More Top Picks Plustek Ephoto Z300
player ready...“Thank god for Chuck Lewis. I can’t stand doin’ that stuff,” a big-time Washington newspaper reporter said to me last week.
If Lewis didn’t exist, somebody would have to invent him. His presence underscores an absence: heavy lifting by most reporters.
It’s what the guy meant by “that stuff.”
Lewis is a former ABC and CBS News investigative producer who runs the 5-year-old Center for Public Integrity. It sounds rather portentous, but it’s just six paid staffers and an army of volunteers whose latest handiwork may prove indispensable to political reporters.
It’s a $10 paperback, “The Buying of the President” (Avon), that is a virtual all-you-want-to-know inspection of the financial interests and backers of President Clinton and his key Republican rivals, including Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander.
Any big-time profile will now have to include data from this yearlong effort of six reporters, 16 researchers and 103 undergraduate and graduate computer database researchers at American University and the University of Maryland.
The links between Clinton and Goldman Sachs, a New York investment banking firm, or NationsBank? The substantial sums that the Ernest and Julio Gallo Winery has funneled to Clinton and to Dole? And why does most of Dole’s $70 million raised since 1973 come from outside Kansas? And how did Alexander get wealthy while in office, including making $620,000 from a $1 investment?
It’s all there in a 271-page effort that brings together information largely reported separately, in everything from Federal Election Commission, House, Senate and state filings, to local newspaper stories. It includes a handy compilation of each candidate’s “Top 10 Career Patrons.” (No. 2 on Pat Buchanan’s list is a Hinsdale family, the Chevals).
“Yeah, I’ve just started reading it,” a political reporter for a news magazine said. “It will be indispensable. I hadn’t realized how Alexander made all that money.”
It’s the 18th substantive report on politics and money from a nonpartisan, non-profit group with a modest annual budget of $740,000 and started by Lewis, a Delaware native who left the staff of “60 Minutes” in 1988.
“We would have to try to solve a 20-year-old murder in two weeks,” he said. “My idea was to take the time you really needed and, rather than just look at one person, look at a system and do the heavy-lifting research that, for various reasons, isn’t done.”
Lewis, 42, had been especially frustrated by the fact that, during the mid- and late-1980s, lots of big government scandals broke, including Iran-contra, the resignation of House Speaker Jim Wright, and misconduct at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, among others, and reporters missed most of them. For example, Iran-contra slipped out as a disclosure from then Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese.
What would happen if you made substantive information more accessible?
He started from his house and then signed a $60,000, two-year lease for an office. He had no furniture and an intern camped on a window sill in the early days.
He did the primary research and writing on the first study, on how nearly half the top White House trade officials since 1974 wound up representing foreign firms and governments.
It brought a General Accounting Office investigation, credibility and, later, support from foundations including Chicago’s John D. and Catherine T.MacArthur Foundation. Two years later, during the presidential campaign, candidates Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot cited the findings.
In subsequent years there have been reports on, among other matters, the backgrounds of 140 unpaid policy advisers to presidential candidates, the selling “for a song” to foreign corporations of taxpayer-supported high-tech research, and U.S. officials taking classified documents with them upon leaving office.
Other studies disclosed how 73 former members of Congress converted $6 million in campaign funds to personal use, and how just 9 percent of 1,200 emergency hazardous waste sites on the Superfund National Priority List had been cleaned up. Many of the databases it’s created are available on the center’s Internet web site at http://www.essential.org/CPI.
Its handiwork brought the characterization of “watchdogs in the corridors of power” from one magazine that studies Congress. It skewered those on the Left and Right and, even now with its latest study, does not press a political agenda on campaign financing. It just suggests something is amiss.
Groups like the center are not known to a large audience but, in ways the media consumer would not know, are indispensable for many, perhaps all-too-many, reporters.
They do the combing of records–federal, state and local governments, especially–that most journalists find drudgery. Especially here, why do real reporting when there are riches to be had spouting opinion?
As usual, the latest study relies on ambitious, modestly paid veterans and volunteers to fetch lobbying and campaign records, collate them and put them together in understandable ways. He had teams checking out specific topics, such as Dole’s relationship to certain contributors and the Clinton-NationsBank coupling (he personally handled that) and regularly met to see where everybody was at.
Once again, their efforts will be relied upon heavily by mainstream media.
Lewis is relied on by reporters looking for help on stories and, maybe, a quote on ethical matters related to government and money. Reporters regularly call looking for story ideas. For sure, the latest report provides many “leads” on other stories involving the candidates.
His group’s relevance also reflects changes in journalism, including here, where many in the craft crave to work, given the professional and social cachet that are potential rewards.
More Top Picks Smart Lock
“There are fewer investigative reporters than when I got here 18 years ago,” says Edward Pound, an investigative reporter for U.S. News & World Report and onetime ace reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times.
“There’s more `bottom-line’ journalism, people looking for something now, the quick fix. Not as many people plugging along like myself,” says Pound, a member of a six-person investigative squad that rarely does breaking stories.
“There are not that many reporters who want to put in the time and do the real digging,” Pound says, noting that Lewis (“a good, solid guy”) is somebody he’s bounced ideas off.
Lewis concedes investigative reporting is a mixed bag. Contrary to what one might assume, he is underwhelmed by the investigative resources and work of “the big guys,” namely The Washington Post and The New York Times. “They’ll howl when they read this.”
Yet he finds a healthful decentralization. “Some of the best stuff,” he says, is coming from lesser-known outlets here (like Gannett News Service) and media “outside this town.”
Weather wimps
As a blizzard engulfed your capital, here’s what the inept District of Columbia government admitted about snow plows:
A total of 50 made it out Tuesday but eight broke down. Further, 30 were idled in garages, in need of parts that presumably the district doesn’t have the money to pay for.
Where’s Larry Mendte, WBBM-Ch. 2’s aspiring game-show host when we need him?
Clearly stung by a flattering Washington Post piece on snow coverage by a competitor, the NBC station, the ABC affiliate opted for daylong snow coverage Friday.
But just 4 inches fell. Not much to cover for “Washington’s Storm Team.” A question too modern for Freud: How much Doppler Radar can a human being endure?