By Joel Thurtell
During the McCarthy period, spy-hunting journalist Whittaker Chambers hid rolls of film in a pumpkin.
In the most amazing Detroit Free Press story I’ve ever read, I learned today, October 8, 2009, how the two top sleuths at the Free Press, each owning a quarter of a Pulitzer Prize, got their big scoop that ousted Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and sent him to prison.
They were pumpkins!
In the weird Free Press story by M.L. Elrick and Jim Schaefer, we learn that attorney Mike Stefani gave the text messages that wound up making political mincemeat of Kwame to the two Freepsters writing today’s very story!
Like Chambers putting film in the pumpkin, apparently Stefani thought the two Freepsters were a sort of journalistic safe deposit box.
In spycraft, it’s called a “dead-drop” — a place where contraband can be put so giver and taker don’t have to be in the same place at the same time.
Stefani, defending his law license before the Michigan Attorney Discipline Board, said he gave the papers to the reporters for “safekeeping.”
So Stefani was the Free Press “deep throat.”
And the paper was his dead-drop.
Maybe the Freepsters were supposed to hold the text messages for somebody else. Stefani gives the text messages to Elrick/Schaefer to keep safe for…
Well, for what?
Did Stefani have some third party for whom the Freepsters were acting as a pipeline?
Not very journalistic of them, if so.
Did Stefani know his partners in subterfuge were going to put the messages on newsprint?
What kind of promises did they make in return for “safekeeping” those lurid texts?
Elrick, covering the hearing, declined to answer reporters’ questions, even though he was a subject of the hearing. Cute.
I’ve known people who honestly trusted media people with confidential information. That’s because there are reporters who are willing to keep such things to themselves. Others will out the facts.
Ethics?
As I say, depends partly on what the agreement was between Stefani and the Pulitzer-totin’ reporters.
Depends also on how forthcoming they are about how they got their Pulitzer-making transcripts.
I’m telling you, it does matter how they got this story.
Isn’t this interesting?
A couple times on JOTR I wondered how the Free Press got those text messages and I suggested it would make interesting reading. I found it hypocritical of the newspaper to go into court — and into print — claiming to be this great representative of the public good, insisting that courts and lawyers and public officials open their records to the Free Press, even while the newspaper contends it’s not subject to the same kind of scrutiny.
Why, the Free Press claims its employees don’t even enjoy First Amendment rights!
Now with this Discipline Board hearing, we’re starting to get somewhere.
But there’s more to know.
Problem is, the demi-Pulitzers have been entrusted by their editors with reporting their own story.
Note that the questions I’ve raised were not even mentioned by the reporters in their Free Press story.
Isn’t it curious that there was no comment from the bosses?
And isn’t it weird that the the Kwame-beaters are the ones asking their editors to comment on a story that has the Free Press and its two award-bedecked heroes as central characters, all of whom are keeping mum?
Doubly cute.
Time was when covering a story about yourself would have been a big no-no.
But now we know that what underlay the Free Press’s deflated Pulitzer was not gumshoe work, just a lucky connection.
And yet, maybe not. Maybe there was more to it.
If so, let’s hear about it!
Come on, you palladins of the people, tell us the whole story.
What’s this about editors having no comment?
Actually, that’s just what the reporter did, isn’t it?
But hey, drag those editors out of their holes!
Let’s hear from those creatures.
There has to be more to this yarn.
Has it occurred to anyone that these reporters might be called as witnesses?
Would they still cover themselves?
Time to yank those pumpkins off the story.
Drop me a line at joelthurtelL@gmail.com
