By Joel Thurtell
All through the Kwame thing, we heard this drumbeat from the Detroit Free Press:
This newspaper represents the public interest.
We need this or that record so we can better represent the public.
We need judges to say the First Amendment permits the newspaper to investigate and publish forbidden materials, for example, private electronic text messages (although we don’t think the public deserves to know how we got them).
Now that the shoe’s on the newspaper’s foot, what do we hear?
There must be some hitherto unknown constitutional amendment that allows newspapers to practice hypocrisy with impunity.
I was amazed at the latest trick cooked up by the den of attorneys laboring to keep Free Press reporter David Ashenfelter from doing his citizen’s duty and testifying in the civil lawsuit of former assistant U.S. attorney Richard Convertino.
Dave, or rather, the paper’s lawyers, want the federal judge in the case to let Dave tell him in secret why he’s afraid he might be charged criminally if he gives up the names of the federal prosecutors who illegally leaked information to the reporter before Convertino was even charged.
The feds have their own nasty little bag of tricks, of course. Leaking confidential information to compliant reporters is one of their slimy tools for prizing public sympathy away from the target and in favor of the government. Usually, it works. Nobody gets hurt — except, of course, the human being they smear.
So Dave wrote his government-biased story, including the name of an undercover federal informant for good measaure. Shades of Valery Plame.
The little scheme backfired, with a federal jury acquitting Convertino. This was comeuppance for the federal blabbermouths, and for the Free Press. However much the paper may suppress the bad news, for them, that Convertino got off the hook, his acquittal let Convertino come back and haunt his persecutors — federal attorneys and the Free Press.
But Convertino can’t go ahead with his lawsuit against the feds until he knows whom to name.
Now the reporter, having screwed Convertino once by writing his suck-up story, is trying to screw him again by sliming away from giving testimony.
U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland wrote in an August 2008 opinion that Ashenfelter has no First Amendment right not to testify. Our champions of the First Amendment and the public interest at the Free Press chose to suppress that — for the journalists — unpleasant piece of news. The judge ruled that the feds who leaked on Convertino might later be prosecuted, and there is no First Amendment shield for anyone, even such public interest-minded journalists as the Freepsters, to keep silent when their testimony is required in a criminal case.
Now comes Dave, or rather the newspaper’s lawyers, proposing that Dave debrief the judge in secret why he fears prosecution and therefore can’t give up the names of federal leakers.
These sources were not whistleblowers. They were Convertino’s bosses or at least his peers in the U.S. Department of Justice. They did what they did hoping to smear a fellow prosecutor because, apparently, they didn’t like it that Convertino had testified before Congress criticizing the Department of Justice.
So Convertino was the whistleblower. And his former colleagues at Justice wanted their pound of flesh. They still won’t fess up about who among them leaked, and the Free Press is taking part in a continued effort by the feds to screw Convertino out of those names.
Now we have the ever-so-public-interest-minded Free Press trying to weasel Dave into the judge’s office for a little private meeting. No record. No published report.
Wow.
What kind of newspaper does that?
This is the institution that sued to open up records in the Kwame Kilpatrick case.
It was all about the public’s right to know back then.
Guess things have changed.
Now, for their own narrowly-focused, private reasons, the Free Press doesn’t want us to know why Dave is staying mum.
If it were someone else (think Kwame Kilpatrick) trying to pull such a shyster shenanigan, there’d be 90-point boldface headlines screaming outrage.
But because it’s the Free Press, we get a little box known in newspaper jargon as a “containable” down at the right-hand bottom of the Local News page.
The Free Press keeps burying this story, and now they want to bury Dave’s face-to-face with the judge.
What’re you afraid of, Freepsters?
The truth?
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
