"The first thing we do, let's kill all the D.C. press corps."
--William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2 (paraphrased)
In the July issue of Harpers, Ken Silverstein went undercover, posing as "Kenneth Case," a consultant for the nation of Turkmenistan, looking for D.C. lobbyists who could burnish that country's turdlike human-rights image. The result was an inside look at the way lobbyists work, which was critized, not surprisingly, by the lobbying firms...and, rather more surprisingly, by some key Kool Kids in the Washington press corps, including Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post and Matthew Felling, writing for the CBS News blog Public Eye.
The inside-the-Beltway reaction was so censorious that last weekend Silverstein took the step of explaining himself in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece:
Some major media organizations allow, in principle, undercover
journalism — assuming the story in question is deemed vital to the
public interest and could not have been obtained through more
conventional means — but very few practice it anymore. And that's
unfortunate, because there's a long tradition of sting operations in
American journalism, dating back at least to the 1880s, when Nellie Bly
pretended to be insane in order to reveal the atrocious treatment of
inmates at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York
City.
In the late 1970s, the Chicago Sun-Times bought its own
tavern and exposed, in a 25-part series, gross corruption on the part
of city inspectors (such as the fire inspector who agreed to ignore
exposed electrical wiring for a mere $10 payoff). During that same
decade, the Chicago Tribune won several Pulitzer Prizes with undercover
reporting and "60 Minutes" gained fame for its use of sting stories....
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."
Perhaps if Mr. Silverstein wanted to be taken more seriously by the D.C. press corps, he should go into online chat rooms, pose as a 12-year-old girl, and then nab perverts who come over for hidden-camera lemonade and Jerry Springer-style whoop-ass. Now that's undercover reporting.
But if Silverstein isn't being taken seriously by the Washington press corpse...well, maybe he's doing something right.
