those willing and able to raise substantial sums of cash from wealthy and powerful interests with business before the government. Forty members of the current U.S. Senate are millionaires; less than one percent of the American people are millionaires. And big money mixed with irregular and high-tech redistricting help explain why the incumbent reelection rate in the House of Representatives the past three elections has been more than 98 percent. These are the kind of numbers we expect to see in countries like North Korea or China, not the United States.

Despite campaign finance reform, 2004 already is and will ultimately be the most expensive election in U.S. history. President George W. Bush has shattered his own astounding 1999 fundraising record and collected $130 million in 2003 – that's more than half a million dollars a day – and his campaign has $99 million in cash on hand with no major Republican primary challenger. Bush's official third quarter cash on hand number of $73 million was more than all of the major Democratic candidates and all of the Democratic national party committees combined ($54 million) through September!

There is an especially compelling reason for candidates to make this headlong rush for cash. As we mentioned in the 1996 and 2000 editions of The Buying of the President, the central, most salient, single fact about the White House selection process—a discovery first made by Republican political fundraising consultant Stan Huckaby—is that in every presidential election since 1976, the candidate who has raised the most money at the end of the year preceding the election, and been eligible for federal matching funds, has become his party's nominee for the general election. At midnight on December 31st, it was Carter and Ford who had amassed the most campaign cash in 1975, Carter and Reagan in 1979, Mondale and Reagan in 1983, Dukakis and G.H.W. Bush in 1987, Clinton and Bush in 1991, Clinton and Dole in 1995 and Gore and G.W. Bush in 1999.

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean raised the most money in 2003 among the Democrats, $40 million, his reported total less than a third of Bush's for the year. Dean opted out of the public financing system, which limits what candidates can spend in the primaries, citing the need to challenge Bush's prodigious fundraising as his reason; Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry followed suit, relying on his personal wealth to fuel his campaign. Late entrant Wesley Clark has touted the more than $10 million his campaign raised in its first full quarter of fundraising, and even dark horse candidate Dennis Kucinich trumpeted his larger-than-expected campaign coffers on his Web site.

But all of that campaign money, of course, comes at a very steep price. Call it "the price of power" in our commercial, pay-to-play democracy, but each of the leading presidential candidates for the 2004 election has done public policy favors for his major campaign contributors. They don't exactly put it that way, or want to acknowledge at all how they service their major donors. The simple aim of The Buying of the President 2004 is to get at the unvarnished truth, underneath the layers of obfuscation, rhetorical excess and just plain lies. Enron Corp., the Houston-based energy firm that touched off a financial, legal and political scandal when it declared bankruptcy in December 2001, remains George Bush's top career patron. Enron's employees and political action committee have given more than $600,000 to Bush over the course of his political career. By the way, in 2003, executives of the reorganized, bankrupt, disgraced Enron -- including Joseph W. Sutton, the company's chairman -- continued to contribute to the Bush campaign. In 1997, while he was CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney wrote a letter to Vice President Al Gore, opposing more stringent air standards. "Implementation of these standards," he wrote to Gore, "would cause great harm to consumers, my own industry, and the U.S. economy and will still not deliver the promised significant enhancement of health protection to the American public." As Vice President, Cheney has played a lead role in shaping the administration's energy policies, which critics charge will lead to greater pollution and lower air quality. Ironically, at the end of his letter, Cheney asked that any change in the environmental standards "be addressed in full and open debate." That is not exactly how critics have described the secret, off-the-record, exclusive meetings the Vice President has had with energy executives the past three years.

While governor, Howard Dean pushed for utility contract provisions that saved the power companies, but cost Vermont families millions of dollars in higher skyrocketing rates. Vermont has the sixth highest utility rates in the country, due in part to a series of long-term contracts between its major power companies. After years of pushing for Central Vermont Public Service Corp. and the smaller utilities it held to absorb the excess costs of their expensive contracts, Dean's Department of Public Service agreed to let ratepayers be billed for more than 90 percent of the excess costs—which could soar into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Central Vermont Public Service Corp. donated more than $10,000 to Dean's Fund for a Healthy America PAC—a hefty contribution in a state that limits campaign contributions for statewide offices to $400.

Dean, in his 11 years as governor, did not propose a law or publicly support any legislation requiring financial disclosures for legislators or executive branch officials, meaning that his assets and income of almost $4 million went unreported. Vermont is one of just three states with no such disclosure laws.

We found from Securities and Exchange Commission records that Acxiom, a company that was seeking Homeland Security contracts, agreed to pay former General Wesley Clark hundreds of thousands of dollars for his help in persuading the government to buy the company's wares. Clark was a registered lobbyist while he simultaneously served as a military analyst on CNN, and indeed, Clark was still registered as a lobbyist when he declared his candidacy on Sept. 17, 2003.

Rep. Richard Gephardt tried to lower taxes on alcohol at least five times over the years, much to the pleasure of his largest career patron, Anheuser Busch, which has given him more than $517,000 over the years.

Senator John Kerry wrote letters to the FCC asking it to delay its spectrum auction, keeping in line with his brother's law firm, which represents the telecommunications industry and has given the senator more than $222,000.

Law firms constitute 22 of former trial lawyer Senator John Edwards' top 25 career contributors, and $6.8 million of the $11.9 million he had raised through June 2003 came from lawyers.

After receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from biotechnology companies, Senator Joseph Lieberman hired the industry's top lobbyist for his staff and went on to introduce and co-sponsor bills on which this sector lobbied.

As previous editions of the book illustrated in 1996 and 2000, special interests pre-select the candidates for president before a single primary vote is recorded, and they influence the policies and platforms of the candidates seeking the nation's highest office. The Buying of the President 2004 also provides new information about the "Top 50 Patrons" of the two major political parties, which illuminates the relationships between the presidential candidates and their respective parties. For example, the top "soft money" (large, unlimited contributions) donor to the Republican Party since 1991 has been Philip Morris, contributing $10.3 million. The top "soft money" donor to the Democratic Party since 1991 has been the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), contributing $16.5 million. The book includes chapters on the bitter primary battle Bush campaign workers and allies waged against John McCain, and looks closely at the Florida recount of 2000 and how President-elect Bush failed to reveal the names of hundreds of donors on his disclosure forms, including that of White House strategist Karl Rove. The book also profiles the Republican and Democratic parties, and offers an in-depth look at the first years of the Bush administration.

The Center for Public Integrity will continue to update its information on the candidates and their career patrons throughout the 2004 campaign on our Web site.

The real powers that be in this country are not on any ballot. And they are accountable to no one. The Buying of the President 2004 unmasks the powerful special interests behind our national politics today. The bottom line is that the American people have a right to know who is underwriting their presidential candidates, and their democracy.

Before taking your questions, I want to thank the extraordinary folks who made this book possible. I won't thank all 53 people – check the book itself or the Center's Web site. But special thanks to managing editor Bill Allison, deputy managing editor Teo Furtado, senior editor Alan Green, research editor Peter Smith, project manager Alex Knott, writers Robert Moore, Ben Coates, Mohammad Ismail, Laura Peterson and Brooke Williams, database editors Aron Pilhofer and Derek Willis, Web developer Han Nguyen, and senior researchers Aubrey Bruggeman, Daniel Lathrop, Katy Lewis and Adam Mayle. I won't thank by name the 34 researchers, including the grad students in American University professor Wendell Cochran's class, or the specific Center staff members who have helped in so many ways – but they are all listed in the book.

Thank you.

Commentary

2012-08-07T14:00:29-04:00

On Jan. 16, 2003, Charles Lewis, the executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, addressed the Forum on Media Ownership at the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at the Columbia University School of Law in New York City (see Webcast of the event). Lewis prepared remarks for the event which, because of the time constraints, he had to summarize. We reprint his full prepared remarks here.

Thank you for inviting me to speak this morning about the Media Ownership Rules currently under review by the Federal Communications Commission.

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization based in Washington. We investigate public interest, public service and ethics-related issues, including distortions to the political decision-making process, and we have produced more than 100 reports and 10 books since 1990. Our work has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists or Investigative Reporters and Editors 11 times since 1996. Before founding and directing the Center for Public Integrity, I was an investigative reporter and producer for 11 years at ABC News and the CBS News program 60 Minutes.

The Center for Public Integrity does not advocate for or against government laws or legislation. The federal government in September proposed the most significant change ever in the rules regarding ownership today of the American media. It is not my purpose or prerogative today to substantively discuss those proposed rules or their impact, but instead to sound a cautionary note about the process itself.

Two people I respect enormously, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, recently observed in a New York Times editorial that, "this shift could reduce the independence of the news media and the ability of Americans to take part in public debate." (Full disclosure: Kovach is on the Center's Advisory Board and I am a member of his Committee of Concerned Journalists). The number of independent news-gathering operations that gather original news for 280 million Americans today is small and may become smaller. And this current FCC "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" is the latest in a deregulation process promulgated by the agency over the past 20 years, at the direct and persistent urging of the principal beneficiary, the broadcast industry.

Recent precedent is not auspicious. For example, since the landmark 1996 Telecommunications Act, in which the cable industry promised that deregulation would stimulate market competition and lower monthly cable bills for all Americans, rates shot up 45 percent, nearly three times as fast as inflation. That same law relaxed the rules on ownership of radio, and since then the two largest companies have greatly enriched themselves, increasing their number of stations owned from 130 to 1,400. In 1997, broadcasters lobbied and received portions of the digital broadcast spectrum worth, according to some estimates, upwards of $70 billion—for free.

Through all of the discussion of further deregulation of media ownership rules, and cheery assurances from media corporations that the commitment and extent of independent newsgathering will be unaffected, the current issue of CJR magazine has commented about "The Silence of the Lambs," aptly asking, "Where is the voice of the journalists?"

With the past relaxed ownership and control rules, I have not seen any evidence to credibly suggest that the quality of information provided to the American people has improved, or that the values and commitment to serious journalism in this country have changed for the better.

Indeed, fairly or unfairly, there is a widespread perception that Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have become a rubber stamp over the years for the broadcast industry. And that this latest agency proposal is a done deal, with minimal public input and consultation.

Two years ago, the Center for Public Integrity issued a report entitled, Off the Record: What Media Corporations Don't Tell You About Their Legislative Agendas, which also was the basis for a CJR magazine cover story. Our five-month investigation with half a dozen researchers revealed that, besides delivering the news, the great media companies of today have their own legislative and commercial interests, which they are not always eager to share with the American people. Not only does the media aggressively lobby and contribute to the two political parties and politicians at the federal level, they also decide whose face and voice make it onto the airwaves. Such raw power provokes fear and trepidation in the political realm.

For example, in his January 1998 State of the Union address, after decrying the campaign-fund-raising "arms race" (in which he was an active and enthusiastic participant), President Clinton proposed a major new policy that would address a big part of the problem—the high cost of campaign commercials.

"I will formally request the Federal Communications Commission act to provide free or reduced-cost television time for candidates," the president said. "The airwaves are a public trust, and broadcasters also have to help us in this effort to strengthen our democracy."

Within 24 hours, then-Federal Communications Commission chairman William Kennard announced that the FCC would develop new rules governing political ads.

But days later, the powerful broadcast corporations and their Capitol Hill allies managed to halt this historic initiative. In the Senate, incoming Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and Conrad Burns, a Republican from Montana and the chairman of that panel's communications subcommittee, announced that they would legislatively block the FCC's free air time initiative. "The FCC is clearly overstepping its authority here," McCain said.

In the House of Representatives, 17 Republicans, including then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay, then-Appropriations Chairman Bob Livingston, future House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House Commerce Committee, sent a blunt letter to Kennard. "Only Congress has the authority to write the laws of our nation, and only Congress has the authority to delegate to the Commission programming obligations by broadcasters," they wrote.

Ranking House Commerce Committee member John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat, also sent an opposing letter to Kennard. Faced with the very real threat that his agency's budget would be cut, Kennard had no choice but to retreat from the proposed rulemaking.

It was a humiliating and metaphorical moment for the FCC. In a very public way, the agency and the White House had been flattened "like a pancake," former FCC chairman Reed Hundt, Kennard's immediate predecessor, told me. But the threat of a shrunken budget and a congressional backlash ("[T]he likes of which would not be pleasant to the Federal Communications Commission under any circumstances," was the way Livingston described it), caused the FCC to back down. Free air time went from the fast track to the back burner.

Many politicians in power tend to fear free air time for the leg up it would give to challengers. And more than that, free air time for political candidates would affect the bottom line of a very important industry and Washington player—the media industry. It would cost broadcasters millions of dollars in lost advertising revenue. They were not about to allow a direct affront to their financial self-interest to become law.

Indeed, the media's success in handling the threat of free air time for candidates is but one of a stack of proposals that media companies have flattened like pancakes in Congress and the White House in recent years. Which is why the media is widely regarded as perhaps the most powerful special interest today in Washington—not that you are likely to read, see or hear much about it in national news media stories.

How do media corporations win friends and influence people in our nation's capital? As we noted in our media study, Off the Record, they do it the old-fashioned way, by using the time-honored techniques with which business interests routinely reap billions of dollars worth of subsidies, tax breaks, contracts and other favors. The media lobby vigorously. They give large donations to political campaigns. They take politicians and their staffs on junkets.

Lobbying. From 1996 to 2000, the 50 largest media companies and four of their trade associations spent $111.3 million to lobby Congress and the executive branch of the government. The number of registered, media-related lobbyists increased from 234 in 1996, the year the historic Telecommunication Act became law, to 284 lobbyists in 1999. And that year, the amount of money spent on lobbyists was $31.4 million, up 26.4 percent from the $24.8 million spent in 1996. By way of comparison, in 1998, when media firms spent $28.5 million lobbying, securities and investment firms spent $28 million, labor unions spent $23.7 million, and lawyers spent $19.1 million. The media wasn't the biggest lobbying interest (airlines spent $38.6 million, defense contractors $48.7 million, and electric utilities spent $63.7 million). But unlike the media, none of those interests has the power to determine what subjects are covered in the local paper or on the evening news.
Campaign contributions. From 1993 to June 30, 2000, media corporations gave $75 million in campaign contributions to candidates for federal office and to the two major political parties, according to an analysis of data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics. In the 2000 presidential election, Vice President Al Gore took in $1.16 million and Texas Gov. George W. Bush received $1.07 million from media interests.

The sitting member of Congress with the biggest haul in media money—including his presidential campaign—is incoming Senate Commerce Committee chairman McCain, who collected more than $685,000 between 1993 and mid-2000. Overall, the amount of campaign cash from the media industry is skyrocketing every election cycle, which is typical of political giving in general. For example, media corporations gave $18.9 million in 1997-1998, a 61 percent increase over the previous, 1993-1994 mid-term election cycle.

We found that no media corporation lavished more money on lobbyists or political campaigns than Time Warner. The media giant spent nearly $4.1 million for lobbying in 1999, and from 1993 to 2000, contributed $4.6 million to congressional and presidential candidates and the two political parties. The second heaviest media spender in Washington was Disney, which paid $3.3 million for lobbying and just under $4.1 million in political donations during the same periods of time. This is not a subject either company was eager to discuss. The Center's calls to Gerald Levin, the then-chairman of Time Warner, and to Michael Eisner, chairman of Disney, were not returned. Nor would the CEOs of the other big media political spenders answer our questions: Liberty Media (formerly Tele-Communications, Inc.) chairman John Malone, Viacom's Sumner Redstone, then-Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman, Ralph Roberts, chairman of the board of Comcast Corp., DreamWorks SKG's part-owner David Geffen, and News Corp., Ltd.'s chairman Rupert Murdoch.
Junkets. From 1997 to 2000, media companies took 118 members of Congress and their senior staff on 315 trips to meet with lobbyists and company executives to discuss legislation and the policy preferences of the industry. Lawmakers and their staffs have traveled near and far, to events as close as Alexandria, Va., and as far away as Taiwan. They've spoken at anniversaries of news organizations, gone fact-finding in Cape Town, South Africa, and toured movie studios. The cumulative cost of the trips was more than $455,000. The top three sponsors of these all-expense-paid jaunts were News Corp., the National Association of Broadcasters and the National Cable Television Association. No member of Congress traveled more frequently on the media industry's nickel than Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican. He and his senior staff were taken on 42 trips—one out of eight junkets the industry has lavished on Congress. In December 1999, Tauzin left with his wife, Cecile, on a six-day, $18,910 trip to Paris, sponsored by Time Warner and Instinet Corp., a subsidiary of the Reuters Group PLC, ostensibly for a conference there on e-commerce. The records don't show where they stayed in Paris, but I have a feeling it wasn't Le Holiday Inn.

Another member attending the same meeting, Rep. John E. Sweeney, R-N.Y., reported half the costs incurred by Tauzin, $7,445. Tauzin's wife and his son Michael have accompanied him on several industry-sponsored trips to Palm Springs, Calif.; New York and New Orleans.

Despite calls to his office and home, Tauzin declined to be interviewed. Andrew Schwartzman, a public-interest lawyer and director of the Media Access Project, who has been watching Tauzin for years, told me he is not the least bit surprised about Tauzin's trips. "Billy Tauzin is an active, knowledgeable and involved member of Congress who spends a great deal of time on telecommunications issues," he says, "But unlike some other members, he is not the least bit embarrassed about accepting large quantities of their generosity. This is the Eddy Edwards, Huey Long kind of streak in these guys of wink, wink, I'm a rogue' . . . Billy just kind of revels in it."

The second most frequent flier in Congress courtesy of the media was Thomas J. Bliley, the Republican who chaired the House Commerce Committee. Bliley and his staff logged 19 junkets over a three year period. At the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Tauzin hosted a Mardi Gras-style celebration, complete with floats from Louisiana. The $400,000 affair, heavily attended by lobbyists and pols, was underwritten by, among others, SBC Communications Inc. Not to be outdone, Michael Oxley, now the chair of the House Financial Service Committee, threw an American Bandstand-themed bash, complete with the show's host, Dick Clark, the day before. Oxley's dance party was paid for by contributions of up to $75,000 a pop from the likes of Comsat, Satellite SuperSkyway Alliance, and SBC Communications; the total cost was estimated in the $300,000 to $400,000 range.

The largesse extended by the media industry is not limited merely to Congress. We found that from 1995 to 2000, FCC employees were taken on 1,460 all-expenses-paid trips sponsored by media corporations and associations, costing a total of $1.5 million.

How can the Federal Communications Commission protect the broad public interest on crucial issues such as media ownership when its own employees accept free trips from companies with billions of dollars of business before the agency? Call me crazy, but I have a problem with that.

The intermeshing of public and private sectors has, of course, been an endemic problem in Washington for years, and the social and professional interaction between the media business and the government that regulates it is, not surprisingly, quite extensive. For example, Podesta & Associates (now called Podesta & Mattoon), was the outside lobbying firm representing the widest array of media behemoths. From 1996 to 2000, the company received $1.5 million as the Washington representative for Viacom, Time Warner and NBC. It is co-chaired by Tony Podesta, whose brother John happened to be the White House chief of staff. Twenty-three members of its then- staff of 33 formerly worked on Capitol Hill, for either party. One of them, Kimberley Fritts, is the daughter of the president of the National Association of Broadcasters.

No media organization spent more money lobbying or had more people covering Washington than the National Association of Broadcasters, which paid $16.9 million to persuade government officials from 1996 to 2000. NAB President and CEO Eddie Fritts was a college classmate and is a close friend of former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and on occasion this relationship has been immensely helpful to the broadcasters. There were 20 registered lobbyists at the NAB, seven of whom came through the revolving door from congressional staffs, the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission. Until recently, their ranks included Kimberly Tauzin, daughter of Billy Tauzin.

Media corporations have spared no expense in Washington, hiring all of the "usual suspects" kind of big-name lobbyists: former Republican Party chairman Haley Barbour (CBS); Patton Boggs' Tommy Boggs, son of long-deceased House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Lindy Boggs, and brother of ABC News correspondent Cokie Roberts, (National Cable Television Association; Magazine Publishers of America); former Reagan White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein (Comcast, National Cable TV Association, Time Warner); former Nixon White House aide Tom Korologos (Cox Communications Corporation); former Carter White House aide Anne Wexler (Comcast, Univision Communications Inc.); and former FCC chairman Richard Wiley (CBS). After all, from copyright issues to broadband access to media ownership rules, billions of dollars were at stake for the transforming media industry.

Former Democratic Arizona Sen. Dennis DeConcini, now a partner at his own lobbying firm, said that during his time in Congress, media lobbyists were omnipresent. "I was lobbied a lot by media companies when I was in Congress," DeConcini, who left the Senate in 1995, said. "The 18 years I was there, there were very complex, sophisticated issues that demanded the time of professionals interested in this area."

Frequently, of course, corporate executives are directly involved in lobbying process, and media moguls are no different. In his recent memoir You Say You Want A Revolution, former FCC chairman Hundt recounts important conversations he had with Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., chairman and president (at the time) Ted Turner; QVC Network, Inc., chairman at the time Barry Diller; TCI chairman at the time John Malone; DreamWorks' executive Steven Spielberg; and Disney vice president (at the time) Michael Ovitz.

Hundt candidly described the atmosphere of influence peddling at his agency. "I learned quickly that the volume of lobbying defined the major issues before the agency," he wrote. "A single company might send soldiers from its regiments to the Commission as many as 100 times, visit or phone the chairman on a dozen occasions, call some member of the chairman's staff perhaps daily. Congressional staffers made tens of thousands of telephone calls to the Commission staff. Congressmen wrote letters on behalf of different parties, up to 5,000 or more a year. Sometimes, when the members wanted a particular result, they phoned the commissioners to solicit votes as they might call each other on the Hill. Smart and well-financed lobbyists also ran media strategies to persuade the Commission to write rules in their favor. Industries might spend millions of dollars on television advertising to influence a handful of commissioners."

The nature of the media's political power remains fascinating to Hundt. "The media industry does not mobilize great numbers of voters and it actually is not comprised of America's largest, economically most important companies . . ." The media's significance and political clout, he told me, comes "from its near ubiquitous, pervasive power to completely alter the beliefs of every American." Members of Congress and presidential candidates, he believes, are afraid to take on the news media directly for fear that they will simply "disappear" from the TV or radio airwaves and from news columns.

Still, no single recent media issue more poignantly portrays the clash between public and private interest than the debate over free air time for political candidates. In early 1998, before the president and FCC chairman made their rule-making move, the broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, were already targets of criticism. They were excoriated for reaping potentially billions of dollars in 1997, when Congress gave them for free their government-owned digital spectrum to use for the next generation of technology. There was a rising public clamor around the question, "Do broadcasters have public interest obligations anymore?"

Against this backdrop, television stations and networks separately have been making a financial killing from political advertising. According to data collected by a firm called Competitive Media Reporting, local and national TV political advertising in the top 75 markets alone earned broadcasters $771 million in 2000. Wall Street analysts estimate the complete political ad revenue total was probably closer to $1 billion. In fact, income from political ads has been steadily rising for twenty years—from $90.6 million in 1980 to $498.9 million in 1998.

At the same time, around the nation, news coverage of political candidates is becoming minuscule. For example, the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California discovered that, in the final three months of the 1998 California governor's race, local TV news on the subject comprised less than one-third of 1 percent of possible news time. In 1974, the amount of gubernatorial coverage in California was 10 times greater. Another USC Annenberg finding: The 19 top-rated TV stations in the top 11 markets broadcast, on average, only 39 seconds a night (from 5 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.) about political campaigns. Top stations in Philadelphia and Tampa averaged six seconds a night.

As Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois professor, wrote in Rich Media, Poor Democracy, "Broadcasters have little incentive to cover candidates, because it is in their interest to force them to purchase time to publicize their campaigns."

Recent research seems to bear this out. For example, in the New Jersey Senate primary, in which Jon Corzine spent more of his own money than any Senate candidate in U.S. history, local television stations in New York and Philadelphia made $21 million from political ads. The last two weeks of the campaign, citizens watching top Philadelphia and New York TV stations were 10 times more likely to see a campaign ad than a campaign news story.

Broadcasters, Paul Taylor, founder and executive director of Alliance for Better Campaigns, has said, "are profiteering from democracy." Since 1996, his group, co-chaired by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford and by former CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite, has been calling for the networks and 1,300 TV stations to give at least five minutes of political news coverage a day during the last month before the 2000 election. Ten percent agreed in concept but ultimately only one station complied.

The FCC in 2000 still had some interest, as did a few members of Congress, who proposed requiring broadcasters to provide free air time to political candidates in campaign finance reform measures before Congress. But industry lobbyists did not give an inch to any of them. In formal comments before the agency, the National Association of Broadcasters "respectfully submits that there is no lack of political news and information available for persons who have any interest in obtaining such information. Thus, a voluntary or mandatory requirement for broadcasters to offer additional free time for political candidates is unnecessary." The Radio and Television News Directors Association stated, "Proponents of mandatory air time for political candidates would prefer that the FCC ignore altogether the First Amendment rights of broadcasters. They would have the Commission turn its back on political coverage decisions made by experienced, professional journalists."

Some newspaper editorials about the free air time proposal have been curiously consistent with the extent of their ownership of broadcasting properties. The Los Angeles Times, with no TV stations, wrote supportively of the free air time initiative. The Chicago Tribune, owned by the Tribune Co., which recently purchased the Los Angeles Times and Times Mirror, and also contributes to political candidates and parties and owns 19 TV stations, saw the issue differently.

The newspaper wrote in 1998, "It might be good if candidates didn't have to raise and spend so much money to finance broadcast ads. In that case, let Congress provide public funds to subsidize campaigns. If the public stands to gain from improved candidate access to the airwaves, the public ought to bear the cost." In other words, let the citizens pay for the ads they increasingly must watch.

The dirty little secret is that from 1996 through 1998, the NAB and five media outlets—ABC, CBS, A.H. Belo Corp., Meredith Corp., and Cox Enterprises—cumulatively spent nearly $11 million to defeat a dozen campaign finance bills mandating free air time for political candidates. One company lobbyist willing to talk to us was Jerry Hadenfeldt, who represents Meredith, owner of a dozen TV stations, 20 magazines, and publisher of more than 300 books. "Free political ads are basically picking the pockets of a select group, namely television broadcasters," he said. "They [candidates] already get the lowest available rates, and that's the way we believe it should stay."

Rep. Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat, introduced one of the free air time bills he opposed. She apparently did not realize the extent of the industry maneuverings against her. When told that $11 million had been spent lobbying against her bill and others like it, she said, "Oh, good Lord . . . It seems excessive to me. I am absolutely astonished. They paid $11 million to kill it? Well, it sure worked, didn't it?"

So this is where we are. A regulated industry has a stranglehold over the regulator and its Congressional overseers. Not a new story in Washington, I'm afraid, but one of the reasons Americans frequently distrust government, its officials and its policies.

My simple questions here today are, have the FCC Commissioners given adequate explanation to the public about why giving billions more dollars to the existing broadcast companies is in the national interest? Has the FCC given adequate consideration to the non-economic impact of these proposed rules on our democracy and on the craft of journalism? Is the FCC sufficiently objective and independent to render such judgments, given its past history?

It is not for me to answer these questions, but to let time and history itself be the ultimate judge.