By Joel Thurtell
A few minutes after six this morning, having brought the day’s issues of The Detroit Free Press and The New York Times in and while I measured coffee into the java machine, it occurred to me that readers of my columns might get the mistaken notion that I think Kwamegate — the scandal that followed the Free Press’ publication of electronic text messages between Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his erstwhile chief of staff, Christine Beatty — is of little consequence.
Just the opposite.
True, I’ve been critical of the way the Free Press has covered the story, after breaking it last January. But that doesn’t mean I think Kwamegate is small potatoes. In fact, I believe the attempts of some to identify it with Watergate — the petty crime in a Washington, D.C. office complex that led to a Constitutional crisis and forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974 — demean the importance of the revelations about Detroit’s mayor.
Not only do I think Kwamegate is a big deal, but I believe the apparent corruption the Free Press revealed in the mayor’s office is connected to Detroit’s other scandal, the one I’ve dubbed Sludgegate because it involves an FBI investigation into allegations that four Detroit City Council members took bribes to vote in favor of a sewage sludge recycling plant.
But sorry to say, I think the Free Press is also complicit is some of this mess. What do I mean?
One of the prime suspects in Sludgegate is City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, wife of U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. Now, when I suggest all of this mess is connected, I need to give you a bit of background. Starting in late 2002, I began investigating reports of corruption by Congressman Conyers. You can read about the Conyers case on this blog under two categories, “Conyers Series” and “JC & Me.” The most important stories ran on Nov. 21, 2003. The main story outlined ways in which Conyers subverted his federally-paid congressional staffers to work on his cronies’ and his wife’s political campaigns while they were collecting paychecks cut by the U.S. House of Representatives Payroll Office. The second story reported how I tracked one of Conyers’ staffers to the campaign office of a presidential candidate in Chicago at a time when the staffer was being paid to organize a symposium on universal health insurance in Dearborn.
The stories got no traction in local and national media. Nonetheless, they sparked a House Ethics Committee investigation of Conyers. When the media finally awoke to the scandal in 2006 — three and a half years after we broke it — the coverage focused on Conyers assigning staffers to babysit his kids. The whole thing was trivialized.
Why do I think Kwamegate and Sludgegate are connected to Conyers? I believe each situation, from firing whistle-blower cops and then lying under oath about it and trying to suppress text messages that reveal the corruption, trading votes for dollars in City Council and suborning the proper role of a congressional office into an election patronage system are connected by a common thread.
That common thread is the delusional belief that elected government office is a pipeline to money and power. It is the misguided faith that government is meant to be scammed by elite members of society who manage to get themselves elected to government positions with the power to help themselves to the public treasury.
I’m talking about a sense of entitlement that propels its adherents to help themselves and their cronies to whatever goodies they can grab behind the cover of public trust.
Now, my concern about the journalists is that they too have succombed to the delusion that they are entitled to something. I’ve written about this before. I call it Pulitzer mania, the drive to win a coveted award that might shoehorn some journalists into better jobs and away from the financially faltering Free Press. All by itself, that manic drive can distort the way a story is reported.
But there may be something more than striving for laurels. It could be calculated self-interest. This is why I’ve focused on the question of how the Free Press acquired those scandalous text messages in the first place. The paper doesn’t write about that corner of the story. In court, its lawyers protected reporters — successfully — from the mayor’s lawyers’ attempts at forcing them to answer questions.
There is a sense of entitlement among journalists, too. This belief in an entitlement is also propelled by elitism. It is the belief that journalists are so different from ordinary mortals that they don’t have to obey the laws that govern the rest of us. They use the term “shield” to suggest that journalists, because they are somehow created more equal than the rest of us, do not have to obey subpoenas to testify in court.
Here’s how it works: If you, Joe Citizen, had some information that would enlighten testimony in a court case, you would be obliged to give that information under oath. What if you argued that your testimony would expose someone who gave you that information? Tough. You must talk. That’s the law. Talk, or go to jail.
But if you were a journalist, you would very likely invoke the “shield” argument. Some states actually have shield laws to prevent Journalists from giving up their sources. In the end, though, government lawyers can break down those shields. Otherwise, news media lawyers argue for a special standing for journalists, who, it is argued, are protecting Democracy when they refuse to reveal who leaked a story to them. I’m not convinced. Remember the case a few years ago of Judith Miller, a reporter for the Times, who was jailed because she refused to tell a prosecutor who leaked information to her? Turned out what she was protecting was her one-sided reportage of the runup to the Iraq war.
In recent years, Journalists have railed at courts for stripping them of their immunity, but in fact there never was an antidote to telling the truth as a witness.
And that brings us right back to the Free Press and its apparent discomfort at writing about how reporters got those text messages. That reticence makes me curious. Did the reporters promise their source or sources they’d preserve his/her/their anonymity even if the Journalists had to go to jail for contempt of court?
I doubt it. I remember years ago sitting in Room 100 of the old Free Press building with scores of other Free Press staffers and being lectured by a lawyer about the importance of never, NEVER making deals with sources that would obligate the paper legally.
In another essay, I’ll take up the issue of dealing with anonymous sources. It’s a chapter in a book I’m finishing: SHOESTRING REPORTER: HOW I GOT TO BE A BIG CITY REPORTER (WITHOUT GOING TO J SCHOOL) AND HOW YOU CAN DO IT TOO.
Right now it’s enough to say there’s enough sense of entitlement, enough elitism underlying problems in Detroit to outlast a hundred newspaper investigations. The malady permeates local government in myriad ways. How is it, for instance, that our institutions, including major newspapers, tolerate the Wayne County Circuit Court operating as if the world were normal while shutting our access to the court’s files, which the state’s Constitution, statutes and common law say must be open to the public?
Is there some kind of mental and moral decay in Wayne County that allows all of these travesties — perjury, bribery, abuse of office, cronyism, nepotism and gross disregard of public rights — to fluorish?
What if the Free Press had investigated John Conyers five years ago as aggressively as its team of sleuths now are going after Kwame? Isn’t it fascinating that the finger of justice is pointing now at Monica Conyers, a public figure who is the creation of her powerful congressman husband and his forced employment of publicy-paid staffers to run her pollitical campaigns that I dissected in my Nov. 21, 2003 story?
Two years ago, one of the Kwamegate sleuths, Jim Schaefer, and I were trying to investigate Monica Conyers. There was zero interest among editors.
If the Free Press had steadfastly pursued the Conyers story instead of stifling it, isn’t it possible that Kwamegate might not have happened? Isn’t it possible lthat coming at this Detroit mess, created by elitism and entitlement, that a probe of John Conyers would have leapfrogged to other Metro Detroit messes, including the one the mayor created. Maybe Monica’s reign would have been checked before her vote could be added to the other four making the majority that ushered in Sludgegate.
Yes, a timely newspaper investigation might have re-tailored the historical fabric into which Kwamegate, Sludgegate and … were woven.
Entitlement and elitism they stretch beyond government, beyond the newspapers. Hey, we could look at the Big Three automakers.
Don’t get me started.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
