By Joel Thurtell
[donation]
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick
Judges say the goofiest things.
If I were Detroit Free Press reporters, I’d be mad as hell.
Can you believe it? Wayne County Circuit Judge Robert Colombo Jr. said the paper’s ace reporters are irrelevant.
That’s the last thing an ambitious reporter with a cast-iron ego wants to hear. That pretty much fits all of us deadline scriveners, doesn’t it?
Why, we journalists disgorge the truth 24/7 in a quest to right wrongs and change the world for the better!
What does His Honor mean, irrelevant?
That’s what he said. In a ruling July 17, 2008, Judge Colombo said it makes no difference how the reporters collected 14,000 city of Detroit-owned text messages that exposed Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s affair with his chief of staff, Christine Beatty, along with their apparent lies in a police whistleblower lawsuit.
His words, quoted from the Free Press: “Everyone would like to know how the Free Press got the text messages, but it’s not relevant to this case.”
Your Honor, I beg to differ.
It is relevant as hell.
And somebody, SOMEBODY, has to keep asking the question.
Guess that somebody would be me.
So here I go: How the hell did these reporters get their hands on reams of sizzling, sexy electronic text messages that passed between Mayor Kilpatrick and Beatty?
It’s an important question.
The answer would explain part of the Kwamegate story that so far has gone unreported. To date, the Free Press has published stories that shed light on many corners of this dark story of love, passion, intrigue and deceit where those stories reflect poorly on the mayor. But the paper has stayed silent about one area where inner Free Press workings might come into public view. And if that is incorrect, why not put the whole story out so I can’t suggest such things?
The paper alluded to this thorny problem in a single phrase, noting toward the end of a July 18 story buried on Page 11A that lawyers for hizzoner “contend the texts were leaked in violation of the federal Stored Communications Act.”
In plain English, it’s against the law for electronic communications carriers like city-hired SkyTel to turn over text messages to anyone other than law enforcement agencies with a subpoena or people designated by the city as legitimate recipients of the data.
Apparently an attorney for cops fired by Kilpatrick got a subpoena that was honored by SkyTel. But the story of how the messages wound up in the Free Press Oakland County Newsroom for the reporters to peruse is a legitimate area of inquiry for serious journalists and for the public. The public has a right to know. Where have I heard that before? Oh yes, it’s the very argument the Free Press is using in a lawsuit aimed at prying open more text messages. That’s the same Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, brought by the Free Press, where Judge Colombo says the reporters’ part of the story is irrelevant.
Hey, if the Free Press is pretending to serve the public, then they should serve up all of the story so the public can judge whether the reporters’ role was irrelevant. What are they going to tell the Pulitzer Prize judges — we served the public interest except where it served our own?
Despite the Free Press’s attempt to marginalize it, the “contention” that the text messages were released in violation of federal law ratchets the interest in that piece of the tale immensely. It throws a heavy mantle of hypocrisy onto the Free Press. Was there something smarmy about the way the paper got those messages? It boils down to this: How did the Free Press get the messages?
If it’s so important for the public to be informed, then we need the whole picture.
If there was something shady about the way the newspaper got the story, I’d like to know what was their collective thinking in doing so? Did they decide the news story’s importance to the public outweighed the gravity of having reporters take part, even tangentially, in the commission of an unlawful act?
The mayor is charged with perjury and other felonies. Is there no interest in possible law-breaking on the cops’ side? Or SkyTel’s? Or — heaven forbid! — by the Free Press? Why is there no federal investigation into how and why SkyTel released the messages? Why no probe into how Mike Stefani got the messages and, of course, why is no federal agency looking into how those messages were passed to the Free Press?
If any lawyer armed with a subpoena can get confidential text messages, what does that say about the privacy of telecommunications?
Or is there an investigation, but it simply hasn’t been leaked to the Free Press?
More darkly, what if there were such a probe, and its existence were made known to the Free Press?
Would the paper report it to the public it supposedly serves?
Or would they say it’s irrelevant?
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
