Read one reporter's story about trying to get the facts surrounding the 2000 election in Florida out to the public. Among other things, the following horror story should put to rest any lingering notions of a "Liberal Bias" in mainsteam media, and may also give you reason to question whether this country has "Freedom of the Press" any longer.

The Silence of the Lambs: An American in Journalistic Exile by Greg Palast

Here's how your president was elected: 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 fifty-eight thousand voters from registries on grounds they were felons not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out, only a handful of these voters were felons. The voters on this scrub list were, notably, African American (about 54 percent), and most of the others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats.

Three weeks after the election, this extraordinary news ran, as it should, on page one of the country's leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the U.S.A., it ran on page zero. The story was not covered on the news pages. It was given big network television coverage. But again, it was on the wrong continent - on BBC television, London.

Was this some off-the-wall story that the Brits misreported? A lawyer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise black voters; and the commission held dramatic hearings on the evidence.

So why was this story investigated, reported, and broadcast in Europe?

I'd like to know the answer. That way I could understand why a southern California hodaddy with a wife and kiddies has to commute to London to tell this and other stories about my country.

The question, why from Europe? is best phrased as, How did a hundred thousand American journalists sent to cover the election fail to get the vote theft story and print it (and preferably before the election)?

Think about all the tales of investigative reporting in this book. They share three things: They are risky, they upset the wisdom of the established order, and they are very expensive to produce. Do profit conscious enterprises, whether media companies or widget firms, seek extra costs, extra risk, and the opportunity to be attacked? Not in any business text I've ever read.

But if profit-lust is the ultimate problem blocking significant investigative reportage, the more immediate cause of comatose coverage of the election and other issues is what is laughably called America's journalistic culture. If the Rupert Murdochs of the globe are shepherds of the new world order, they owe their success to breeding a flock of docile sheep; snoozy editors and reporters who are content to munch on, digest, and then reprint a diet of press releases and canned stories provided by officials and corporate public relations operations.

Take this story of the list of Florida's faux felons that cost Al Gore the election. Shortly after the British story hit the World Wide Web, I was contacted by a CBS TV network news producer ready to run their own version of the story. The CBS hotshot was happy to pump me for information: names, phone numbers, all the items one needs for a quickie TV story.

I also freely offered up to CBS this information. My first story was about voters falsely accused of felonies; my new story was about those who did in fact serve time but, nevertheless had the right to vote. The office of the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, brother of the Republican presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of the names of felons from voter rolls - real felons - but with the right to vote under Florida law. As a result, fifty thousand of these legal voters, almost all Democrats, could not vote.

One problem: I had not quite completed my own investigation on this matter. Therefore CBS would have to do some actual work, reviewing documents and law, obtaining statements. The next day I received a call from the producer who said, I'm sorry, but your story didn't hold up. Well, how did the multibillion-dollar CBS network determine this? Why, we called Jeb Bush's office. Oh. And that was it.

I wasn't surprised by this type of investigation. It is, in fact, standard operating procedure for the little lambs of American journalism. One good, slick explanation from a politician or corporate chieftain and it's case closed, investigation over. The story ran anyway-on BBC-TV.

Let's understand the pressures on the CBS producer that led her to kill the story on the basis of a denial by the target of the allegations. (Though let's not confuse understanding with forgiveness.) First, the story is difficult to tell in the usual ninety seconds allotted for national reports. The BBC gave me a fourteen-minute slot to explain it.

Second, the story required massive and quick review of documents, hundreds of phone calls and interviews, hardly a winner in the slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am American school of journalism. The BBC gave me six weeks to develop the story.

Third, the revelations in the story required a reporter to stand up and say that the big-name politicians, their lawyers, and their PR people were freaking liars. It would be much easier, and a heck of a lot cheaper, to wait for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to do the work, then cover the commission's canned report and press conference. Wait! You've watched Murphy Brown, so you think reporters hanker every day to uncover the big scandal. Bull. Remember, All the President's Men was so unusual they had to make a movie out of it.

Fourth, investigative reports require taking a chance. Fraudsters and vote-riggers don't reveal all their evidence. And they lie. Make the allegation and you are open to attack or unknown information that may prove you wrong. No one ever lost his job writing canned statements from a press conference.

Meanwhile, back in sunny England. . .

My paper received about two thousand bless-you-Britain-for-telling-us-the-truth-about-our-election letters from U.S. Net-heads who were circulating the samizdat presidential elections coverage. Also I received a few like this:

You pansey [sic] brits seem to think that the average American is as undereducated and stupid as the average British subject. Well comrad [sic], I'm here to tell you. . .

which ended with some physically unfeasible suggestions of what to do with the Queen.

My editor noticed only one-a letter demanding retraction of my first article on Katherine Harris's phony voter purge-or else. It was from Carter-Ruck, a law firm with the reputation as the piranhas of the libel bar in England. They had cornered the market in representing foreign millionaires unhappy about their press. They did not represent the Bush family, but a company that had once employed George Bush Sr. (Bush resigned from this in 1999), a Canadian goldmining company originally funded by arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

You didn't know that Poppy Bush went to work for a Canadian mining company after he left the White House? Of course not - the firm has sued, or threatens to sue, any paper or person who reports on them in ways they find less than flattering.

My reports on the Florida ballot shenanigans first began as a sidebar to this story about the cash flowing into Bush family bank accounts and campaign war chests from firms for which the elder Bush performed favors after leaving the White House.

Who were these Canadian guys who could hire our former president and his Rolodex? If American papers weren't curious, Britons found this stuff fascinating. This Canadian company, Barrick Gold, had purchased a mine, with Bush's apparent help, in Tanzania. I had received information from Africa that in 1996 the previous owner of the mine had allegedly buried alive fifty-some jewelry miners who had refused to leave the property. Sickening stuff, these allegations were also mentioned in a report by Amnesty International, which I cited. I also cited Barrick's denial. Barrick had bought the mine in 1999.

Barrick Gold and its demi-billionaire chairman demanded that my paper retract the allegations of killings. They demanded that we print that the Guardian newspapers were happy to confirm that no one died at that mine. A Canadian newspaper that had picked up my story already had grabbed their ankles and run that incredible retraction.

In England, there is no defense of repetition. That is, I can't say I accurately reported on the Amnesty allegations; I have to prove that miners were actually buried alive in Tanzania. We called Amnesty, which courageously refused to help, announced it would be silent on advice of lawyers, and allowed the company to state that Amnesty had cleared the company.

I was ready to go along with some kind of apology and retraction, only because I was living on Red Bull, potassium powder, and no sleep, trying to get out the elections story, and I sure as hell didn't need another distraction.

But I had a problem. Our paper encouraged a human rights attorney to go to the Tanzanian mine. He came back with witness statements, photographs of a dead exhumed body, and videotapes showing bodies being exhumed from the mine pits. His name is Tundu Lissu - and when the company found out about his investigation, they threatened him with a lawsuit as well.

That's when I lost any sense of reason. I hinted that if the Guardian fabricated a lie to save a few shekels, I might have a claim against my own paper for defaming me as a journalist. I'd never do it; the threat was nuts (not exactly a career-maker), but my paper hesitated about giving in-and got sued by Barrick. It was December. The money clock on legal fees was now ticking, making me the most expensive journalist at the Guardian papers.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A. . . .

Salon. com, the Internet magazine, ran my story on the theft of the elections. It wasn't-exactly print, but at least it was American. And now columnists like Bob Herbert of the New York Times picked it up, and some radio talk shows too. But still, not one news editor called, not even from the Washington Post, with whom the Guardian shares material.

From a news view, and the flood of site hits, this was Salon.com's biggest political story ever-and it named part 1 its political story of the year.

But where was part 2? On its Web site and on radio programs, the magazine was announcing part 2 would appear in two days. . . and in two days. . . and in two days. . . and nothing appeared. Part 2 exposed how Jeb Bush violated court orders by refusing to register to vote over fifty thousand people who had criminal records in other states. (Florida law bars the vote only to the state's own felons and those in a dozen other states.) The fact that 90 percent of these voters were Democrats should have made it news because this maneuver alone more than accounted for Bush's victory.

I was going crazy: Gore had not yet conceded. The timing of part 2 was crucial. Where the hell was it? Finally, the editor told me: the Washington bureau chief (quite a title for Salon) had determined that the story didn't check out. You see, we checked with Jeb Bush's office and they said. . .

Agh! It was deja vu all over again.

I called the bureau chieftain himself, who sniffed, I used to work for the Washington Post, you know. And the Post would never run this story.

Well, he had me there. They hadn't, they didn't. Not yet. So God bless America.

Meanwhile, back in sunny England. . .

Bad news. In the middle of trying to get out the word of the theft of the election in Florida, I was about to become the guinea pig, the test case, for an attempt by a multinational corporation to suppress free speech in the U.S.A. using British libel law.

Here's something I bet you didn't know about Britain: there is no freedom of the press. There is no First Amendment. England is one of the few nations on earth without a written guarantee of freedom of speech or press. That's why we Americans celebrate July 4th. Britons don't have freedom of the press, and they don't want it - not the public, not the government, and, weirdly, not the editors or the publishers.

This hit me on the head in 1999 when my paper was facing charges under the Official Secrets Act. The Guardian had published an innocuous letter by a former MI-5 agent in the Letters to the Editor section. In the U.K., it's a serious violation of the law to publish anything by a former agent - even a Christmas card. (The last example is not hypothetical.) My editor argued with me in favor of the Official Secrets Act, the very law under which he at that moment faced unlimited jail time. It brought home that Britons are subjects, not citizens.

Lacking a First Amendment, Britain has become the libel suit capital of the world. Stories printed anywhere else draw steep judgments in London. Guardian newspapers receive notice of suit or service of suit about three times a day - that's one thousand libel notices a year! This creates a whole encyclopedia of off-limits topics, including an admonition from our legal department not to disparage the marriage of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (sent the day after they announced their divorce).

Britain's libel law has privatized censorship. No paper could afford to defend all these actions. One excellent reporter, chosen journalist of the year, told me to just sign anything and get out of it. That's just how it's done here. And Floyd Abrams, who defends the New York Times in the U.S. and Europe, explained, the truth alone is not a defense in England. All my photos of dead bodies in Tanzania meant nothing in our case. (Barrick counters that the bodies in the film did not come from their mine site or were not victims of the clearance operation.)

And now the Canadian Goldfingers were about to try something new in the British censorship game: annul the U.S. Bill of Rights. Their legal gambit was brilliant. I have a U.S.-based Web site for Americans who can't otherwise read or view my BBC and Guardian stories. The gold mining company held my British newspaper liable for aggravated damages for publishing the story in the U.S.A. If I did not pull the Bush/Barrick story off my U.S. Web site, my paper would face a ruinous bill.

The legal department begged me to pull not just English versions of the story but my Spanish translation, printed in Bolivia. ÁCaramba! I resisted.

But Goldfinger was not done. Their lawyers told our paper that I personally would be sued in the U.K. over my American Web publications of my story - because the Web could be accessed in Britain. The success of this legal theory would further chill U.S. publishers with international sales. Suddenly, instead of the internet becoming a means of spreading press freedom, the means to break through censorship, it would become the electronic highway delivering repression.

And repression was winning. InterPress Services (IPS) of Washington, D.C., sent a reporter to Tanzania. They received a note from Barrick that said if the wire service even mentioned the allegations of killings, even with Barrick's denial, Barrick would sue. The IPS story never ran. Lawyers told the reporter that there were a couple of newspaper customers in Canada (which inherited British libel laws), and the U.S.-based wire service couldn't chance it. The internet reach threat was biting.

I chose to fight. In July I issued an alert to human rights groups worldwide. My paper went ballistic: In the U.K., one can't complain about being sued for libel, because under their libel law, a paper is guilty of defamation until it proves itself innocent. Therefore, publicly defending oneself repeats the libel and makes the paper and reporter subject to new damages and court sanctions. Kafka had nothing on the British court system.

Most of my colleagues were sympathetic, but not all. As one noted, any other reporter would have been sacked on the spot. And now my paper was flooded with thousands of we-support-your-courage letters.

The pressure was on. And, I'm pleased to say, my editor refused to sign the abject, lying retraction-just fifteen minutes before the court-imposed deadline. Then he sent me this encouraging note: "We are now going to spend hundreds of thousands on some fucking meaningless point you are trying to make. I hope you are happy."

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A. . . .

In February 2001, I took my BBC film crew to Florida, having unearthed a page marked "secret" and "confidential" from the contract between Florida and the company the state had hired to make up the list of names to purge from the voter rolls. Here it was, smoking gun evidence that the Republican officials knew their operation had knowingly wiped out the voting rights of thousands of innocent voters, most of them African Americans.

(I wondered why not one American news outlet had bothered to obtain these documents, available through Florida's freedom-of information law. But I did find this in the files: The Orlando Sentinel had been suspicious of the conduct of the voter purge before the election. The government e-mail was a gloating message that the Sentinel had been thrown off the scent by that brilliant ploy: flat-out official denial and a schmooze job, which the Sentinel ran as fact.)

It was February. I took my camera crew into an agreed interview with Jeb Bush's director of the Florida Department of Elections. When I pulled out the confidential sheet, Bush's man ripped off the microphone and did the fifty-yard dash, locking himself in his office, all in front of our cameras. It was killer television and wowed the British viewers. We even ran a confession from the company. Newsworthy for the U.S.A.? Apparently not.

My program, Newsnight, has a film-trading agreement with ABC Nightline, a kind of sister show. Over twenty thousand Net-heads in the United States saw the BBC Webcast, a record; and they banged ABC TV with demands to broadcast the BBC film, or at least report on it.

Instead, Nightline sent down its own crew to Florida for a couple of days. They broadcast a report that ballots are complex and blacks are not well educated about voting procedures. The gravamen of the story was blacks are too freakin' dumb to figure out how to vote. No mention that in white Leon County, machines automatically kicked back faulty ballots for voter correction; whereas, in very black Gadsden County, the same machines were programmed to eat mismarked ballots. (That was in our story, too.)

Why didn't ABC run the voter purge story? Don't look for some big Republican conspiracy. Remember the three elements of investigative reporting: risk, time, money. Our BBC/Guardian stories required all of that, in short supply in American news operations.

Meanwhile, back in sunny England. . .

My paper was again ready to throw me to the dogs. Understandably, they couldn't spend half a million pounds defending a story about a Canadian company in Tanzania, dead bodies or no. But in July, human rights groups bombarded Barrick's Toronto headquarters with petitions demanding they stop trying to censor the story and permit a public inquiry into the alleged killings. And Barrick started to give, getting nervous, offering my paper a (relatively) cheap out.

Would my paper still have to confirm no killings took place? Under the horrific British system, a statement that no one died, read in open court, would have given this factoid the virtual force of law, barring any paper from reporting otherwise.

While Amnesty International's leaders hid under their desks (despite Bianca Jagger's several phone lectures), other groups - Friends of the Earth (Holland), Comer House (U.K.), and Britain's National Union of Journalists - took the extraordinary step of intervening in the libel action under a rarely used provision of the law allowing third parties to argue against the settlement of a lawsuit in a manner that could harm the public interest. They presented the judge with evidence of the Tanzanian killings, with a plea to keep the matter open.

Astonishingly, the judge accepted the interveners' position, requiring Barrick to accept that the agreement with the Observer did not foreclose allegations of the killings. So that's how it ended: a halfbaked apology from my paper and Barrick frustrated, unable to extract a statement that no one died at the mine. Hooray.

Well, half a hooray. I still faced personal ruin. The threat of a lawsuit against a reporter after settling with a paper was not cricket even by English legal traditions. But Barrick told my paper's attorneys that it was still prepared to sue me in the United Kingdom.

Barrick's decision to sue depended, their lawyers said, on my behavior in the United States and Canada.

So I went on the radio in Toronto, where Barrick is headquartered. I talked about Barrick, the Tanzanian mine, and censorship.

As I write, I'm waiting for the writ. My woes are nothing. The Tanzanian papers splashed the story and as a result, lawyer Tundu Lissu is facing charges of sedition there for releasing the videotape.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A. . . .

My part 2 on the theft of the elections found asylum in that distant journalistic planet not always visible to the naked eye, the Nation magazine. Bless them.

In May, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission prepared to report on the election in Florida. They relied heavily on the material uncovered by the BBC for the core of their commission's f~ding of systematic voter disenfranchisement in Florida. Our documents were their main evidence used in witness cross-examinations.

And then, mirabile dictu, the Washington Post ran the story of the voter purge on page one, including the part that couldn't stand up for CBS and Salon, and even gave me space for a bylined comment. Applause for the Post's courage!

Would I be ungrateful if I suggested otherwise? The Post ran the story in June, although they had it at hand seven months earlier while the ballots were still being counted. They waited until they knew the findings of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission Report, so they could fire from behind that big, safe rock of official imprimatur. In other words, the Post had the courage to charge out and shoot the wounded.

So there you have it. Take your pick: Work in the United Kingdom where editors are scared of lawsuits, or America, where editors are scared of their own shadows.

And then came September 11 . . .

Journalism is a planet whose inhabitants are rewarded for big mouths and instant answers. On September 11, the vomit of journobabble began before the World Trade Center towers hit the ground. In the U.S., professional hair-do Tom Brokaw was typical. He didn't know who did it, but he knew why: Someone hated these symbols of American capitalism and our spirit of freedom. Across the Atlantic, colleagues at Guardian newspapers were just as swift to wag their fingers in print, blaming the attack, as Europeans are accustomed, on the Jews (by way of "Imperial IsraelÓ) and gloating that it was about time the Americans learn why everyone hates them.

I spent the day just outside New York, uselessly staring at my laptop, silent and worried sick about my friends on the fifty-second floor of Tower One where I had worked for many years. A simple question nagged at me: not the grandly philosophical why? but how? How had the FBI, CIA, America's zillion-dollar intelligence apparatus missed this one? Over the next two months, I found a frightening answer: They were told not to look.

A group of well-placed sources-not-all-too-savory-spooks and arms dealers-told my BBC team that before September 11 the U.S. government had turned away evidence of Saudi billionaires funding Osama bin Laden's network. Working with the Guardian and the National Security News Service of Washington, we got our hands on documents that backed up the story that FBI and CIA investigations had been slowed by the Clinton administration, then killed by Bush Jr.'s when those inquiries might upset Saudi interests.

The story made the top of the news - in Britain. In the U.S., one television reporter picked up the report. He was called, he says, by network chiefs, and told to go no further. He didn't. Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper's, asked me why the story did not run in the U.S.A.

Suggested responses welcome.

Palast is an American who writes for the Guardian and Observer newspapers of London and reports for the BBC's Newsnight, a 60-Minutes-style newsprogram. Palast abandoned hopes of working in America when the mainstream press failed to report on his groundbreaking exposes known for stripping bare abuses. Two documentaries about his investigation of the "presidential election rip-off" will soon be released in America. Palast is author of the book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Incendiary Writings of an Investigative Reporter (Pluto Press, 2002).

The above story was taken from "Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Pree Press," Edited by Kristina Borjesson, Prometheus Books, 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, New York, 14228-2197, copyright 2002, pp. 65-75. In this book, eighteen top journalists recount their experiences with censorship and cover-ups. It's exciting reading, like 18 thrilling and suspenseful espionage tales collected between two covers. Quoting Publisher's Weekly: "If members of the general public read this book, or even portions of it, they will be appalled. To the uninitiated reader, the accounts of what goes on behind the scenes at major news organizations are shocking."