Free Press: Hang ’em high!

By Joel Thurtell

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In one short story on page A17 in the July 15, 2008 issue of The New York Times, an out-of-state paper, managed to capture the essence of a Detroit judge’s ruling Monday, July 14, in the perjury case — also known as the text message scandal — of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty.

The Times’ achievement is no big deal. It’s what we’d expect from any news organization striving for fairness in reporting.

Too bad the Detroit Free Press, which broke the text message story in January, can’t meet the standard.

The nut of the story is that Detroit 36th District Judge Ronald Giles has decided to withhold some text messages that have not already been published by the Free Press and umpteen other news outlets because, as the Times writes, they “could be challenged by the defense as privileged material or would be ruled inadmissible.”

Why might the unpublished messages be privileged or inadmissible?

Again according to the Times, “Defense lawyers say the messages could threaten the defendants’ ability to get a fair trial and were illegally obtained.”

Nowhere in the Free Press story will you read that explanation.

The Detroit paper consumes a large tract of page 3A newsprint real estate with a big color photo of Beatty and hizzoner over a fat, two-deck headline: “Judge: Some texts could stay private.”

Does the Free Press report say the messages would stay private because, as the Times concisely put it, they might impair the ability of Beatty and Kilpatrick to get a fair trial and besides were gotten illegally?

Nope.

Who got the messages illegally?

We don’t know the answer to that one. But we do know, because the Free Press trumpets the news every chance it gets, including in this story, that the Free Press obtained and published parts of messages that came — apparently illegally — from Beatty’s city-issued pager.

It’s a violation of federal law for a pager company to release text messages, but SkyTel, the city’s pager company, did just that.

The Times said it plainly. The Free Press broke the story in January and supposedly owns the story. So why did they miss these points?

I doubt it was an oversight.

First, there’s the issue of making sure Beatty and Kilpatrick get a fair trial. The Free Press has already told us what it thinks: Guilty as charged.

In a previous post, I chided Free Press editors for saying over and over in stories that the text messages “show” that Beatty and Kilpatrick committed perjury in a police whistle-blower lawsuit. But Beatty and Kilpatrick have yet even to be bound over for trial, a circus that won’t happen till next year, if ever. In other words, no jury has yet determined that the text messages “show” anything.

Despite my efforts to correct them, the hanging judges at the Free Press keep acting like this duo have been convicted. In the July 15 paper, they repeated the falsehood: The text messages, the Free Press stated, “showed Kilpatrick and Beatty…lied under oath and tried to mislead jurors in a whistle-blower trial.”

Talk about tainting potential jurors. Many who read the Free Press could easily come to believe, if they don’t think very carefully, that Beatty and Kilpatrick have already been assigned state prison inmate numbers.

Because I hear Freepsters and other Detroit journalists saying the Free Press is a shoo-in for a Pulitzer Prize for its Kwamegate coverage, I’m convinced that the paper’s staff are tilting their stories to impress the prize board judges. Journalism awards often are given out to publications whose stories get results. Putting somebody in jail is a very visible result. At the Free Press, it seems that they want so badly for Kilpatrick to do jail time that in their minds he’s already taken the fall.

Okay, that explains maybe why the paper pretends the mayor and Beatty are guilty until proven innocent. But why would the newspaper suppress basic facts of court coverage like the issue of the possibly illegal release of text messages to someone who knew how to get them published?Just as self-interest in the form of Pulitzer mania seems to be driving coverage, so is it being pushed by the paper’s need to protect itself and its employees from parts of the story the Free Press has chosen not to tell us.

Namely, who gave them the illicit text messages? How did they get this big scoop, anyway?

Isn’t this fascinating? I’d like to know. Lawyers for Kilpatrick and Beatty seem dazzled by this question, too. They’re demanding to have the two star Free Press reporters who broke the story testify in the newspaper’s own Freedom of information Act lawsuit demanding that all the text messages be made public. If the paper wins that one, gets lots more messages out in the open, it would be a big coup — then they can pick and choose which will be the next juicy morsels they print.

Right now, they’re not in control of the information flow that creates the story. That’s one reason why Free Press editors and lawyers don’t want the reporters to testify. Another reason might be, well, if somebody at the paper crossed an ethical or legal line. That would be a story to choke on.

The paper’s making a First Amendment issue of its claim that the reporters should not have to testify. They say it’s in the public interest that the text messages be released in full, but it’s not in the public interest for their reporters to tell all.

Wouldn’t it be in the public interest for the reporters to tell the whole story? How can you can defend freedom of expression by suppressing the truth?

I’m sure it galls bosses at the Free Press to think Kwame might take charge of this story.

The Free Press is so entangled in Kwamegate that it can’t fairly report the story.

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com