Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity on political lies, and the corporate interests that fund them

Chuck Lewis has devoted his entire life to investigative reporting. After spending 11 years as an off-air reporter at ABC News and a producer for Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes, Lewis founded the Center for Public Integrity in Washington in 1988 to investigate political influence and all forms of political corruption. The center's full-time staff of 40 has produced more than 250 reports and 14 books, including five coauthored by Lewis: The Buying of the President (1996, 2000, and 2004), The Cheating of America ( 2001), and The Buying of the Congress (1998).

In 1998, Lewis was named a MacArthur fellow. He is currently president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism in Washington, which was created as a support organization to the Center for Public Integrity. He also serves on the board of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the advisory board of the International Reporting Project, and as an "international associate" of the Open Democracy Advice Centre in Cape Town, South Africa.

Last week he released the report he coauthored with Mark Reading-Smith detailing the 935 false statements of the Bush administration on its way to war in Iraq.

I first met Lewis 25 years ago, when he was an off-air reporter at the ABC News bureau in Washington. Both of us first started writing for newspapers during Watergate. Like me, Lewis is a former Ferris professor of journalism at Princeton. Currently, he is a Distinguished Journalist in Residence and professor of journalism at American University in Washington, D.C. Last week we chatted about a few of the permanent catastrophes in our nation's capital.

CHARLES KAISER: Compared to 1980, how much institutionalized investigative reporting still exists at the networks?
CHUCK LEWIS: It appears to me almost none. There are people who have investigative inclinations; individual producers who would like to do it, or who may gather string and pitch something here and there. But most of the D.C. bureaus have been gutted.

These folks are all getting the news on every day. And the news to them is whatever the newsmakers are saying is the news. They're covering hearings—if there are any interesting hearings. Most hearings aren't covered anymore. They'll cover presidential speeches. There are only six or seven pieces a day in less than 22 minutes on the evening news, and of that, you're talking one or two out of D.C., if that. The bottom line: Whatever you're getting is pretty big stuff, like whatever the big bill is up on the hill or some controversy between the speaker and the president—something that is basically headline stuff. I'm not saying it's not important, but it's also not investigative.

They don't have the staff to do it, really. You know, at each network there are a few investigative producers who I know and have respect for, but the problem is they also have to do crap occasionally. They get diverted. And then when they pitch stuff it doesn't always get approved—which, again, is putting it charitably. ... We have to be honest here: There's not great incentive to do complex investigative business stories about multibillion-dollar corporations.

Who just happen to be the people who make all the decisions in Washington.
Yeah—and the people who own the networks, by the way. No one wants to go down that road. Those stories are very difficult to do, and there could be consequences ... There is almost no pretense that investigative reporting still exists anymore, as far as I'm concerned.

Local TV is even worse; I was just talking about the networks. You get to the newspapers—the so-called elite newspapers, the big ones—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. They obviously do high-quality in-depth journalism, both international and investigative; they're the ones who have people around the world. There are scores, even hundreds of reporters who I would call all-stars, who are amazing, just astonishing in their talent and prowess, and you look at the awards every year and you see the work that's being done. It's just that the din into which it falls is so thick and so loud with so much crap, so much celebrity pablum. You have to look a long way to actually find it.

As I'm sure you're aware, several thousand newspaper reporters and editors, 3,000 or 4,000 of them have been fired since 2000. So what's happening is newsrooms are starting to be hollowed out.

Do you think that the corporate control of the Washington governmental process is greater than it was 30 years ago, or really just about the same?
No, I think it's greater, for sure. Just look at what's happened to our political process with who gets to enter politics just in terms of elected officials. When you look at the cost of campaigns, which has risen so much higher than inflation in recent years.

To become a senator from a state like New York or California, it's tens of millions of dollars you have to raise. All that money is coming from powerful, well-heeled interestsAs I've certainly pounded into the ground with a few books, the idea of a Harry Truman or an Abe Lincoln entering politics—good luck! You have to raise a lot of money just to be a state legislator now. And to become a senator from a state like New York or California—forget it. It's tens of millions of dollars you have to raise. All that money is coming from powerful, well-heeled interests—less than one percent of Americans make contributions of $1,000 or more. We've done a lot of work over the years at the Center of Public Integrity—we're talking scores of reports that deal with this. You have the iron triangle: members of Congress who have oversight over independent federal agencies like the FDA or the FAA. And what happens is, if you start asking questions that are a little tough about this industry or that industry, campaign money dries up. The corporate influence is huge.

I'll give you one small example. We looked at 10 years of food safety legislation, from approximately '87 to '97. In the mid-1990s, 9,000 people were dying every year from food-borne illnesses according to the Centers for Disease Control, and millions more were getting sick. What happened is, not a single bill to tighten up safety in meatpacking plants and things like that came out of the two agriculture committees in the two houses of Congress. And of course the most money from the food-related industries all goes into those two those committees, and the chairs of those committees bottle up the legislation and never let it hit the floor for a vote.

If the industry flexes its muscle, it can control that agenda. I could go through about 20 examples of this.

The average American senses that Washington is such a mess, which sums it up. That's why we don't have health care. We did a big report in '94. It was the only report dealing with lobbying on the Clinton health care proposal—right before it was withdrawn. It took a year of research and we tracked 660 groups, both pro and con, from unions to hospitals and doctors and insurance companies; we interviewed hundreds and we looked at thousands of records. It was called "Well Healed." I did a piece for the Outlook section and I compared Clinton and health care to Santiago, the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea. Like all other preceding presidents who were interested in health care insurance going back to the beginning of the 20th century, Clinton came back to shore with just a skeleton of bones. The thing had been eaten alive by all these sharks out there—the nurses don't want this, the doctors don't want that—by the time you saw what was left it was not a pretty sight.

So that's Washington.

Which industries spend the most in influencing Congress? Can we rank oil, defense, pharmaceuticals?
It changes over time, so that's hard to answer. The telecom and pharmaceutical industries are two of the most robust in terms of lobbying and contributions. The defense industry, which has thousands of companies spread throughout the country, actually doesn't spend as much as you might think given the importance of that in our policy.

It's more a question of having it spread throughout the country so that every congressman has a vested interest in keeping all this crap going?
Right. Which is what Eisenhower had a conversation about in 1960—about the military industrial complex.

Oil is certainty right up there; pharmaceutical and telecoms. The Center has done frontal examinations of the funding of all these industries. Those are the ones who do the most.

So there's no chance the telecoms won't get immunity in the current bill?
No chance. It's headed where it headed last time. So, all of this is depressing, but it is how things work, unfortunately.

Did you see that thing about the 435 days of missing White House e-mails?
I've been astonished by the lack of coverage about this. The New York Times really needs to go into this. I said this to Tom Blanton, who runs the National Security Archive, a nonprofit at George Washington University. Blanton brought the court action about this. His center is the biggest single requester of Freedom of Information records in America today, and has been for years. I bumped into Tom Blanton the other day and I said, "Tom, this is unbelievable!" And he said, "It sure is." I said it reminds me of the 18.5-minute gap in the Watergate tape. And he looked at me and said, "Oh, no, this is much much worse: These are millions of White House e-mails. It is technically against the law to destroy these records. And of course the White House is saying it did not deliberately destroy them. This story should be the lead on the evening news."

And it probably hasn't been on the evening news at all.
No. The same thing with this Iraq report we just did [about the administration's 935 lies]. It should have been on the evening news. It wasn't anywhere on the networks, except for the NBC show at 6 a.m.—they read the AP story.

Isn't [Los Angeles congressman] Henry Waxman still pretty good? An exception to this general mess?
I think he's the most aggressive. Even before he became chairman again and now has subpoena ability. Back when he did not have that, he was the one that was bird-dogging Halliburton. He was the one going hard on the energy task force issue when they were setting policy without revealing who was in the meetings. He was finding out about the no-bid Halliburton contract.

There's this image we have from our civic books that congressmen will haul people up and get them to talk about whatever they want to. It's actually not like that.

Because they have these elaborate negotiations in advance about exactly what they'll talk about?
Right. It's really frustrating to watch, because you know the truth is not coming out; a piece of the truth is coming out about something you're not quite interested in.

Are you disappointed that the change in control of Congress to the Democrats hasn't made more of a difference?
I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon here. Studies have shown congressional oversight has been diminishing over two decades. The number of hearings has gone down, the network coverage has certainly gone down, not counting C-Span. The number of subpoenas that have been issued—the tenacious oversight use of the Congress has also gone down over time. So in a way this is typical, and not surprising. Democrats don't want to seem to be too critical because it's an election year; they want to seem more like statesmen and junkyard dogs. Also, they don't want to alienate half their constituents or some of the independents.

But even when they try to get folks up there, even when they flex their muscle and try to do what is an entirely reasonable oversight thing to do, they're stiff-armed by the White House. And most of the power in Washington for several years now has been at the White House, clearly, and not at Congress. It shows.

The other problem is that the national news media takes its lead from Congress. They're clearly symbiotic. If the press doesn't want to cover the hearings, Congress doesn't want to hold them.

The dynamic has changed so much from 20 years ago. Our checks and balances are not what people might thing they are; it seems to be much more diminished. The gusto and the aggressiveness by folks doing oversight is nothing like it used to be. It's quite serious for democracy. You end up having mono instead of stereo for the information the public gets. It ends up just coming out of the White House, and everyone being carefully on message. And Congress for much of the time was the same party. So it too was on talking points.

When you have everyone saying the same thing, the media emaciated in its newsroom ranks and otherwise disinclined to be aggressive, they generally went with the easy way—the horse's mouth. The president said it; it must be fact. And they amplified it like hell all over the world. So they're complicit in what's happened here. It does give the average citizen a sense of powerlessness that someone else is in charge of this country.

What are five things a citizen can do?
Five? It sounds corny, but we have a real problem with the informed-citizenry part of our democracy. Sixty-six percent don't know who their member of Congress is. As recently as 10 years ago, 40 percent didn't know who the vice president was. More people know who the judge is on People's Court than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And 36 percent of high school students think the government should censor the news every day. Quite disturbing. I think media literacy—but just in general being informed about public affairs. In other words, watching the bastards, whoever they are.

The reason news organizations are hollowing out their newsrooms and investors are harboring their investments is because people are not consuming news the way they once did. When sound bites have gone from 19 seconds to six seconds from the '70s to the '90s, when you dumb down the public, you get a certain result here. They're much more easy to manipulate by those in power.

Democracy is not a spectator sport; people have to participate. This idea of sitting on the sidelines and bitching and moaning gets old, too. You can't just complain about what they are doing. It's supposed to be us. This is our government.