By Joel Thurtell
A week after a federal jury acquitted Geoffrey Fieger of charges that he used “straw donors” to cover more than a hundred grand he donated to the 2004 John Edwards presidential campaign, the Detroit Free Press finally says Fieger was wrong about one of the statements he made before the trial ended.
Better late than never, I guess, though the June 8 story ( “Fieger case is example of why law exists, experts say”) is too late to correct a false impression the paper created during Fieger’s trial.
Fieger claimed that before him, the federal government had never tried and convicted someone on the felony charge of reimbursing people for campaign donations. He claimed the government wanted to hassle him because he’s a big wheel Democrat.
In a story in joelontheroad.com last week, I criticized the Free Press for repeatedly reporting that claim by Fieger without any effort to rebut it. If Fieger was correct, I wrote, it would make you wonder why the feds were going after him if they’d never tried anyone else for the same offense. But if Fieger’s claim were wrong, it would look like he was trying to trivialize the prosecutor’s case.
By failing to offer rebuttal, it seems to me that the Free Press was tacitly endorsing Fieger’s claim.
I added that Free Press editors were not telling readers what they and I know — that top Free Press and Gannett execs have donated sizable amounts of money to political causes and that in at least one instance, Gannett actually paid for the contribution. In other words, a Free Press editor was a straw donor. I know this, because it came out in testimony during a Jan. 18 arbitration hearing in which Free Press Editor Paul Anger justified a $175 donation to the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Political Action Committee by saying Gannett actually paid, though his name appears on the Michigan Secretary of State website as the donor of record.
Could it be that Freepsters are reading joelontheroad.com? Lo and behold, today’s story belatedly tests Fieger’s claim.
And finds it false.
Several days after the trial ended and most of the public interest presumably withered, the Freep finally got around to putting the question. It turns out there has been at least one straw donor case that went to trial and ended in a conviction, according to the Free Press. I suspect that if reporters put some real effort into it, say the kind of time, effort and money they’ve expended on another high profile case in Detroit (hint: Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick might be wondering why Fieger got such second-fiddle coverage) they might find there were a few more successful federal prosecutions.
Something weird about that Free Press corrective: There were actually two stories on June 8. The lede story ran on B-1, “Don’t bet on Fieger fallout; case won’t faze campaign finance law, experts say.” Despite what its sidebar story said, the lede story once again repeated Fieger’s claim that nobody had ever been tried and convicted under the straw donor law, which we now know is false. Once again, through this story, the Free Press repeats Fieger’s baloney without rebuttal. Strange.
But I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I appreciate that the Free Press published what amounts to a “skinback,” or correction of an error. I wish they’d printed the information before or during the Fieger trial when it would have been useful to readers, including judge, prosecutors, defendants and yes, even those jurors who I suspect were sneaking looks at the Detroit news coverage, not to mention glimpses of Fieger’s own warm and fuzzy TV commercials.
Yes, I’m grateful, except that, well, I still think they owe it to readers to mention that at least one Free Press exec was a straw donor.
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
