By Joel Thurtell
According to the May 21, 2009 Detroit Free Press, five lawyers involved with last year’s Kwamegate text message scandal have been charged with violating the lawyers’ canon of ethics and some may even have committed crimes in a coverup.
All the world knows that the scandal came to light because intrepid Free Press reporters got their hands on the texts of messages between former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his paramour and chief of staff, Christine Beatty.
But we still can’t learn from the Free Press — which won a Pulitzer Prize for its journalism in this case — how the reporters got their hands on copies of thousands of text messages. Censorship has a comfy home at Michigan’s oldest newspaper.
The Free Press informs us that the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission thinks an attorney for plaintiff cops violated a judge’s order that he be the first to review subpoenaed messages. Instead, cops attorney Mike Stefani, representing three fired Detroit police officers in a whistleblower lawsuit, ignored the judge and took the messages straight to Kilpatrick’s lawyers and threatened to make them public. The lawyers from both sides then arranged a secret deal for the cops to get an $8.4 million settlement while the messages would be suppressed.
Now it seems that some attorneys may have committed a misdemeanor by concealing the messages’ evidence of perjury by Kilpatrick and Beatty. Both were later convicted and sentenced to jail for perjury.
It is a very interesting story. It would be more interesting, given all the suggestions of ethics and law breaking by attorneys, if we could know how the reporters got their hands on documents that were supposed to be seen only by a judge.
It would make a powerful story even more so.
But the Free Press consistently pussy-foots around this question.
I suppose the paper would argue its reporters are protecting the person or persons who passed the text messages to them.
Protecting them from what?
A contempt of court citation for violating the judge’s decree that the court handle the messages and not a plaintiff’s attorney?
Possible sanctions for other misbehavior connected with passing purloined documents to unauthorized people, in this case news reporters?
Did the reporters maybe step across some ethical or legal line in acquiring the messages?
The blanks need to be filled.
By suppressing the facts, the newspaper acts like the government it forced to be transparent.
If there were ethics violations or lawbreaking in the way reporters got those messages, then the public has as much right to know about that as it had a right to the texts.
We know from the strange case of Free Press reporter David Ashenfelter’s Fifth Amendment jousting with Richard Convertino that this newspaper is capable of making obscure those areas of a story that might involve crimes that may have been committed by its sources, or even, maybe, by a reporter. Interesting that the lead writer on the Attorney Grievance Commission story is Ashenfelter, whose clash with Convertino lately has been reported in part by the Pulitzer twins, Mike Elrick and Jim Schaefer.
In Convertino, the Free Press left out hugely important pieces of the story.
Why not fully serve the public, rather than cherry-picking parts of the story that are convenient to the paper ?
The mere fact that reporters won’t write about that very important piece of the story makes me wonder if it’s not time to for the Free Press to assign different reporters to the case.
Better yet, farm the reporting out to someone without an interest. As I suggested they do in the Convertino case, outsource the story to reporters in some state or nation uncontaminated by previous Free Press prying.
By not writing about or even acknowledging the importance of sources to this Pulitzer-winning story, the Free Press underscores the importance of the related questions: How did its reporters get those text messages and was it done according to the law?
If there’s nothing to hide, why not out with it?
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
Come on, Joel, your obvious anger and resentment toward the Free Press is getting old. Censorship? You do know that the freep is part of a publicly-owned company and the City of Detroit is a taxpayer-funded government entity. The freep may be guilty of secrecy but it is hardy censorship. You have regaled us with stories of your great reporting skills…if the sources are so important to you, go out and find them.
Yeah, I’m interested in the sources, but you are being silly by zeroing in on this story as if it is something odd. Newspapers and journalists often get information through promises of protecting the source. That the free press won’t explain how it got these text messages is neither surprising nor all that worrisome. If they proactively broke the law, they should be charged…reporters have to follow the law just like everyone else should. But if someone funneled the information to them, that’s likely just good reporting.
The big story was the revelation of the perjury, the hush-money settlement, the waste of taxpayer dollars, the unfair firing of police, the use of taxpayer money to fund and then cover up an illicit affair by the mayor. Great story. You won’t even give the paper its due. Oh, that’s right, you had a big blockbuster story (in your opinion) that the paper wouldn’t pursue. Your jealousy is showing. The freep is suffering, but their reporting is something we’ll miss if this paper goes away.
There are legitimate criticisms of the Detroit papers. Your diatribe about the ownership handling of the JOA and the strike — while decidedly one-sided — had many strong points. (However, if I had worked for one of the Detroit papers, I would have bought dogs just to hunt down the union leadership for how poorly they handled the situation.)
But you are off base on this one. Your hatred of the paper clouds your judgment. You are like the joke about the reporters who saw Nixon walk across the Potomac one night and reported the next day: Nixon can’t swim!
Somebody slipped them the text messages and they were able to use that to propel great reporting into a deserved Pulitizer Prize and, more important, bring down a corrupt mayor.
I suppose you think the washington post also practiced censorship when it wouldn’t reveal its sources in watergate.
This angers me. Misusing the term “censorship” cheapens it.
If there’s nothing to hide, why not out with it?
At least 2 horrible deficiencies in that argument:
1. They do have something to hide: the identity of the person(s) who provided the information. They are protecting that source.
2. Your reason suggests you are in favor of tossing out a portion of our Bill of Rights and constitutional law. If you have nothing to hide, why not testify in a case in which you are the accused? If you have nothing to hide, why not answer the police questions, before your lawyer arrives?
Silly arguments reveal empty positions.
The Attorney Grievance Commission has their heads up their ass, along with the Freep. It’s really interesting how the Freep used Steffani and then hung him out to dry. As for the City of Detroit attorneys, they are scum, plain and simple; where the hell is Sharon McPhailure’s comeuppance, too? After he received the verdict, Steffani owed a duty to his clients to get the most money he could for them, including, in this instance, being reimbursed for attorneys fees; in order to justify the fees on a whistleblower action, he had to prove how the defendants’ actions contributed to those fees, especially if their actions caused those fees to increase exponentially, as in this case. Those sactimonious holes at the AG would have turned around and charged him with unzealously representing his clients, had he not done what he did. Steffani can’t win. Previous comments about prominent attorneys, who because of their status in prominent firms, would be treated more leniently, speak very loudly that they do not treat everyone equally. They are always out to get the solo practioners or small firms, but the prestigious ones are given a slap on the wrist. Simply disgusting and appalling.
Ricky, I’m surprised that Joel left your comment up, as it is borderline trolling, barely makes sense, and is full of ad hominem arguments. Of course nobody would ever want to anger you. Apparently, you’ll buy dogs to hunt down those that do. Maybe he took that into account when leaving the comment up.
Leaving aside your ad hominem arguments, you claim that the term ‘censorship’ was misused in Joel’s article, but you failed to explain why you felt that was true. The definition of censorship is “the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor.”
In this case, the communicative material is the source of the text messages, which may have been illegally gotten, making it inconvenient, and of course harmful to the paper. So, in fact, the term was used correctly in the article. What may actually be angering you is your inability to grasp basic concepts (yes Ricky, that was an ad hominem attack).
Your argument is basically this: if the source was illegal, reporters should be prosecuted; but the source may be legal, so we shouldn’t be asking what the sources were in order to protect them. To make a valid argument, you really need to explain why these two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
If the reporters brought down a corrupt mayor, they should be protected because their methods may have been legal? Following that logic, how would we ever know if their methods were not legal?
In your next post, you point out two ‘deficiencies’ in Joel’s article (which is ironic, considering the deficiencies in your own argument), one of which is that Joel is in favor of throwing out the Bill of Rights. However, you didn’t cite the specific passage of the Bill of Rights that Joel is in favor of throwing out, which would be very helpful, especially considering that Joel never implied that he thought that any part of the Bill of Rights should be thrown out. This seems to be a ‘straw man’ argument, the straw man being your claim that implicit in Joel’s argument was the disposal of one’s right to a lawyer, etc.
In fact, I believe that Joel is implying that the reporters may have come into possession of the texts through illegal search and seizure. If you’ve read the Bill of Rights, the phrase ‘illegal search and seizure’ may ring a bell.