Confessions of an investigative reporter - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, March, 1992 by Christopher Georges

It's almost two years now since I could have broken the BCCI story. But, as you can tell from the chart to the left, I didn't. In fact, I didn't even come close.

A reporter for CNN's investigative unit, I had been dispatched to Tampa, Florida, in early 1990 to help unravel the riddle of Manuel Noriega's money laundering emprie. Surrounded by the competition--in this case a courtroom of emptry pews--I took frantic notes as five BCCI officials, one of whom had been Noriega's personal banker, stood trial for a ledger of bank-related crimes. Buried in the mound of documents we gathered, as it turned out, were the inklings of the scandal: Huge chunks of Noriega's laundered millions had been funneled through Washington-based First American Bank, cryptically labeled in files as "BCCI-Washington." As we worked on the story, the writing was literally on our walls: more than 40 feet of homemade flow charts mapping the wash-cycle of Noriega's millions. But focused as I was on Noriega--that is, the story that everyone from George Bush on down heralded as the story to get--I regarded BCCI as little more than a complex conduit to get me there. Too bad for me, not to mention Ted Turner, who no doubt would have relished picking up the Emmy.

I take some consolation in knowing I wasn't alone. After all, some of the nation's top investigative reporters, such as the Los Angeles Times's Douglas Frantz and CNN's Brian Barger, also ran across bits and pieces of the BCCI puzzle while trailing Noriega but missed the banking scandal all the same. While others, such as Larry Gurwin of Regardie's and Jim McGee of The Washington Post, helped break parts of the story, the real sleuths were government investigators, who not only uncovered most of the story but plugged away for years until the media woke up. It was--as measured by the great yardstick of investigative reporting--Watergate in reverse, with the government hammering away until the media took notice.

A rare oversight by the dogged investigators of the Fourth Estate? Hardly. While there is much worthy of praise in the national media's investigative reporting, in one area--perhaps the most important one--we (and I use "we" because, as a CNN investigative reporter until this year, I'm as guilty as the next guy) are woefully lacking. A close examination of major institutional scandals within government and business in recent years--HUD, the S&Ls, Wedtech, Salomon Brothers, BCCI, corruption at the Chicago commodities exchange, the Ill Wind defense contractor scandal, and so on--reveals that it wasn't the national press that exposed wrongdoing, but the government itself or, in a few cases, the regional or trade press.

How could this be? After all, as NBC's award-winning investigator Brian Ross recently told The New York Times, we've finally entered the "golden age of investigative reporting." ABC News has not one, but four, investigative teams: one each at "World News Tonight," "PrimeTime," "Nightline," and "20/20." CNN made its debut two years ago with a high-profile team of 30 journalistic sleuths, and CBS's "60 Minutes," long king of TV's investigative hill, still draws tens of millions of viewers. It's the age of the pin-sized camera, the Freedom of Information Act, and unprecedented investment in investigative teams: The combined annual investigative budget for the three networks and CNN tops $150 million. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times all have investigative reporters, as do nearly 98 percent of the nation's 500 largest newspapers.

The good news in all this is that investigative reporting in the regional and local press is truly in its heyday. And at the national level, investigators at papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times have in recent years made an important commitment to explaining the news rather than breaking it. But while the national media advanced many of the major stories of recent years, in only the rarest of cases did they uncover the scandal. For example, while investigative reporters at The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times have filed approximately 800 stories since 1989, nearly 85 percent of them have been follow-ups or advances of leaked or published government reports. "Most of what we call investigative journalism these days," explains former Atlanta Journal and Constitution editor Bill Kovach, "is really reporting on investigations."

While the print press may not be breaking the big stories, they are at least turning over some of the mossy stones. The problems lie msot glaringly with the source from which most Americans get their news--TV--whose standard method of investigative reporting is dressing up leaked government investigations and running them as their own. ABC's investigative unit, for example, has produced nearly 150 stories since 1988. While these included important efforts like a two-part series in 1989 explaining the international proliferation of biological weapons, more than 85 percent were follow-ups to government investigations. For example, the team produced 10 stories on S&Ls--a worthy topic--but six were simply reports on the latest government advance on the Neil Bush investigation; one was a follow-up to congressional hearings involving Charles Keatings's Lincoln Savings and Loan; one was a pickup from the trade publication Thrift News disclosing the Keating Five; one told of the federal government seizing property from Michael Milken's junk bond customers; and, in probably ABC's best effort on the subject, one disclosed financial connections between Keating and Senator Alan Cranston. Likewise, the unit produced eight pieces on BCCI, only one of which was based substantially on ABC's own digging.