Investigating the Sludge | Exposing Campaign Finances in the Oil Industry with Alex Kotch
Sludge, a money-in-politics newsroom that has been publishing on Civil for just over six months, has already exposed donations to white supremacist candidates in Congress, uncovered special interest groups hiding their campaign donations and generally established itself as a must-read source among campaign finance circles and beyond (see this post for a more detailed look at some of its top accomplishments to date).
Sludge investigative reporter Alex Kotch’s interest was piqued last week when he saw a Tweet from campaign finance journalist David Sirota pointing to how 2018 Senate candidate (and, increasingly, rumored 2020 presidential candidate) Beto O’Rourke had received monetary support from individuals in the oil and gas industry, and how that may have violated his pledge to not take contributions from fossil fuel executives.
The story includes empirical data, but Sludge made the conscious choice to tag it as an “Opinion” — the first time it has done so — due to the fact that Alex was compelled to write it to distinguish between investigative journalists and political operatives in defense of investigative journalism.
This post will be the first in a series on Civil’s blog to explain the “stories behind the story,” meant to share more context about what goes into reporting especially impactful stories from Civil newsrooms. In this Q&A, we asked Alex about why it’s important to view campaign donations in context, as well as about what kind of research goes into truly independent reporting.
Q: At what point between David Sirota’s tweet and the subsequent firestorm it set off did you decide to dig into this deeper, and why?
Alex Kotch: David tweeted on Sunday morning, and Neera Tanden first tweeted out her thoughts on Monday night. I was interested in correcting the record pretty soon after that, but I was working on a big piece about a California wildfire profiteer, so I didn’t have a chance to start on a Beto article for a few days. As the week went on, things got crazier and crazier, and after the conspiracy theories came out, I was like, “OK, I’m doing this.”
There were several things people were doing and getting wrong (and still are) that I wanted to correct, including: casting David’s tweet as an attack, confusing investigative reporters with political operatives or activists, the conspiracy theory (obviously), and seemingly confusing corporate PAC donations (made by individuals who work for the company) and contributions from corporate treasuries (which are illegal in all federal races).
Q: This is the first official story Sludge has published with an “Opinion” tag, meaning it contains subjective opinion as well as objective fact. What prompted this decision?
AK: I wrote the piece [as an Opinion] because my argument that David’s tweet wasn’t an attack, which I firmly believe, does involve a modicum of subjectivity, and because I’d gotten pretty involved in the back-and-forth on Twitter. Criticism of legitimate campaign finance reporting is something very personal to me. I wrote the piece in the first person and used it as a chance to state some of my beliefs and my goals for Sludge.
Q: Towards the end of the piece, you wrote, “It’s not our job to sit back and let the political operatives decide who deserves scrutiny and who doesn’t.” How often do you come up against this mentality in the process of reporting a story?
AK: It’s fairly common for politicians, their staff, think tanks and the like to assign an ideology or an agenda to reporters when they ask honest questions about conflicts of interest. It’s much easier to justify your own conflicts, or the appearance of conflicts, when you think, or pretend, that the person asking the questions is conflicted herself. And it makes it easier to think you have the right to tell journalists what they should be covering instead.
Here’s what really matters: A center-left think tank that’s intimately tied to the Clintons and has scores of corporate donors (including an oil and gas company!) is trying to stifle facts from coming out about a potential presidential candidate it clearly likes. As opposed to 2016, Dems will have a real, competitive primary contest in 2020, and for it to be fair and meaningful, we reporters need to scrutinize every single candidate. It might not make ideological think tanks happy, but that’s completely irrelevant to the field of journalism. It’s what the public deserves as they decide, over the grueling, roughly 18-month primary.
We [at Sludge] go to work every day with zero corporate donors and zero advertisers. This allows us to be completely, 100 percent free from conflicts of interest, and makes us answer only to our readers. (For the record, our current funder, Civil, has never so much as attempted to influence our content in any way, and we are a completely separate company from Civil.)
There’s something that many people, especially those in mainstream media, refuse to acknowledge: that reporters are people with real lives and opinions, just like everyone else. And that’s ok! For instance, I’m an environmentalist, but that didn’t prevent me from honestly and fairly reporting the O’Rourke piece. I truly want to know why, and how, the O’Rourke campaign broke his No Fossil Fuel Money pledge, and I wanted to explain the facts and dynamics behind his oil and gas-linked donations to everyone who’s interested. This effort by media organizations to appear unbiased is actually quite dangerous, because it leads directly to “both sidesism,” which isn’t remotely accurate right now.
As much as Tanden and many of her colleagues, allies and Twitter followers want to characterize unflattering, or even neutral, reporting on O’Rourke as political hackery, Sludge and other independent media won’t let them get away with it.
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