Ken Silverstein wrote a fascinating expose for the July issue of Harper’s about DC’s lobbying industry. Silverstein wanted to understand how, exactly, these firms operate when approached by an ethically-dubious client, and what lobbyists would/could do for a price.
Of course, if the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine calls up one of these firms, he’ll get plenty of spin and very few answers. If “Kenneth Case,” a consultant for “The Maldon Group,” a mysterious (and fictitious) London-based firm that claimed to have a financial stake in improving the public image of neo-Stalinist Turkmenistan calls up, he’ll get a candid assessment of what services are available.
So, Silverstein went undercover, took on a fictitious persona, gained some fascinating, albeit disturbing, insights.
In some circles, what Silverstein did was clearly unethical. In short, he misrepresented himself. “No matter how good the story,” Howard Kurtz wrote, “lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.” Kurtz was hardly alone; the DC media establishment has been less than shy about denouncing Silverstein’s tactics.
Silverstein responded today in a LA Times op-ed, and noted that a) this media establishment has lost its way and is too close to the political establishment; and b) until news outlets start taking investigative journalism seriously again, the public will suffer.
The decline of undercover reporting — and of investigative reporting in general — also reflects, in part, the increasing conservatism and cautiousness of the media, especially the smug, high-end Washington press corps. As reporters have grown more socially prominent during the last several decades, they’ve become part of the very power structure that they’re supposed to be tracking and scrutinizing.
Chuck Lewis, a former “60 Minutes” producer and founder of the Center for Public Integrity, once told me: “The values of the news media are the same as those of the elite, and they badly want to be viewed by the elites as acceptable.”
I suspect this will make Silverstein even less popular with the media establishment, but he makes a very compelling case.
As for Silverstein’s investigation, what’d he find?
Earlier this year, i put on a brand-new tailored suit, picked up a sleek leather briefcase and headed to downtown Washington for meetings with some of the city’s most prominent lobbyists. I had contacted their firms several weeks earlier, pretending to be the representative of a London-based energy company with business interests in Turkmenistan. I told them I wanted to hire the services of a firm to burnish that country’s image.
I didn’t mention that Turkmenistan is run by an ugly, neo-Stalinist regime. They surely knew that, and besides, they didn’t care. As I explained in this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, the lobbyists I met at Cassidy & Associates and APCO were more than eager to help out. In exchange for fees of up to $1.5 million a year, they offered to send congressional delegations to Turkmenistan and write and plant opinion pieces in newspapers under the names of academics and think-tank experts they would recruit. They even offered to set up supposedly “independent” media events in Washington that would promote Turkmenistan (the agenda and speakers would actually be determined by the lobbyists).
All this, Cassidy and APCO promised, could be done quietly and unobtrusively, because the law that regulates foreign lobbyists is so flimsy that the firms would be required to reveal little information in their public disclosure forms.
Silverstein’s tactics hardly seem beyond-the-pale. I can think of several 60 Minutes exposes in which Steve Croft, among others, went undercover to shine the light of day on wrongdoing, which in turn led to justice and accountability. It was the only way to get the story and serve the public’s interest. The fault isn’t on the part of the journalist; it’s on the part of those who the journalist is investigating.
Silverstein added:
Based on the number of interview requests I’ve had, and the steady stream of positive e-mails I’ve received, I’d wager that the general public is decidedly more supportive of undercover reporting than the Washington media establishment. One person who heard me talking about the story in a TV interview wrote to urge that I never apologize for “misrepresenting yourself to a pack of thugs … especially when misrepresentation is their own stock in trade!”
Sounds right to me.