Ken Silverstein has a fantastic piece in this month’s Harper’s magazine (excerpt here) detailing his undercover investigation of the Washington lobbying establishment. Specifically, Silverstein posed as a consultant for the fictitious, London-based “Maldon Group” which supposedly has a financial stake in spiffing up the image of the neo-Stalinist nation of Turkmenistan.
Silverstein found two high-profile lobbying groups more than eager to help out; they offered to send congressional delegations to the country, plant custom-written op-ed pieces in major newspapers, get “sympathetic” think tanks to hold symposiums, recuit helpful academic types, all in the interest of promoting a country which until his Dec. 21 death had been ruled by a strongman, Sapurmurat Niyazov, who crafted a bizarre cult of personality and periodically showed up on Parade Magazine’s list of the world’s worst dictators.
The lobbying groups punctured by Silverstein’s sting, of course, cried foul. But so did the Washington media establishment, with the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz writing that “No matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.”
Nonsense, replies Silverstein in an L.A. Times op-ed in which he laments both the decline of Nellie Bly-style undercover journalism in particular and the too-cozy relationship between the Washington press corps and the governing elite:
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.”
But beyond that, as Silverstein correctly notes - there’s simply no way he could have gotten the same information had he played this one straight. On-the-record interviews with the principles would have produced nothing but smoke. But Silverstein’s piece was instead fascinating, a real look inside at how things actually run. You read it and you come away thinking that those who like to speak of governance in terms of ideals and ideologies - they are fools. Money runs this show, with enough money you can game the system so that this country, this paragon of human rights and home of the brave, will officially embrace some of the worst offenders on planet earth.
Small wonder the lobbying firms themselves are outraged. But I wonder at the likes of Kurtz; it is only OK to expose this type of thing if you can get it on the record officially? And if not - then it’s best left in the shadows? It’s one thing to break the law; there’s clearly an ethical line crossed there. But Silverstein didn’t break the law. All he did was pretend to be something he wasn’t in order to get information he never would have gotten otherwise. That information is important if you, we, are to understand how our government and the for-profit entities hovering around it really operate. It’s just interesting how some seem to think all of that should be trumped by decorum.
