Jeff Greene, the defeated Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Florida and current anti-media crusader, says he’s on a mission to break the cabal of reporters who he says have dominated Florida politics for too long. His $500 million lawsuit against two prominent Florida papers, he told me yesterday, is his new quest to set Florida on the right path.
“To me this is just as important as running for office,” Greene said of his libel suits against the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times. The billionaire investor claims that his multi-million dollar campaign for the Democratic nomination went down in flames, in part, due to reporting that was at best shoddy and at worst out-and-out biased. Greene seemed more inclined to believe the latter, suggesting that one reporter, the Times‘ venerated political correspondent Adam Smith, was more interested in taking down Greene than reporting the facts.
“It is our firm opinion that the allegations in this lawsuit are preposterous,” Times editor Neil Brown said in a statement. “We believe Jeff Greene is a sore loser and he’s blaming the newspapers because he can’t accept the verdict of the voters.”
Brown said the paper “gave Mr. Greene ample space to explain his positions” in its coverage, and said its coverage of his campaign was “fair, clear and the information was well-documented.”
But Greene says Smith’s reporting did not live up to that standard. Greene said that Smith told “a senior member of my campaign” that the paper was set to publish “a hit piece” in advance of Smith’s August profile of Greene that helped bring the infamous tales of Greene’s yacht to light.
“To me, the word ‘hit piece,’ means you’re attempting to hurt someone,” Greene said. He said that Smith “ignored the facts” in favor of publishing a story that proved to be quite damaging. Greene suggested that Smith set out to write a hit piece and take his candidacy down.
And lest you think these lawsuits are all about Greene, the former candidate said that he’s fighting for more than just his own reputation. He says he’s suing the press to protect future politicians from the supposed devious scheming of the media elite in Florida.
“If what I’m saying is true, and I believe it is, it means a few political reporters are out there destroying candidates,” Greene said. He went so far as to suggest that due to the nature of the political press in Florida, plenty of outsiders were “afraid to get into politics” for fear of running afoul of the reporters who hold the keys to credibility.
He said the groupthink of these few, powerful political reporters are part of “why we’re in the mess we’re in today” in Florida, which led him to his claim that suing two of the state’s biggest papers for half a billion dollars was at least as important as trying to get a seat in the United States Senate.
But Greene also acknowledged that the offending stories may not have been the only reason he lost to Rep. Kendrick Meek on primary night. “Everyone knows it’s a moving target,” he told me. “Things don’t happen one piece of news, one advertisement at a time.”
Though Greene did not provide me with substantive evidence supporting his claims, he did say that he has internal poll numbers that suggest that the coverage of less-than-savory business dealings in the recent past stopped his campaign dead in its tracks. He said that internal numbers showed that voters didn’t care much about his connections with celebrities like Mike Tyson, but when they heard his investments may have been shady, his numbers dropped “10 points.”
It should be noted that the media wasn’t the only place voters were hearing bad things about Greene’s business practices. Meek ran a negative campaign against Greene focused mostly on his time as a real estate investor. What’s more, the time that Greene led most in the polls came when he was the only guy on air with TV ads. Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that The Other Rich Guy won the Republican gubernatorial primary on the same day Greene lost in the Senate race. Despite a healthy helping of bad press, Rick Scott was able to run from the outside and knock off establishment choice Bill McCollum in the gubernatorial race in much of the same way Greene had hoped to against Meek.
But for now, none of that really matters. As Greene says, his theories about reporters in Florida will “have their day in court,” and his huge fortune will now be turned toward his new enemy: the fourth estate. Greene makes no bones about the potential of his suits (and the fortune behind them) to scare off other reporters from writing tough pieces about rich guys like him. But he says that as long as reporters have their facts straight, they’ve got nothing to worry about.
He also made no bones about taking on the papers in Florida.
“These newspapers ran stories they absolutely knew were false and misleading,” he said. “They tried to engage in character assassination, there’s no question about it.”
Brown says that Greene’s lawsuit against her paper is little more than sour grapes. But she also says it could potentially set a dangerous precedent.
“Democracy won’t work if we let lawsuits full of baseless charges from a political candidate inhibit us from providing voters with the independent information that they need and rely on,” he said.
Note: This post originally attributed the Times‘ response to a spokesperson, rather than the paper’s editor, Neil Brown. The post has been updated to reflect the correct source of the comments.
