Confessions of an investigative reporter - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, March, 1992 by Christopher Georges

Beat the press

One result of all this self-policing is that internal investigators often beat the press to the story -- and that's fine: It doesn't matter who blows the whistle on official corruption or wasted taxpayer dollars, as long as somebody does. But as thorough as government investigators might be, there are plenty of stories they miss -- like Iran-contra. Investigative journalists might be going out in search of those elusive stories. Instead, most take the easier path -- becoming increasingly dependent on the inmates' notion of what's wrong with the asylum.

An example from my own experience illustrates how it works. In the fall of 1990, while I was at CNN, I followed up a "tip" from a "friend" to a government "source," a Senate staffer who had spent well over a year gathering information showing that a new generation of radar jammers, at $3 million a piece, had repeatedly failed tests under combat situations. Yet the contractor was building the jammers anyway, with the Navy's blessing. Of course, said the Senate staffer, The New York Times was interested, but if CNN could get his boss on camera and get it done within a couple of weeks, the story was ours. I spent the next three weeks on the "scoop," shooting interviews and tracking down sources who had already been tracked down. Finally, dutifully, we shot a half-hour one-on-one with the senator. As it turned out, we never ran the story, but only because of logistical problems. No matter. It was done a few weeks later by the ABC News I-team, running on the evening broadcast under the heading "ABC News Investigation."

Should this story have made the national press? Of course, and so should most of the government investigations that uncover fraud, waste, and corruption. But is it the type of story investigative reporters should be doing? Hardly. Hitching ourselves to government investigators' bandwagons does more than make us lazy; it leaves us--and the rest of America--thinking falsely that we are looking where the government isn't.

And while we gladly carry the water for the federal investigators who have already chased down the story, how often does it work in reverse? "Almost never," says congressional investigator Peter Stockton. "In fact, I can't think of a lead I've gotten from the national press in recent years."

Of course, there's something lazier than tagging along on government investigations: our occasional failure to even go that far, as GAO and inspector general reports that might point reporters in the right direction pile up untouched in newsroom libraries. The massive proportion of the HUD scandal, for example, was laid out in IG reports years before the Bush administration turned it into an issue. Likewise, between the inception of the space shuttle program and the Challenger disaster, NASA's inspector generail issued hundreds of audit reports concerning safety problems and defective materials, but the media never noticed. "One of our great failings," says CNN investigative reporter Brooks Jackson, "is that we don't read and synthesize the enormous amount of muckraking material these people put out."