Regular readers of this blog know that former New York attorney general and current NY governor Eliot Spitzer’s abuses of power have been a frequent topic for a long time, particularly Spitzer’s dubious prosecution of former New York Stock Exchange chairman, Richard Grasso.
Well, as the years pass from Spitzer’s odious term as AG, additional information is beginning to filter out that indicates that Spitzer’s abuses of power were every bit as bad as suspected.
Dealbreaker’s John Carney has posts here and here reviewing Charles Gasparino’s new book, King of the Club: Richard Grasso and the Survival of the New York Stock Exchange (Collins 2007) in which Carney summarizes Garparino’s research on Spitzer’s dubious tactics in investigating Grasso.
Suffice it to say that Spitzer’s tactics would have qualified him for a key position in any of the secret police units of the former Eastern European totalitarian regimes.
In Carney’s latter post, he makes an excellent point about the mainstream media’s myopia regarding Spitzer’s abuses of power, which were regularly noted in the blogosphere, but rarely mentioned in the mainstream media outside of the Wall Street Journal. Carney observes:
Why didn’t [the mainstream media covering Spitzer’s investigation of Grasso] reveal the slimy tactics of the Spitzer squad?
We suspect part of the problem was the fear of being “cut off” of access. Reporters compete for scoops, and often those scoops depend on sources who will leak information to them. In the NYSE case, reporters assigned to the story were largely at the mercy of the investigators, who could cut-off uncooperative reporters, leaving them without copy to bring to their editors while their competitors filed stories with the newest dirt.
They probably felt — not unrealistically — that their very jobs were on the line.
This reveals an unfortunate state of affairs. Playing bugle boy while government officials call the tunes from behind a veil of anonymity is not investigative journalism — it’s hardly journalism at all. It’s closer to propaganda.
It would have been far better had the journalists turned their backs on the Spitzer squad, or even revealed these tactics to the public. Sure they may have lost some “good” stories but they could have painted a truer picture of what was going on. But that’s probably too much to hope for.