By Joel Thurtell
[donation]
The big question in this whole Detroit Kwamegate scandal — the best entertainment we’ve had in decades — is this: How did Detroit Free Press sleuths Jim Schaefer and Mike Elrick get their hands on the racy electronic text messages that sizzled the airwaves between Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his then chief of staff, Christine Beatty?
The messages are the heart of this soap opera, but they were and are protected by federal law, which supposedly prohibits wireless carriers like Detroit’s carrier SkyTel from doing what SkyTel did: The company handed thousands of inflammatory messages to somebody who had no right to them. That person then, it seems, passed them on to Schaefer and Elrick. The Free Press duo then put them in the paper, and all hell broke loose. A majority of the Detroit City Council wants to oust the mayor, who’s been charged with perjury because the messages contradict his sworn testimony in a police whistle-blower trial.
Meanwhile, the Free Press doesn’t want Kwame — or us — to know who gave Schaefer and Elrick the messages. So the paper’s been sitting on that corner of the story.
In those parts of the world located outside the Free Press newsroom, we call that censorship.
But the Free Press sure would like to print more dirt on Kwame!
So they went to court to argue that the First Amendment gives them the right to see — and print — more of Kwame’s messages. Why, they even say it’s in the PUBLIC INTEREST that they be allowed to pursue their Pulitzer without further hassles from hizzoner.
At the Free Press, you see, the text message windfall is seen by many as a free pass to the paper’s first Pulitzer Prize for writing since 1967. The problem now is that the latest Sludgegate scandal suggesting bribery of Detroit City Council members threatens to make Kwamegate seem like small potatoes.
Downsizing the stature of Kwamegate could mean bye-bye Pulitzer.
But as I say, the big untold story waiting for us patient Free Press readers is the one about the Free Press itself: Did the reporters fish those embarrassing text messages out of a sewer or did they just fall from the sky? How’d they get them? Who was the source? Did the source violate any laws by getting those messages? Did the Freepsters break any laws by accepting this seemingly career-enhancing but maybe illicitly-gotten cadeau?
The Freep ain’t sayin’.
That’s what editors at most papers would call a big hole in the story.
I call it censorship.
Now, thanks to Mayor Kwame and his phalanx of city-paid (they hope!) lawyers, we may find out how the two reporters got their hands on the scandalous messages. Is there a scandal in the getting of the scandal? Kwame’s lawyers are demanding that the two reporters be deposed under oath in the Free Press’ lawsuit to make public the text messages.
But Freep mouthpiece Hershel Fink and Editor Paul Anger are crying foul: They claim the First Amendment shields their reporters from having to testify. “Now he’s attacking the freedom of the press,” Anger said.
I’m confused. Has somebody tried to stop the Free Press from printing a story? Well, yes, of course: Free Press editors themselves. They are unwilling to tell us how the paper got the text messages.
The Free Press honchos have asked a judge to exempt the two journalists from doing what any other citizen would be obliged to do — testify in a trial where getting the truth involves possible jail time for Kwame and his erstwhile chief of staff and paramour, Christine Beatty, who also has been charged with several felonies.
The newspaper’s claim of immunity raises another question: Are journalists somehow a different class of citizen? Do they deserve to dodge giving crucial evidence that us mere mortals who lack access to a $400-an-hour lawyer would have to give or else risk being held in contempt and going to jail?
I’m trying to puzzle this out: According to the newspaper, it has a First Amendment right to know what’s in Kwame’s text messages, which were –notwithstanding the First Amendment — protected from disclosure by federal law.
But somehow the First Amendment also protects the paper’s reporters from having to disclose how they laid hands on the messages.
This is the newspaper, by the way, the so-called FREE Press, which claims its employees — people like Schaefer and Elrick and once upon a time me — don’t even HAVE First Amendment rights.
Can somebody help me decipher this?
Or am I just confounded by the magnitude of the hypocrisy?
Seems to me the Free Press wants it all their own way.
All Kwame’s saying is that he’d like to know how the two reporters got the documents. Well, I’d like to know, too. I think the public has a right to know how this big scoop was put together.
I can’t quite see how the public good is promoted by suppressing reporters’ testimony on how they got the messages while the paper is demanding more messages so it can publish them, sell more papers and nail that Pulitzer.
If the Freepsters have nothing to hide, why wouldn’t they just testify and add a new chapter to the story they broke? And if they do, the public needs to know what’s behind their big scoop.
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
Joel!
If I might respectfully disagree, this isn’t censorship, but protecting confidential sources who felt comfortable enough to provide information showing that the mayor almost certainly committed perjury and conspired to cost taxpayers several million dollars to keep an affair secret.
It’s quite likely that if the source of the text messages believed the newspaper would turn belly up as soon as the mayor lawyer’s demanded their identity, this taxpayer ripoff would never have seen the light of day.
Even if the information is “crucial” to the mayor’s defense (a dubious claim at best) then
the paper is right to make them prove so to a judge before having the boys go under oath.
Would you have had Carl Woodward print a sidebar on the identity of “Deep Throat”?
Hugh
I can’t think of any other word other than “censorship” for suppressing part of a story — “Kwamegate” — whose importance you place on a level with Watergate. If it’s that important, don’t we deserve to know everything about it? Or must we allow reporters and editors to pick the parts they like best and hide the rest? Sounds like censorship to me.
To my knowledge, the argument of protecting sources hasn’t been raised by the Free Press. Regardless, I think it distracts from the fact that the law may have been violated on both sides, since release of the text messages is illegal, as is perjury. Oh yes, and “the mayor almost certainly committed perjury,” as you say, is still not a finding of guilt by a jury. So far, Kwame Kilpatrick has been convicted of no crime, despite the wishful thinking of some journalists.