Greg Palast, has been called a cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes because of the style of his investigative reporting. One of the topics covered in his new book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons and High Finance Fraudsters includes an account of deceptive reporting around Bush’s election and the way votes were counted.

According to Palast, "in the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered local elections supervisors to purge 64,000 voters from voter lists on the grounds that they were felons who were not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren't felons, or at least, only a very few were. However, the voters on this "scrub list" were, notably, African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats."

In November, this story made front-page news in Britain and it was given a lot of television coverage on the BBC, but it did not run in the United States. A hundred thousand U.S. journalists failed to cover the vote theft story! Palast explains that in order to report on this story, he had to leave the United States and move his family to Europe to print and broadcast this and other crucial stories about American politics.

On April 19, 2002, I had the opportunity to speak to Greg Palast about the state of investigative reporting and journalistic freedom.

Adams: Why do you think Americans believe we have a free press, when so much information is suppressed?

Palast: If you haven’t seen it, you don’t know it. A good thing about Americans is that we have to be lied to. As my friend Daniel Elsburg says, they have to fill us up with brain-dead nonsense. They have to give us hypnotic garbage on television, because if they told us the truth, Americans would get very upset. That’s the good thing about Americans. We’re told that this is the land of the free and that we have a free press--not having any other information to go on, we can’t say that this is not true.

Obviously, when Michael Moore2 comes out with a book, based on my reporting, and then I come up with a book with a dinky-winky publisher in Britain, and I’m on The New York Times Best Seller list—obviously people are hungry.

Adams: Do you think countries elsewhere in the world have a free press?

Palast: No, I haven’t found a country yet with a free press. The closest I’ve come to is Sweden or Holland. What’s wonderful about the US is that we have a First Amendment. No other country has a First Amendment—a law which says that the government can’t tell you what to print or what not to print.

That means, for example, that we have no libel law restrictions, which are very, very serious, around the world. In Britain, I’m facing restrictions under the Official Secret’s Act. I’ve been in the situation where I can’t print something because the government says it violates their secrets.

I was stopped, for example, from reporting about the Bush family’s involvement in gold-mining properties in Tanzania. It’s a horror story. You don’t have the same rights to report in Britain that you have in the US; on the other hand, you can’t report on certain things in the U.S. because of the powers that be and the commercial restrictions.

So forget the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate stories, from decades ago, they would not print those things today. There is no chance in the world that The Times would publish the Pentagon Papers today.

Adams: Has there been greater restriction made on what will be printed, since September 11th?

Palast: No, actually. In fact, there is more open discussion now. It’s very interesting. I just spoke to Noam Chomsky and we agreed that the debate has actually opened up since Sept. 11th.

I’ve discussed the connection between money and power, which you cannot discuss in the US. Since September 11th, we’re beginning to discuss the relationship between foreign policy and the use of US military proxies and what the US is up to. This kind of discussion hasn’t happened since the war in Vietnam.

I don’t think it’s worse, though I can’t say there’s good reporting. Total lies are being told about Venezuela, for instance. Complete lies, actually. The NY Times apologized, because it editorialized in favor of the coup against the elected government of Venezuela. Frankly, I thought they’re just showing their true colors and they shouldn’t have to apologize over an editorial which is obviously bone headed, being against a democracy.

The big problem was that they published as truth, a set of lies about Venezuela. They said that Hugo Chavez was unpopular—it’s complete crap that he’s a dictator, and unlike our president, he was elected. Finally, they said this fantasy that Hugo Chavez resigned the presidency, which gave legitimacy to the right-wing coup planners. That was a complete fabrication and The New York Times did not check it out--I checked it out and it was false. It was easy to check out that it was false, but they ran that as truth. They never apologized for lying about that.

Adams: How does this time period compare to the McCarthy Period, in terms of restrictions to freedom of expression?

Palast: That was grim. I’m old but not that old. I’ve had my old partners and I did a lot of work for labor unions. That’s a whole different level of terror. You couldn’t say anything or do anything. I mean, you’re not going to lose your job because you’re walking around with one of Noam Chomsky’s books. We still aren’t that bad yet.

Adams: Are you concerned that we could return to that kind of extreme censorship?

Palast: Sure, it doesn’t take much for the brown shirts to reactivate themselves. A couple of more terrorist attacks and they’ll start looking for the enemy within. Who’s helping these guys out? At the moment we’re still saying it’s them out there. But the whole con of the McCarthy Era was that America’s enemies had a hit column inside and they used that to smash any progressive sense of America.

My uncle, Oliver Crawford, was a blacklisted writer. I’m effectively blacklisted today. I’ve won the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in Britain. Yet, there is no way I can get on the air or in major US papers.

Adams: Are you worried about personal safety or your life?

Palast: No. I mean, my wife is good at keeping me out of trouble. She has stopped me from doing some stories and from going to some locations--like meeting an arms dealer in a dangerous spot. But I’m more concerned with my sources. Compared to any danger I might face, their dangers are immediately real.

I told you about Bush and his gold-mining company. This company bought another company. To clear the gold-mining property that Bush and his company wanted to buy, this other company buried miners alive that wouldn’t leave. We have videotape and film of this, but no one wants to broadcasts it. In Amsterdam, this weekend, I’m holding a press conference with this evidence. A press conference is also being held in Toronto, because they’re trying to block this. You can’t get this into American papers. We have a right to show this stuff.

My problem is that the guy that was the source, Tundu Lissu, was facing charges of sedition in Tanzania for getting the material, the videotape and witness statement, to me about these killings. He got out of the country with the tapes, and then chose to go back to Tanzania even though he faced prison for outing the truth. I said, ‘please don’t go they’ll arrest you.’ He said, ‘if they arrest me I’m lucky.’ It was more likely that they would just do away with him, but he went back. That’s a courage on a scale that I can’t match. I worry about the other people, the whistle blowers who hand me documents. Their careers and lives could be ruined, they could be arrested and killed.

Even before I was a journalist, I was doing investigative work and other progressive work. For example, I brought material from the Dalai Lama into Tibet and got material to one person whose brother had already been killed by the Chinese. I was worried that he was taking too many chances. They caught an American photographer who was with me, and they put her on a plane, destroyed her camera and film. If they caught me, in Tibet, handing out material from the Dalai Lama, I would be thrown out of the country. The people I would hand the material to would be jailed, beaten, and probably killed.

Adams: Do journalists refrain from covering certain stories because they’re afraid for their lives or is it that they’re concerned for their careers?

Palast: Most journalists don’t report things because they fear for their careers. Seymour Hersh, one of the most celebrated investigative reporters, can’t get a job on an American paper. The top American investigative journalists that I know can’t get work with American newspaper. You see great journalists working for The Nation Magazine. I like The Nation, but it is marginal, it’s not the mainstream. You put something in The Nation, and I guarantee that it won’t be seen anywhere else. It’ll be dismissed because it’s in The Nation.

Great reporters who try to cover certain stories, see their careers go down the drain. So you have fake guys like Bernard Goldberg, who’s on CBS news, and they’re complaining that there’s a left-wing bias to the press. Well, if there’s a left-wing bias, how come he’s on the air and I’m not. He doesn’t know anything about economics and I do. I have a degree in economics and actually know something about the subject.

There’re a hundred other reporters that could do what I’m doing if they were allowed to, but they’re not given the resources or backed up. There’s complete gutlessness and also it’s cheap and easy to do the obvious. No one apologized for that crap story on Venezuela. They just reported what everyone else was saying, and everyone else was wrong.

They say, ‘well, the NY Times ran it’ and the NY Times says, ‘well the LA Times ran it,’ and the LA Times says, ‘well, it was in a Venezuelan paper,’ or ‘the State Department said so,’ and that is that. If the State Department says so, then that’s good enough. But it’s impossible for me to report that the State Department is lying, they never tell the truth…ever.

There was a period when even the main stream press, especially because of the war in Vietnam, ultimately would turn around and say that the official word is a lie. I can tell you that they’d never run a Watergate story again. Bob Woodward, would never allow someone to write a story today, based on hidden inside sources. I don’t think Bob Woodward would run his own story.

Adams: Which subjects would you like to investigate now?

Palast: I want to continue my investigations of the World Bank, globalization, and how Argentina was really destroyed. I’ve been trying to run reports on Venezuela for months. I’ve been saying to my own editors, ‘there’s going to be a coup in Venezuela,’ but no one believes me.

I have another book coming out, Democracy and Regulation, about power pirates like Enron. This was written before Enron went under, when I was screaming about those guys. What about the other Enrons? I’ve been writing about these guys for a long time and finally these stories are coming out.