The sun sets on The Royal Gazette as it misses the big picture on the JetGate scandal

Someone has to say it. No one has. So we will.

More than two months have passed since we published Selling Bermuda, the story that led to the governing party’s internal inquiry and Craig Cannonier’s resignation as Premier of Bermuda.

That’s two months in which the legacy media could have built upon the foundation we provided.

Two months of probing questions, piercing analysis, robust interrogation of key players. Two months of holding the powerful accountable. Two months of serving the public interest.

So, how did it all work out?

The big surprise for us was that Nathan Landow, the millionaire at the centre of the saga, got his memory back.

We first learned this when the Bermuda Sun tracked him down and, in a May 16 story headlined “We sent the $300k”, reported Landow’s version of JetGate.

Much was made in the community of the developer’s admission that he was a donor to the One Bermuda Alliance’s election campaign.

A number of commentators have concluded that his testimony to the legacy media organisations corroborate aspects of our story Selling Bermuda, while discrediting others.

But how credible is the named source Landow?

Admitting to the campaign donation – months after telling Politica he had “no knowledge” of such a thing – may well have been inspired by the fact that the truth would eventually come out in any case. The OBA had launched its internal investigation and key players were cooperating. Lying about it at this stage would have been stupid.

But he probably simply forgot.  Landow, we are sure, does not tell a lie.

Landow’s memory seems to have returned when both The Royal Gazette and the Bermuda Sun asked about Steven DeCosta.

Recall that he told Politica – in our report Selling Bermuda – that he “met with many people. I don’t recall everyone that we met with” when asked if he met DeCosta.

Now, Landow says – to The Royal Gazette: “He’s a good-sized guy so you can’t miss him.” In the same edition, the august institution reports the words of two suddenly very talkative ministers declaring their shock at learning that DeCosta had worked for Landow.

Strangely, neither the daily nor the Bermuda Sun appear to have asked Landow to explain the discrepancies between what he told us and the story he was now selling to Bermuda.

This, in spite of the fact that both newsrooms should be quite familiar with our story Selling Bermuda.

(At the RG, one copy was printed, copied and distributed to a number of their reporters – in violation of our Terms of Service.)

Yet, no questions were asked about our report that a meeting took place between developer Carl Bazarian, DeCosta, Cannonier and Landow.

Nor did they see fit to ask Landow about his trip to Bermuda in early 2013 when he met with Cannonier at Bermuda’s airport.

Landow admitted to flying down here, but apparently forgot he met with Cannonier, telling us he spent ten minutes and left.

We can only be grateful he didn’t fly the plane himself. With his amnesiac condition he may well have ended up on the wrong island.

Selling Bermuda did more than establish Landow’s forgetfulness.

The well-documented rejection by state gaming authorities of Landow’s bid for a casino license in Maryland was not a rejection at all, the developer told us. His group had simply made a decision not to put in a proposal for the license after examining the details, according to the developer.

(Landow refused our offer to send him copies of the newspaper reports on the license rejection. One DC source put his attitude down to his extreme wealth and a sense that he can make his own reality regardless of the facts.)

In similar fashion, Landow told The Royal Gazette that his group decided not to put in a proposal to develop the former Club Med property – contradicting our report that he had been keen to invest and had asked for an extension to the RFP deadline.

The daily reported Landow’s version as fact.

Yet we hear from the same paper – in a May 13 story – that Landow’s proposal was “rejected” by the Government.

The results of the governing party’s internal inquiry has now been made public. As predicted in 11 things we’ve learned since Selling Bermuda, Hollis’s inquiry has found no evidence of any wrongdoing. But Hollis has also been honest enough to tell us that his inquiry was restricted by his own party. What the public might well wonder is what decisions were made about the parameters of the legacy media’s inquiry into the scandal. And by whom?

For our part, we at Politica have learned nothing new from his report.

Thad Hollis’ inquiry into the affair leaves a number of questions unanswered. Questions that should have been asked by the established media as they breathlessly tried to make up for missing the biggest scandal since the rape of the Bermuda Housing Corporation. Their breathlessness was matched only by the breathlessness of those who, keen to protect their own reputations, were finally ready to tell a story to the public.

So, we are already hearing cries of “cover-up” just hours after Hollis’ release of the results of his inquiry.

But if there has been a cover-up, the greater tragedy is the legacy media’s full complicity by abdicating its duty to think critically, ask probing questions and speak truth to power.

The greater tragedy is that too many of us in the media – and too many members of the public – seem to be satisfied with the daily production of mouthpiece journalism and Gazettian stenography.

This article belongs to Politica ! The original article can be found here: Mouthpiece journalism and the forgetful Nathan Landow

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