• by Tom Siebert , Op-Ed Contributor, December 14, 2006

Whenever somebody tries to blather at me that the media is liberal, I immediately start talking about Greg Palast. The first thing they usually ask is,"Who?"

At the beginning of summer--on the auspicious date of 6/6/06 no less--two books hit the market simultaneously: Ann Coulter's "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," and Greg Palast's "Armed Madhouse." Both were partisan hit pieces, one from the Right and one from the Left. But one deserved serious attention, and the other deserved to be ignored. That's exactly what happened, but it happened the wrong way.

The difference between the two books is the difference between a muckraker and a flamethrower, a genuine journalist and a pedantic pundit. The key social revelation exposes what the mainstream media wants the national conversation to be, and what it actually should be.

Palast's book--which deserves far more attention than I can possibly give it here--is a series of extended investigative pieces, written in a barbed sarcastic style similar to H.L. Mencken. It provides a true public service in exposing--through interviews, leaked documents and sourced secondary research--the dueling backroom plans for rebuilding Iraq that pitted politicians and the military against the oil companies. (Guess who won?) And it led to the bizarre zig-zag of strategy in Iraq that was one big reason for the U.S.'s failure there.

But that's only the long first segment. "Armed Madhouse" also exposes an extended list of voting irregularities in the 2004 presidential election (recently re-purposed in a pair of huge features by Robert Kennedy, Jr., in Rolling Stone. Sadly, this was another article mostly ignored by the mainstream press. So was the schoolroom farce of No Child Left Behind and Osama bin Laden's motives and strateg--he pretty much lays it out in his speeches, if you read them; China rising and the threat to the dollar; class warfare and a couple other outrages.

Coulter's book, on the other hand, was yet another collection of right-wing diatribes against the immoral atheists of the Left who, she still seems to think, run the country. There is very little new reporting, and many of the citations and footnotes she scatters generously--and deceptively--through the book have been exposed by the Web site Media Matters as misleading at best and flat out lies at worst.

But in the days after June 6, nobody was talking about Palast's hard-boiled journalism, they were talking about Coulter's hard-hearted statements, most specifically, her rabble-rousing characterization of several 9/11 widows as "broads" who were "enjoying their husbands' deaths."

It got her time on the "Today Show," she made the usual tour of the news channels, a feature article from David Carr in The New York Times, and several months on the best-seller list. A lot of the coverage she received was contemptuous--coverage that would certainly make left-leaning viewers or readers feel better about themselves--t she was part of the national conversation. And it kept us all from thinking about...well, what Greg Palast was trying to tell us.

Palast, on the other hand, got almost nothing.

No review in The New York Times or The Washington Post, though the book spent a few weeks on each newspaper's best-seller list. No trips to any of the news channels to discuss any of the points made in his book. No interviews in the mainstream press.

If you Google Greg Palast for interviews around that time in the United States in a non-progressive publication, you'll find one: PR Week. It was free until I tried to link to it this week. Hopefully, you have a subscription.

That's because Palast is taking blows against the empire and reporting stories that the establishment doesn't want you thinking about. Like the stolen election of 2000, which Palast wrote about convincingly in his first book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." He was the first to painstakingly detail the successful efforts of Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris (failed Republican candidate for Senate in Florida) and other Florida bureaucrats to purge thousands of African-American voters from voting lists prior to the 2000 election.

Palast is for real. He has won six "Project Censored" journalism awards for reporting on stories that the U.S. media has ignored. He earned a degree in finance studying under Milton Friedman. The Financial Times gave him its prestigious David Thomas Prize for business journalism. But for the most part, he's been ignored.

That's because the media doesn't mind pointing out the system's corruptions, but it's loath to show that the system is inherently, strategically corrupt. It's a very scary thing to realize that those in power are in constant mechanizations to bend the country to their will, the laws be damned. A deep loss of faith in the system hurts the economy.

The truth of the matter is that the media is perceived as liberal--and mostly correctly so--on a few of the top hot-button social issues: abortion rights, gun control, freedom of speech issues. But otherwise, the media is a lapdog to the Establishment. Greg Palast, on the other hand, prefers to bite the hand that feeds him.