{ "id": "2001-julyaugust-money-and-politics", "slug": "2001-julyaugust-money-and-politics", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-julyaugust-money-and-politics.html", "year": 2001, "month": "July/August", "monthNum": 7, "headline": "Money and politics", "kicker": "STUDENTS", "author_name": "Scott Finn", "author_title": "", "affiliation": "Charleston Gazette", "summary": "A journalist investigates how special interest money influences West Virginia's Legislature by analyzing campaign contributions, lobbyist spending, and conflicts of interest to show voters why lawmakers often ignore public opinion on key issues like gambling and tobacco taxes.", "keywords": [ "lobbying", "legislature", "influence" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Government & Politics", "Data & Databases" ], "technologies": [ "dBase", "Excel", "Access", "Paradox" ], "full_text": "I have a friend whose first newspaper job was covering West Virginia's Legislature for a conservative, family-owned newspaper. He sat down with the editor at the beginning of the session to talk about topics he'd like to cover, such as Medicaid funding and health care reform.\n\nThe editor soon cut him off, and said to go to the legislators with one question: \"Why aren't you doing the will of the people?\"\n\nAt first, I thought this was a ridiculous question, but the more I dug into the inner workings of our Legislature, the less paranoid this question seemed. Two examples:\n\nEven though a majority of West Virginians opposes any expansion of gambling, a bill legalizing coin-drop slot machines passed the Legislature.\n\nEven though a majority of state citizens supported a smokeless tobacco tax, it died in a Senate committee year after year.\n\nMoney influence\n\nOne obvious reason the Legislature didn't respond to what voters wanted was the influence of special interest money over the legislative process. But that's a vague answer. How can voters picture something like \"influence\" in their minds? I wanted to show how the money worked, and tell it to readers in a way that wouldn't make them sleepy.\n\nI spent a lot of time stumbling around before I finally figured out how to tell the story of how money warps the legislative process. I completed the series \"Cycle of Influence\" for the Charleston Gazette as my master's degree project from the University of Missouri. I was new to reporting, and what I knew about the Legislature came from what I read in the newspaper and heard from friends.\n\nI was fresh out of two Missouri classes investigative reporting and a computer-assisted reporting \"boot camp.\" I wanted to incorporate what I had learned into the series.\n\nI read through the IRE archives and found a lot of stories about money's influence in state legislatures. The stories tended to fall into three categories: campaign contributions, lobbyist spending, and personal conflicts of interest.\n\nIn West Virginia, different groups already had computer databases that tracked all three of these types of money in our Legislature:\n\nCampaign Contributions: A non-profit group called the People's Election Reform Coalition (PERC) had campaign contributions to state legislators going back a decade. PERC includes the state chapter of Common Cause, the West Virginia Citizens' Action Group, and other reform-minded groups.\n\nLobbyist spending: Two databases existed at the state Ethics Commission - one of lobbyists and their registration, the other of lobbyist spending on meals, gifts, and campaign contributions.\n\nConflicts of Interest: Fortunately, the 50 States Project of the Center for Public Integrity had just completed its nationwide searchable database of every personal disclosure form of every state legislator in America (www.50statesonline.org).\n\nThe campaign contributions database was in Dbase and Microsoft Excel, and both translated easily into Microsoft Access, which I used to analyze the data. The lobbyist databases were in Paradox, but also were translated into Access.\n\nI had no trouble getting access to any data. Lucy Suchy at the state Ethics Commission even gave me free disks. She said no one had ever asked for her databases before.\n\nOnce I began to analyze these databases, I saw some disturbing trends. For example, gambling and tobacco industry donations were increasing - more than 200 percent for gambling and 800 percent for tobacco in just two years.\n\nI struggled with how to tell these stories so readers would understand and not get bogged down in numbers. The best stories in the IRE archives tied one of these money issues into a \"real\" issue people cared about - like a bill about filling in wetlands, or locating a toxic dump near a low-income community.\n\nGambling and tobacco\n\nI focused on two gambling and tobacco bills because of the disconnect between public opinion and what the Legislature actually did.\n\nThe Gazette's writing coach, Kate Long, helped me think of ways to show readers how things worked instead of telling them. I picked people on the losing side of the gambling and tobacco bills and reconstructed their experiences in fighting against the bills.\n\nOne anti-gambling activist, a minister, provided some great examples of how lobbyist money buys influence. A gambling lobbyist hangs his coat in a legislator's office and walks in without invitation, while the minister has to wait in the hall. Teams of lobbyists with cell phones tag-team different hearings and meetings with legislators, while the minister wears lace-up shoes instead of loafers so he literally can run from the House to Senate chambers during certain critical hearings.\n\nThe computer-assisted analysis gave flesh to the anecdotes. Pro-gambling lobbyists outspent anti-spending lobbyists by a ratio of 66-1. Legislators who voted to legalize slot machines in the state on average received more than four times as much in campaign contributions from the gambling industry as those who voted against the bill.\n\nIn a story about the failure of a smokeless tobacco tax, an anti-smoking activist told the story of her father's cancer death from chewing tobacco.\n\nShe then talked about her sense of betrayal as a legislator who knew both her and her father voted to keep the smokeless tobacco tax bottled up in the Senate Finance Committee.\n\nThe CAR analysis showed this committee had six of the top ten recipients of tobacco industry contributions in 1998. The committee chairman has a personal financial interest in several convenience stores that sell tobacco products.\n\nImpact\n\nSince the series ran, the Legislature passed a smokeless tobacco tax, after more than a decade of defeat. I would like to think the series helped put pressure on legislators to pass the bill.\n\nThe gambling industry suffered its first major defeat in a decade last fall when voters in Greenbrier County defeated a measure that would have allowed casino gambling at The Greenbrier, a four-star resort.\n\nThe results of \"Cycle of Influence\" and follow-up stories were part of the debate over gambling's increasing influence in the state.\n\nI have continued to follow the gambling industry and its influence on politics in West Virginia. In October, I published a story showing that contrary to popular belief, the Republican governor who publicly opposed gambling quietly was raking in tens of thousands from the gambling industry in campaign contributions. He lost in a close election.\n\nBut gambling forces did help pass a bill to increase the minimum slot machine bet from $2 to $5 in this legislative session, showing their increasing clout among legislators, if not voters. Another bill passed that legalized, taxed and limited the number of video poker machines. During that debate on video poker, an anti-gambling legislator was almost censured by the House of Delegates for what he said during a debate: that there is a correlation between gambling contributions and how legislators voted.\n\nAs long as the Legislature ignores the will of the people, the Gazette will continue to show how money warps the political process.\n\nScott Finn can be reached by e-mail at sfinn@wvgazette.com", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1996-january-public-interest-contributions-and-the-candidates", "score": 0.232 }, { "slug": "1995-july-how-to-check-campaign-coffers", "score": 0.213 }, { "slug": "1992-october-the-national-library-on-money-and-politics-searches-databases-for-you", "score": 0.193 }, { "slug": "1995-july-theyre-in-the-money", "score": 0.193 }, { "slug": "1999-januaryfebruary-searching-for-influence", "score": 0.183 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-julyaugust-money-and-politics.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-julyaugust-money-and-politics.json" }