“Tonight, on `PrimeTime Live, it’s Ripoff-City!’ ” the ABC announcer might intone with basso gravity. “Sam Donaldson reveals how urban yuppies, accountants and other city slickers are really farm banditos, living in urban leisure as federal farm subsidy checks pour into their bank accounts.”
It sounds like a suitable promotion for a Donaldson piece, though he’d have to take a pass on this one because, the world learned last week, he’s one of the slickers.
It’s lucky that Wall Street Journal reporter Bruce Ingersoll recalled reading somewhere that Donaldson, ABC News’ slayer of duplicitous and lawbreaking public officials, had a ranch in Lincoln County, N.M.
He called agriculture department offices down there and, through a garrulous official, learned where Donaldson had two farming operations replete with sheep and angora goats. Ingersoll doublechecked computer printouts, which detailed farmers who receive government subsidies, although, for alleged privacy reasons, all such recipients are listed in computer code, not by real names.
He crosschecked farms receiving subsidies with a list of nine-digit ZIP codes with publicly unidentified, subsidized owner-operators. Ingersoll could then discern that somebody on Crest Lane in McLean, Va., received not just $3,500 under a federal conservation cost-sharing program in 1990 (to build watering facilities, a tank and trough for his animals), but $97,000 in wool and mohair subsidy payments in the last two years.
A tiny bit more digging and it was clear that the anonymous owner-operator was Donaldson, a millionaire urban Mr. Green Jeans.
The Ingersoll story, in which Donaldson’s receipt of federal monies was arguably buried last Thursday, was headlined, “As Congress Considers Slashing Crop Subsidies, Affluent Urban Farmers Come Under Scrutiny.”
It was no accident that similar, but often geographically tailored, stories appeared the same day on the front pages of the New York Times (“Farm Aid to Chicago? Miami? Study Hits an Inviting Target”), Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Sun-Times (“Farm Aid in Chicago? Residents Get Millions”), San Francisco Chronicle and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and inside the Tribune.
And there were pieces on the “NBC Nightly News,” CNN, “CBS This Morning” and “ABC World News Tonight,” with ABC citing Donaldson but indicating he had no comment. (One imagines him ordering his secretary: “Tell Jennings I’m having an emergency appendectomy.”)
Whether it was Virginia’s Donaldson, Arnold Travis of elegant Holmby Hills in Los Angeles, or realtor Leonard Richman of the Belden-Stratford Apartments in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, there was a common thread: the trail to their doorsteps was blazed by the sort of small Washington interest group that can play a critical role in formulation of public policy.
The stories were either directly generated-or, in the case of Ingersoll’s, greatly assisted-by the Environmental Working Group, a 19-person non-profit group headed by Kenneth Cook, 43, a respected Washington insider-activist.
His issues are agriculture and conservation. He’s a trained soil-erosion expert and free-lance writer-consultant. Big farm legislation comes up for renewal in Congress every five years, as is true in 1995. He’s a real player who spearheaded major environmental provisions in 1985, explaining why one farm writer tags him the “Ralph Nader of farming” (meaning many farmers detest him).
He testifies before committees and is well-liked by many top staffers and legislators, notably Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the straitlaced chairman of the Agriculture Committee and presidential candidate who’s attacking many agricultural subsidies.
He’s also lured foundation money, including from Chicago’s Joyce Foundation, and gifts of three heavy-duty Apple computers, which mock the days when a reporter slogged through paper records by hand.
For three years he has relied on readily available government data, as well as hard-to-procure statistics via Freedom of Information Act requests, to compile a data base on suspect agricultural subsidies. It all surfaced last Thursday in a report titled “City Slickers” and in well-orchestrated, virtually simultaneous testimony he gave to Lugar’s committee and a press conference held by his group.
With the farm bill’s $12 billion in programs up this year, Cook doesn’t want a “narrow” debate. Rather than let deficit-obsessed Republicans simply make across-the-board cuts, he wants a broader discourse that touches everything from subsidy excesses to environmental concerns.
Three years ago, he started filing those Freedom of Information Act requests. The computer revolution has allowed him to compile a gargantuan 50 gigabyte data base. That included the 110 million checks written by the department in a 10-year period for various subsidy programs, whose original purpose was to assist economically struggling farm families.
Just tabulating a year’s worth of data, and breaking out individual payments to farm producers, was daunting. It took two of his potent Power Macintosh computers two weeks, running 24 hours a day.
His group, expanded to include full-time computer processers, began to hit paydirt in November after receiving separate files on the ZIP codes (some five-digit, some nine-digit) where residents got subsidy checks. Further, Cook received data allowing the group to link all of the recipients who might have received payments from a specific farm to that farm.
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What ensued was a hellacious job of computer collating in which one could finally match a subsidy check with the property and, in many cases, a nine-digit ZIP code.
The first big “Holy cow!” came on a Friday evening in November when they stuck in the Beverly Hills, Calif., ZIP of 90210, and found 47 recipients of 949 checks totaling $1.2 million.
They kept going, inspecting other upscale areas, concluding that in the 10-year period, at least 1.6 million subsidy checks were sent to people whose mailing addresses were in the hearts of 50 of the most-populous urban areas.
With the help of two publicity firms, Environmental Media Services and Fenton Communications, Cook started contacting reporters with the broad outlines of their findings.
They produced one general report and 50 separate ones, listing all the subsidies for the 50 major metro areas (“Farm Subsidy Recipients in Chicago, Il.,” was one), helping to spur competitive juices as they indicated that others were on a similar track. “The Wall Street Journal is writing 70 inches and the New York Times is putting it on page 1!” a Tribune reporter was told.
They made clear that reporters could parlay a little digging into good, localized stories.
Thus, with the department’s nine-digit ZIP codes, a reporter could see that somebody at one of several addresses on West Willow Street on Chicago’s North Side has received $822,880 in payments since 1986. A reporter would have to check out the folks on the block to confirm who it was (as of late Friday, the Tribune had come a cropper).
The Sun-Times reported Cook’s aggregate figures for Chicago but did not track down individuals. The Tribune took ZIP code and address information and confirmed individual recipients, such as Richman, for its Page 8 story. He got $40,000 last year for leaving idle 500 acres in three rural Illinois counties as part of a federal conservation program.
Of course, these legal, if dubious, subsidies are a small part of the enormous agriculture budget. But Cook and David Fenton, the publicist, know the power of symbols. There could be none handier than a Beverly Hills mansion-dweller soaking the government, or a millionaire TV news reporter.
It also was a handy way to get into the complex matter of agriculture subsidies, while giving reporters the chance to break their own related stories-as long as they didn’t violate last Thursday’s release date of the study.
As Cook conceded Friday, he still has a way to go. He couldn’t make sense of $4 billion of the $106 billion in subsidies over the past 10 years because either a post office box or no address was listed.
“This strengthens the hand of reformers by driving up the negatives of the status quo,” he said. “These subsidies aren’t all about helping family farmers.”