News in Exile



March 10, 2001


BROOKE GLADSTONE: What the American press does not cover is every bit as important as what it does cover, and what it hasn't covered says reporter Greg Palast, is the theft of the presidential election in the State of Florida. Now Palast is a U.S. citizen who has done a great deal of investigative work on this subject, and it's gotten front page treatment on the country's leading paper, but not his country. It was the lead in Britain's Guardian newspaper and warranted a hefty 14-minute story on Britain's BBC. Greg Palast, welcome to On the Media.

GREG PALAST: Hi, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now first could you summarize your findings for us?

GREG PALAST: Well what I found was that the State of Florida -- Katherine Harris's [sp?] office, under the direction of Governor Jeb Bush ordered the removal of 64 thousand names using - they used the computer system to find 64 thousand people who were supposedly felons. About half of these people were African-American but almost none of them were felons. So you had several thousand people -- probably tens of thousands of people -- barred from voting in the November election.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And mostly Democrats.

GREG PALAST: Mostly Democrats. Those are Al's votes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay. So you say that with the exception of the Orlando Sentinel and C-Span, no other news organization, at least no major ones, did any work on this story?

GREG PALAST: No work. I mean I got a lot of praise and comment from Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, et cetera, from their columnists and they repeated the allegations from BBC and The Guardian which is the major newspaper here in Britain. Yet there was no followup on the news pages. No ev-- no comment - no reflection - nothing in the American media despite the thousands of reporters kind of milling around looking at each other in Florida.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I have a piece from January 11th from USA Today that addresses the question of voter fraud and specifically the exclusion of African-Americans from the rolls, but doesn't answer the question. Is that your main complaint - that no one nailed it down?

GREG PALAST: Well it's not like the information wasn't around before the election, so I'm a little bit stunned at my fellow reporters for not questioning what was happening in Florida beforehand. Florida was the only state to use a private corporation -- and this one was - this private corporation was Republican party-connected --to use a private corporation to go through voter rolls and suggest names to be purged from voter rolls! That's pretty serious stuff. That information was available before the election.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now this organization is called Database Technology?

GREG PALAST:Database Technologies which was paid 4 million dollars, several times what companies are normally paid for this type of work, to use computers to hunt down supposed felons. The company told us that they were told by the State of Florida to provide more names than could actually be verified. Now they were paid to actually verify whether these people were in fact felons, in-- but in fact they didn't go through with any verification process, and they were told they didn't have to by the state, according to the company. So I'm not blaming DBT per se; but certainly the State of Florida I'm blaming. I should say that I took a BBC camera crew in to talk to the Department of Elections, and the head of the Department of Elections under Katherine Harris, a guy named Clay Roberts, he just literally ripped off the microphone and ran away from the cameras yelling stop the cameras when we asked him about the contracts! What's interesting is that I was the first television reporter to ask the question -- did you systematically remove these names, and did you pay this company to give you a bunch of names that you knew and that they told you would not -- would contain many people who had the right to vote? My problem is how come I was the first reporter to ask? My cameras didn't show up until this month! We had like CBS -- at least they began to pick up the story; they had talked to me and gotten names and phone numbers, et cetera. But as soon as they got a stone cold denial from Jeb Bush's office, it was investigation closed! That's the entire nature of investigative reporting in America, unfortunately--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why do you think the proud tradition of investigative reporting in the United States has come to this pass?

GREG PALAST: You know when you have a for-profit, multi-billion dollar corporation, they don't take on risks; they don't take on costs.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How important an issue do you think the threat of lawsuits is on investigative journalism?

BOB GARFIELD:We have the wonderful privilege of a First Amendment in the U.S. which we don't have anywhere else in the world. Certainly don't have it in Britain. What's missing in the U.S. frankly is more courage! Once the governor of Florida says I did nothing; these allegations are baloney; to them - that's it - story closed. NAACP alleges; the official says that's baloney; and then that-- Ted Koppel asks a couple of people some questions. Good night. See you tomorrow. You get your 90-second reports on the CBS Evening news--; that's it! That's American news!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Greg Palast, thank you very much.

GREG PALAST:Sorry if I sound a little bitter, but you know the American style of news has forced me into exile with my family until things change.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thanks again.

GREG PALAST: You're very welcome!