Bullies of the newsroom

Posted on September 21, 2009 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Normally, I don’t reply to comments people post on my blog.

But now and then one of these letters-to-JOTR is just too obnoxious, too disingenuous to let pass.

So it is with a reader’s response to my September 18, 2009 “Harvard and the hypocrites” post.

A commenter wrote:

“Harvard” didn’t agree with you. A kid who has never done a day’s work in a newspaper newsroom wrote an essay agreeing with you. Some ratification!

You were a reporter, and you gave money to a political party, and you think that helps your credibility?

Big dose of anger there.

Where to start?

Well, it seems like a longer form of a congressman’s yelp at President Obama of “you lie!”

First, there’s the “kid” thing — the gratuitous suggestion of childishness about the author of a Nieman Reports essay exploring the ethics of newsroom behavior codes that ban political expression by editorial employees of news organizations. With this slur, the commenter wishes us to think that the essay itself is not quite full=grown, that it is the work of an immature person.

It is one of the red herrings the commenter tosses out to distract us from the crux of our subject, which is denial of political freedom to journalists — who are, after all, American citizens — because they are journalists.

But it’s worth stopping for a moment to reflect on what our reactions might have been had the commenter, instead of “kid,” used a term like “black” or “Muslim” or “woman” or for that matter “oldster,” suggesting that such people are incapable of reasoned analysis.

Bigotry comes in many guises.

That the “kid” is old enough to be a veteran of U.S. military service is a fact, but it is not relevant. If the ideas put forth in Reed Richardson’s Nieman essay, and on in The Nation, were written by a pre-schooler, they still would be important. We should judge the article on the merits of its research and argument, not on the author’s age.

The next gratuitous insult, also a red herring, suggests that 1) the Nieman Reports and Nation writer never worked in a newsroom and implies 2) that this is somehow relevant to the discussion. It is not, unless we accept the notion that the only people competent to opine about issues important to the practice of journalism and human rights are people who’ve worked in newsrooms. Presumably, though I don’t know, the commenter works or once upon a time worked in a newsroom.

So what?

If sweating in a newsroom somehow qualifies a person as an expert on journalism issues, what does that mean? Well, what qualifications does it take to be employed in a typical American newsroom?

College degree?

Nope.

License?

Unlike, hairdressers, plumbers, electricians, accountants, lawyers and doctors, journalists don’t need to meet minimal standards of professionalism, intelligence and knowledge to ply their trade. You work in a newsroom, you’re ipso factor one of the club.

This fraternity mentality is part of the problem. It’s no accident that the Society of Professional Journalists used to be called “Sigma Delta Chi.” Power is the name of the game. It’s all about who’s “in” and who’s “out.”

The slurs about being a “kid” and not having paid dues as a newsroom drudge are typical of the bullying that often substitutes for discussion in news organizations. It doesn’t help that victims of this outrageous behavior must always consider that management could discipline or fire them if they own up to having expressed political opinions.

It’s pretty hard to think independently and express yourself in an environment where doing so could cost you your job.

I can’t help wondering if the newspaper industry would be in such dire straits today if more journalists had been accustomed to think freely and express themselves openly. One of the most telling moments in my confrontation with Gannett over my donation to the Democrats came with a company letter stating that employees of privately-owned news organizations don’t have First Amendment rights.

Think about that: Newspaper reporters, editors, photographers — the whole editorial clan — do not, in the company’s view, possess free speech rights that are so dear to the publishers of newspapers.

There’s a lot wrong with American journalism, but it doesn’t look to me like employees of newsrooms or their bosses are in any position to fix it.

And then there’s the remark suggesting I think Harvard “ratified” my position that journalists have human rights that include taking part in our democratic political process. Harvard ought to, but at least their journalism review published an essay stating that principle.

It’s hard for me to fathom how we could have such a thing as a democratic political process if private corporations forbid their employees taking part in the process. And yet that is what the news industry has done.

Who has more integrity, the reporter who proclaims his/her political leaning via bumper stickers, lawn signs and political donations, or the stealth journalist who keeps his/her political leanings secret but nonetheless acts on them in choosing, rejecting, or reporting, writing and editing news articles?

I didn’t need Harvard to “ratify” my position. The arbitrator agreed with me and my union and ordered my then employer, the Detroit Free Press, to lift its ban on political acitivity by newspaper staffers.

But the fact that a Harvard journal published an essay supporting this point of view is huge. Certainly, in 2004, when I donated $500 to Michigan Democrats, no publication was making the kind of case Reed Richardson made in September 2009. That was equally true in 2007, when the Free Press honchos banned my further political activity and threatened to fire me if I disobeyed.

Thanks to The Newspaper Guild, my case was argued and won and there is now a precedent on record for upholding the political rights of journalists.

As for my credibility, when I was a reporter, I was pretty frank about my politics in and outside the newsroom. I never heard a reader complain that I lacked credibility. Two years into retirement, I’m still being asked to speak and have 10 talks on my calendar this fall and more coming up in 2010. Apparently, my audiences find me a credible person.

True, I did hear complaints, but they came from a few newsroom peers and, of course, the very managers whom the arbitrator ordered to quit squelching staffers’ rights.

Drop me a line at joelthurtel@gmail.com

Posted in Arbitration, future of newspapers, Unions | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Harvard and the hypocrites

Posted on September 18, 2009 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Back in 2007, when top brass at the Detroit (so-called) Free Press reprimanded me for donating $500 to Michigan Democrats, then threatened to fire me if I ever again dared exercise my right as a U.S. citizen while employed by the selfsame, self-proclaimed Free Press, I felt pretty lonely.

Most of my colleagues at the (gag) Free Press seemed either noncommittal or downright hostile to the notion that a journalist might consider it his right to take part in the process loosely called “democracy” in this country. But eventually, an arbitrator sided with me and ordered the newspaper to rescind its ban on political activity by employees.

Now, there’s an essay in Harvard’s journalism review, Nieman Reports, supporting my view.

Wow!

It seems I’m not a raving lunatic or oddball social misfit for believing that journalists, like every other U.S. citizen, are born with certain rights that can’t be alienated by intellectually-deprived newspaper bosses.

Reed Richardson’s article in the Nieman journal and his post in Eric Alterman’s blog at The Nation, bring into the open a discussion that has frightened and embarrassed journalists who want to take part in politics, but whose bosses — and worse, many colleagues — behave as if having a political opinion is some kind of ethical lapse comparable to plagiarism or insider trading.

I’ve been hammering this issue here at joelontheroad.com for almost two years — almost since the time I left the pardon-the-expression Free Press late in 2007.

I don’t feel so lonesome now.

At the time, my great support came from The Newspaper Guild. I was encouraged and coached by Lou Mleczko, the union local’s administrative officer in Detroit. Lou told me he was hearing from some Guild members unhappy that the local was supporting me. Many of my colleagues at the (choke) Free Press had drunk the Kool-Aid passed around at J schools and newsrooms and looked at someone who claimed a citizen’s right to take part in democracy as some kind of crazed saboteur.

Eventually, Guild attorney Duane Ice made the newspaper lawyer look like a stooge who flunked his bar exam, largely because the paper’s owner, Gannett, simply had no justification for abridging journalists’ right to express themselves politically. 

Richardson quotes Nation columnist Eric Alterman, who has a view diametrically opposed to that of newspaper managers like those at Gannett and the New York Times, whose form of tyranny reigns supreme in most newsrooms. According to Alterman, “You can be an incredible partisan and still be very fair.”

That statement is absolute anathema to most journalists because it laughs in the face of a huge myth in American journalism — the idea of what Richardson called “the press as umpire.”

At this point in his essay, Richardson brings up the example of my case against the Gannett managers. I’ll quote the entire passage about “press as umpire”:

Perhaps the clearest distillation of this ideal to appear recently occurred during the early stages of the 2008 presidential campaign. In June 2007, MSNBC.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman identified 143 working journalists—out of a total of roughly 100,000 nationwide—as having made campaign contributions during the previous four years. “Because appearing to be fair is part of being fair,” he wrote, these donors had essentially violated their journalistic duty to be impartial arbiters. “They have opinions, like anyone else, but they are expected to keep those opinions out of their work.”

 

Finding clear evidence of this last point would have been the equivalent of an ethical smoking gun, proof positive that newsrooms are justified in clamping down on the mere appearance of political bias, lest actual bias run amok within their news coverage. Dedman made almost no effort, however, to find evidence linking these donations to biased coverage. Neither did the Detroit Free Press, which tried to ban all political donations by employees after two of its journalists’ names surfaced in Dedman’s story. An independent arbitrator struck down the newspaper’s new ethics rule as unnecessarily broad and pointed out that despite the claim of harm to the paper’s reputation, Executive Editor Caesar Andrews had conceded that the paper “did not possess or even look for evidence that [the donations] compromised the Free Press’ integrity.”

 

Dedman told me that to focus solely on the fairness of journalistic output misses the point. “An umpire only has to cheer for the Red Sox during the game once to call his objectivity, his independence, into question,” he contends, in drawing the analogy that many make of the press as serving the role of an impartial umpire. “It matters how he performs his job, yes, but it also matters that he appear not to take sides.” But as both his own and the Free Press examples demonstrate, even when it is in the best interests of a story or a news organization to examine both, there still exists a powerful tendency to let appearing to be fair become the de facto lone standard. This has perhaps never been truer than now, when withering newsroom budgets and unprecedented staff cutbacks have left few mastheads with barely enough time to get a newspaper out the door or a broadcast on the air, let alone to consistently parse their news coverage for creeping bias.

It is worth reading Richardson’s blog post in The Nation, if only for the transcript of his interview with New York Times standards editor Craig Whitney.

Whitney proclaims the idea that if journalists keep their opinions under wraps, avoiding the appearance of a conflict, there somehow is no conflict. Or something like that. When Richardson presses him to explain, Whitney tells him “we’ve exhausted this subject.”

Gannett tried the “appearance of conflict” gambit in my case, and it backfired.The paper’s honchoes couldn’t show that my $500 donation to the Democrats did any harm to their business. Such hypocrites. I discovered that many Gannett execs had made similar donations to political parties, except they gave lots more money that I did.

Moreover, it came out that several newspaper managers had contributed money to a political action committee and charged the cost back to the company, which is against the law.  One of them — Paul Anger, top guy at the Unfree Press — actually did it AFTER he forbade my giving future donations to political causes.

Brazen hypocrisy.

Those company-paid political donations were not the only place where newspaper managers ran afoul of the law. I discovered that in Michigan there is a statute called the Bullard-Plawecki Employee Right-To-Know Act that forbids employers collecting political information about employees. Here on JOTR, I likened it to Red Squad activity. (When the Michigan State Police were forced to divulge contents of their political file-keeping in the 1970s, my name turned up in the file. When Free Press editors began tracking my political affiliation, they violated the Michigan Employee Right-To-Know law.

To date, it seems that I’m the only one harping on the Red Squad aspect of newspaper managers’ trampling on journalists’ rights. But who knows — a couple years ago, I felt pretty lonely tilting against the biggest newspaper chain in the country, and now Harvard is on board.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com

 

 


 

Posted in Arbitration, Joel's J School, Unions | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Times and toxics

Posted on September 14, 2009 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

My first reaction on reading the Sunday, September 13, 2009 New York Times article on water pollution was to think, “Wow! They get it!”

For years, I’ve been reporting that environmental pollution in Metro Detroit’s Rouge River is far worse than custodial institutions like the U.S. Envronmental Protection Agency, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and Wayne County Department of Environment have admitted. 

I wrote articles about this for the Detroit Free Press, and the book I co-authored with Free Press photographer Patricia Beck (Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River, 2009, Wayne State University Press) drove home the point.

In May 2005 in the Free Press, I wrote that Michigan natural resources agencies, led by the now-defunct Michigan Water Resources Commission, had set a 20-year deadline for making the Rouge River “swimmable and fishable.” That was done in September 1985.

Oops.

Didn’t happen.

Not even close.

A comprehensive study of E. coli showed that up and down the river, the Rouge was fit for human contact at best 2-5 percent of the time.

I wasn’t writing about drinking, just the mere touching of Rouge River water.

Now, the Times has concluded from what it pitches as an exhaustive investigation that “an estimated one in 10 Americans have  been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways.”

Last year, the Times reported, “40 percent of the nation’s community water systems violated the Safe Drinking Water Act at least once, according to an analysis of E.P.A. data. Those violations ranged from failing to maintain proper paperwork to allowing carcinogens into tap water. More than 23 million people received drinking water from municipal systems that violated a health-based standard.”

According to the newspaper, “The Times obtained hundreds of thousands of water pollution records through Freedom of Information Act requests to every state and the E.P.A., and compiled a national database of water pollution violations that is more comprehensive than those maintained by states or the E.P.A. (For an interactive version, which can show violations in any community, visit www.nytimes.com/toxicwaters.)”

Wow! I thought. Finally a comprehensive database on pollution.

I was disappointed. I’m still looking for discharge data from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. I didn’t find data from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, nor from the United States Geological Survey.

What I found was that the Times study relied on self-reporting by governments and private companies of spill or release incidents rather than on records of measurements of actual presence of fecal or toxic substances in water.

In other words, the Times barely scraped the surface of data on pollution. For a broad, national study, maybe it was necessary to approach the subject of water contamination in this narrow, incomplete way.

But incident reports don’t show the whole picture. For one thing, they depend on the polluting actors to report themselves, rather than on objective collection and analysis of data. They also rely on reports at specific points where bad stuff might be released.  Non-point pollution, such as fertilizer released into waterways by golf courses or homeowners, farm waste, erosion from construction sites, leaching of human waste from faulty septic systems or animal waste are not likely to show up in these reports. And the Rouge River still receives releases of oils and other chemicals from municipal sewage outlets and old, unremediated factory sites. I imagine that what holds for the Rouge is true for just about any other river, especially ones that have been used by industry.

Evidence of pollution shows up too often where private or governmental parties have consistently collected water samples for testing. There is plenty of data on non-point source pollution, though there could be lots more. The big story on this area of pollution data collection, though, is that governments and nonprofit institutions are cutting back on data collection. We are becoming more and more reliant on self-reporting by potential polluters.

I reported on the pullback from monitoring in the December 10, 2008 issue of Metro Times. In the case of the Rouge River, the monitoring of dissolved oxygen and temperature were being done by USGS hydrologists; the work was paid for by Wayne County. According to the USGS hyrdologist who had been doing the work, he decision to cut it out was made by officials of the Alliance of Rouge Communities, which is half funded by Wayne County and half by local governments who also happen to hold and need to renew pollution discharge permits. It is managed by ECT, a longtime recipient of government contracts for  environmental consulting. Parties, in other words, with a vested interest in less, not more, monitoring.

The more monitoring, the better chance that bad things will be found and the governments will be held responsible. There is therefore an incentive not to monitor.

The Times‘ conclusions certainly are cause for alarm. But we need to be aware that continued and expanded monitoring of surface and ground water for feces and toxics is important. By neglecting that important work, we are giving cover to polluters.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com


 

Posted in Adventures on the Rouge, Lakes and streams | Leave a comment

Riding the Rouge with Florent Tillon

Posted on July 10, 2009 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

It happened.

My motorboat trip up the Rouge River with French film maker Florent Tillon began just as our press release predicted, a bit after eight in the morning of Wednesday, July 8.

To those readers who referred Florent to me, I want to say thanks for steering me into one of the most amazing and thought-provoking experiences I’ve ever had.

This first essay will be short and quick. My wife and I are packing for a trip, and there are many pressures other than writing. But I wanted readers to know that we actually made the trip and passed the better part of that day touring the Rouge River by motorboat.

My particular boat is a 16-1/2-foot Crestliner fishing boat with a 60-horsepower outboard motor. It fishes comfortably with two, but with care, we were able to make it work for four people on our tour.

We trolled at a couple miles an hour mostly, sometimes doubling back so Florent could re-shoot or shoot from different angles. Hard to think of another river with industrial plants set cheek by jowl along a waterfront. Perfect for touring.

Florent asked me beforehand what kind of wildlife we’d see. He read the book by Pat Beck and me, Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River (Wayne State University Press, 2009). He’s very interested in the convergence of animal life with city people, city buildings. He wondered if we’d see any foxes. I told him I doubted it, because foxes are pretty wary. But Pat and I saw lots of blue herons when we made our canoe trip up the Rouge in 2005. Well, either we saw a lot of herons, or we saw one blue heron a lot of times — that was our little joke as we struggled against 30-mph winds on June 6, 2005.

As it turned out this time, we saw lots of herons, common terns, seagulls and even got up close to some turkey vultures feeding on dead fish alongside the river.

There was little wind, and we had a powerful outboard to counter any such trouble.

Florent noted that in Up the Rouge!, I wrote that the Rouge north of Michigan Avenue often seems secluded. We saw lots of wildlife and twice saw an adult female common merganser — the first sightings of this bird ever in summertime Wayne County.

Florent wondered about my use of the word “sanctuary” to describe the country surrounding the Main Branch north of Michigan Avenue. To me, this was one of the most dramatic things I experienced on that canoe trip four years ago. We paddled and sometimes towed our canoe against heavy headwinds four miles along the concrete channel part of the Rouge upstream of the Ford Rouge plant. Suddenly, a few yards past Michigan Avenue, the concrete stops. Your canoe, or your boat, suddenly glides into a forest. 

A couple of times, I stopped the motor so we could listen. An arrogant cardinal peeled off his loud cry and the staccato chatter of kingfishers sounded across the water. It’s as if someone drew a line with a ruler and said from here on will be wilderness. But to the south, it’s concrete, steel, piles of coke, limestone, ore at two steel mills, and there are teh concrete elevators, the salt operation and the stench of the compost business. And in fact, someone DID draw that line.

Quite a tour. The Rouge Gateway Partnership folks have called for tour boats to ply the Rouge, and I think it would be a great idea. There’s now a cut through the concrete channel where you could navigate a canoe, at least, into the Oxbow that leads to Greenfield Village. A tourist could dock or at least ground a boat at Greenfield Village and stop for lunch or a tour of the museum.

We could hear the tooting of the steam locomotive beyond the trees.

But before the Gateway folks start their tours, they might want to consult with the bosses at Severstal Steel, the Russian-owned company that now owns the old Ford Rouge steel mill.

For the second time, Severstal security guars went nuts when my little boat patrolled into the freighter slip. We toured nearly to the end of the slip, which is an enlargement of a creek that is tributary to the Rouge. Florent was taking footage of me and of urban explorer Geoffrey George sitting beside me, and getting background photos of the steel operation.

On our way back, a red fire-rescue truck prowled along the shore, keeping pace with my trolling-speed boat. By the time we exited the freighter slip, the red truck had been joined by three white trucks and some uniformed people walked to the edge of the water and began shouting. Security guards, it seemed. Waving for me to come over.

Well, I recall what happened when one of Matty Moroun’s shotgun-totin’ goons tried to arrest me when I was taking pictures of Matty’s bridge from publicly-owned Riverside Park. These bozos just don’t understand that they aren’t supposed to play bully on public property.

Last year, when I took a friend into the Severstal freighter slip, a guard warned me he was going to report me to the Coast Guard for violating some marine security law. I’ve since learned from Coast Guard officers that the Rouge is a public waterway, as are all waterways. Boaters have a right to travel on the Rouge, and the freighter slip is part of the Rouge and doggonit, a public waterway. As long as I don’t step onto Severstal land, I’m okay, according to the Coast Guard.

The Severstal guards and their bosses don’t understand that they have no authority over anyone on the water. I’ve heard from other boaters, including Bob Burns, the Detroit Riverkeeper, that the Severstal goons have bugged him, too.

Obnoxious.

If anyone wants to start a tourist business on the Rouge, they’ll need to get those Russkies to lighten up.

I’ll be writing more about this amazing trip and my conversations on the water with Florent Tillon and Geoffrey George.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com

Posted in Beginnings | 2 Comments

Filming the Rouge

Posted on July 7, 2009 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

On vacation in Canada, I found a little sandwich shop with a Mac computer and a wi-fi connection. I logged on and found a message from a French film maker, Florent Tillon, wondering if I’d take him on a trip up the Rouge.

I shot back an answer: Sure thing.

But  did he want to go by canoe or by motorboat?

I’m not sure Florent was aware of Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River, the book by me and Patricia Beck  about our 27-mile odyssey up the Rouge back in 2005.

In any case, he opted to make the trip by motorboat.

Darn!

That means he’ll miss the wonderful logjams that so entertained us over four days of our five-day trek.

Ah, well, motorboat it is. He’ll get to film the blast furnaces of Zug Island or the coke piles of Severstal or maybe the gypsum piles at U.S. Gypsum, and too there are the wonderful drawbridges for cars and trains that help to make the Lower Rouge River one of the most picturesque industrial landscapes in the world.

Should be an interesting trip. But I don’t want it to be TOO interesting. Recalling the scolding I got from a Severstal security guard last September when I trolled my boat into the freighter slip at the Ford Rouge plant, and the nasty reception I got from one of Matty Moroun’s shotgun-totin’ goons when I dared step onto the city of Detroit’s public Riverside park, I called the Coast Guard and just for good measure sent the USCG an e-mail outlining my plan to give a French film maker a tour of the Rouge.

Wayne State University Press, publisher of Up the Rouge!, sent out a press release just to make sure there is an awareness that my maroon and tan Crestliner fishing boat is helping to make a film documentary of the Rouge. Here’s the release:

For Immediate Release                Contact: Laura L. Rodwan 313.477.2750

                                                                   Cara I. Belton 313.520.8454

 

 

MEDIA ADVISORY

 

French Film maker Joins Local Author of “Up the Rouge!” to

Document Wildlife on the Rouge River

 

DETROIT— July 1, 2009 — On Wednesday, July 8, at 8 am, noted film maker, Florent Tillon will join retired Detroit Free Press reporter Joel Thurtell, author of Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River to reenact Joel Thurtell and photographer Patricia Beck’s expedition up the Rouge River.  The team will depart from DTE Delray Pier and Boat Launch, located on W. Jefferson, between Waterman and Livernois, next to Historic Fort Wayne in Detroit.

 

Tillon and his crew are in Detroit to film a documentary about the return of animals and rural lifestyle in the city of Detroit. Since 2006, he has been working on different projects about the interaction between civilization and wilderness, including the Detroit Wildlife Project, Las Vegas Meditation, and Les Sables de Cabo de Gata. During the early part of his career, Florent Tillon filmed urban animals in Paris. His first feature film, Porte Maillot Traffic Circle documented a rabbit colony stuck on a huge traffic circle over the course of a month.

 

“We’re pleased that Mr. Tillon has selected our book Up the Rouge! and our collective experience as a resource for his work,” said Joel Thurtell. “It was our goal to present a different view of the fabled river, as its very seclusion makes it a sanctuary,” he added. 

 

Up the Rouge! chronicles the author and photographer’s journey as they traveled by canoe to explore the legendary Michigan river’s industrial side, and its hidden urban wilderness. The book captures the Rouge River as a home to wildlife. Thurtell and Beck show that despite its environmental contamination, the Rouge is home to wildlife and that its very seclusion makes it a sanctuary. During their trek, the authors saw animals such as green and blue herons, snapping turtles, musk turtles, mallards, feral dogs, and the first adult female common mergansers ever recorded in summertime in Wayne County.

 

 

Reporters in need of more information, please contact: Laura Rodwan at (313) 477-2750 or Cara Belton at (313) 520 – 8454.  To learn more about Wayne State University Press or to order a copy of Up the Rouge! please visit wsupress.wayne.edu or call 1.800.978.7323. Special discounts are available for bulk purchasers.

Posted in Beginnings | 2 Comments

The Monica Conyers diversion

Posted on June 27, 2009 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Monica Conyers is small fry.

So the Detroit City Councilwoman now faces a possible 5-year prison term for taking bribes, and the special agent in charge of the Detroit FBI office, Andrew Arena, is boasting that the agency is coming after other wrongdoers.

“We’re coming after you,” Arena was quoted in the June 27, 2009 New York Times. “Look over your shoulder. Look under your bed. Look in your closet. We’re coing after you. This is not the beginning. This is certainly not the end.”

I have some advice for Special Agent Arena: Look in your own closet. Look in those files in the FBI office where all the statements and documents and interviews from Deanna Maher and Sydney Rooks are stashed.

Those would be the same files on violations of ethical guidelines and laws by Monica’s hubby, who just happens to be chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary.

Uh-oh, that’s one closet the feds won’t look into.

They’ll be satisfied to have snared his wife. They’ll send her to prison or maybe a long probation, get her kicked off the Council and chalk up a huge victory for the U.S. Justice Department’s Eastern District.

Monica is a sideshow. A bit of FBI sleight of hand.

The FBI and Justice Department have known about John Conyers’ misbehavior since at least late 2002. Late that year, Maher, who was then chief of staff of Conyers’s Downriver office in Southgate, approached me with her concerns, having offered her documentaion of Conyers’ abuses to the FBI and been spurned.

Now, we have Terence Berg, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, quoted in the Times as convinced that “investigators found no evidence that Mr. Conyers, a Democrat who leads the Judiciary Committee, knew that his wife had accepted bribes.”

Well, that may actually be true. From what I hear, JC and Mon are not exactly the best of pals, and maybe JC doesn’t know all of the shananigans his wife is pulling.

But it is also irrelevant.

What John Conyers DID know is contained in the following essay I published here, right on joelontheroad.com, on August 5, 2008. I began writing the essay in 2006 when I was still a reporter with the Detroit Free Press and had finally grasped the fact that the newspaper that paid my salary — the same paper that likes to boast about the great public services it performs — was not about to print the whole story about John Conyers.

I’m prompted now to re-publish this essay, goaded by John Conyers’ own words in a public statement his office released on June 26, 2009 after Monica Conyers pleaded guilty in federal court to a felony conspiracy charge  of committing bribery and taking money in exchange for changing her vote to break a City Council tie on a city sludge-hauling contract.

According to Congressman Conyers, “Public officials must expect to be held to the highest ethical and legal standards.”

Right you are, JC. And if the FBI would hold itself to such high standards, you might find yourself in the dock facing charges, too.

By Joel Thurtell

All of a sudden, journalists are dissing John Conyers. Time was when no reporter in his or her right mind would criticize the congressman from Detroit, the second-most-senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Time was when editors wouldn’t let reporters pursue investigations of Conyers.

Someone just sent me a column by Ray McGovern published in antiwar.com: “John Conyers Is No Martin Luther King.”

Right on. As unlike as John Conyers is to King, he is similar to another Detroit congressman. Excuse me, a late and former congressman. One who went to prison after being convicted of fraud for, among other things, assigning congressional staffers to work in his family’s Detroit funeral home.

I’m thinking of Charles Diggs.

I looked into Diggs’ career back in 2003 when I investigated Conyers’ abuse of his congressional staffers. I was looking for parallels between Diggs and Conyers, and I found them. My reporting, followed by a set of Detroit Free Press stories on Nov. 21, 2003, prompted the House Ethics Committee to probe Conyers. That investigation lingered until 2006, when the committee quietly made a deal and Conyers skated clear of the allegations of his staffers that he forced them to do personal work for him on the federal dime.

Long before the Ethics Committee dropped the ball, my Free Press investigation was derailed. I simply couldn’t get editors interested, somehow. One top editor told me all congressmen do what Conyers did. If everyone stinks, nobody stinks.

Early in 2006, I wrote an op-ed column comparing Conyers and Diggs. I submitted it to the Free Press editorial page, and never got a reply. Eventually, a top metro editor sent me this note:

Joel:

I’m afraid you’re going to hear an answer that you’d rather not hear. I don’t think we can publish this. Here’s why.

Even though you don’t cover Conyers as a daily part of your responsibilities at the Free Press, the fact remains that you have written extensively about him. We want readers to be assured that our reporters are covering stories without bias. Publishing an opinion piece by you would conflict with that mission and would taint our earlier reporting. Beyond that, there’s a possibility that you could end up writing about Conyers again someday. You couldn’t very well do that if you had openly criticized him.

For these reasons, I would not give my OK for you to freelance this, either. You’re welcome to run the question up the line to Caesar or Paul, but I’d be willing to bet that you’ll hear the same answer.

This missive was signed by another of the Free Press high honchos.

I appealed up the line, but got the same answer. Not only would the Free Press not publish my viewpoint piece, but I was forbidden to send it to another publication.

So what did I do?

I sent it to the New York Times op-ed page.

Never heard back. No surprise. To date, the Times has published zero, zilch on Conyers’ ethics problems. It’s not that they don’t know about it. Conyers was notorious for making staffers do campaign work as well as chauffeur his kids, babysit and tutor his kids, coach his wife in her law school studies, do his laundry and housekeeping and more. Our story made waves, big waves, on the Hill.

Somehow, from the press, he got a free ride.

Well, I dug up that 2006 op-ed piece. Things have changed since Free Press editors suppressed my Conyers reports. I took a buyout from the Free Press last November. The editor who wrote that memo censoring my work is no longer my boss. My new boss has encouraged me to publish that essay. Who is my new boss? Me!

For a deeper understanding of who John Conyers is, you may read my Free Press stories about the man in the “Conyers stories” category of this blog. General articles about John and Monica Conyers are to be found under the “JC & Me” heading.

What do you think? Would this essay have “tainted,” ex post facto, my earlier reporting on Conyers? And of course, as to the editor’s carrot, holding out the possibility I might write more Free Press stories about Conyers, well, it never happened.

It’s happening now, only because I cut loose from the Free Press.

Here’s the piece the Free Press stifled:

The Ethics “Paralysis’ Charade

By Joel Thurtell

The new Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has promised us “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”

But Democrats are not serious about that promise now any more than they have been for the last several years. If they really took ethics reform seriously, Democrats would long ago have moved decisively for an investigation of one of their most senior and prominent members.

John Conyers, I believe, is the simple reason why Democrats are pulling their ethics punch. They could have done something about ethics long before now. No new rules or laws are needed to deal with members like Conyers. Even as the minority party, Democrats had parity with Republicans on only one committee in all Congress. That’s on the so-called Ethics Committee, officially the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. Yet Democrats allowed Republicans for the past two years to paralyze the Ethics Committee.

Or so it would seem.

All along, there has been Democratic complicity in the committee’s lethargy. An article in The Nation on Feb. 6, 2006 suggested that Democrats are reluctant to file complaints against Republican members for fear of reprisal complaints aimed at Democrats. Hence a “truce” that in effect has stymied, the magazine argued, the committee from investigating new cases. In fact, there may be far more complicity on the part of Democrats than commentators acknowledge.

More than two years ago, on Nov. 21, 2003, the Detroit Free Press published a pair of articles exposing longstanding abuses by U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Detroit. The Free Press stories revealed that Conyers had routinely assigned not one, not two, not three, but ALL of his congressional staffers to do campaign work on government-paid time. The work was done not only for Conyers’ own re-election campaigns, but for others, including his wife and various local, state and national Democratic candidates whose elections Conyers thought crucial. I’m one of the reporters who worked on these stories. At one point in November 2003 I reached a Conyers staffer by telephone where he sat working in the Chicago presidential campaign office of Carol Moseley Braun. He was being paid to be in Detroit, organizing a universal health insurance symposium for constituents, except that Conyers had assigned him to work for Braun. The staffer was collecting pay for congressional work others were obliged to do for him, I confirmed through congressional payroll records. Not only office time was squandered, but office phones, fax machines, photo copiers and computers were used for political campaigns, notwithstanding that misuse is contrary to House ethics guidelines and in some cases illegal.

Soon after our articles were published, I was told the Ethics Committee had opened an investigation into the abuses we outlined regarding Conyers. I reported that. But the committee has not acted. It has been paralyzed, seemingly by obstruction from Republicans.

John Conyers has been a member of Congress for 42 (now 44) years. Among black people in Detroit, he is an icon. He espouses liberal causes that make him the darling of the left and of labor unions. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. He has called for the impeachment of President Bush, and if there were to be an impeachment case, Conyers, as ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, would have a powerful say in how it’s run.

Those are potent reasons why Democrats might not want a probe of the dean of black congressmen.

But it could be worse than that. Some years ago, another Democratic congressman from Detroit, Charles Diggs, was convicted of fraud and served prison time for ordering House legislative aides to work at his family funeral home on government time. Recently, the indictment of U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and the convictions of members like Randy Cunningham and Bob Ney are proof that congressmen who play fast and loose with House rules and with the law often are a short step from indictment.

A proper investigation of John Conyers in the Ethics Committee would have no trouble finding plenty of witnesses who would testify that as congressional employees hired by Conyers to work for constituents they instead were ordered by the congressman to do personal work for him resembling those funeral parlor assignments of Charles Diggs: They worked as chauffeurs for Conyers and his wife and kids, they were fulltime babysitters in the Conyers home or staffers’ own homes. Conyers’ former general counsel Sydney Rooks says Conyers assigned her to tutor Conyers’ oldest son — a daily chore that took place in the office during regular business hours with the use of the congressman’s fax machine to receive the boy’s daily homework assignments. Despite the supposed Ethics Committee inquiry, Conyers continued to assign his staffers to do personal chores like driving him in their own cars, babysitting his kids and picking up his meal tabs, according to Deanna Maher, who retired May 31, 2005 as chief of staff of Conyers’ Southgate, Mich. Office.

It may not beat messing with dead bodies in a funeral home, but assigning staffers to work in a Chicago politician’s office and assigning aides to baby sit your kids and then representing to the congressional payroll office that these people were doing bona fide constituent work so they can cash government paychecks seems on a par with Charles Diggs’ duping the government into covering the payroll for his funeral parlor.

Could John Conyers be the reason the Ethics Committee — not to mention any move to strengthen ethics laws — is in limbo?

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in JC & Me | 7 Comments

Matty & the Reds (herring, that is)

Posted on June 24, 2009 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Matty’s bait has a rotten smell, and I don’t plan to chew on it.

That’s why you won’t read joelontheroad fussing over Matty’s lawsuit claiming a proposed government-owned alternative to his private Ambassador bridge is racially discriminatory. Nor will you find me arguing the pros and cons of dumping dirt on his tarmac.

Those disputes are diversions created by the Grosse Pointe billionaire to distract us from the central issue: Why does one man control a choke point that passes one quarter of the annual trade between Canada and the United States?

One billionaire megolomaniac who collected tolls from 2.89 million trucks last year (well, minus the tolls he didn’t collect from trucks he owns) and 4.45 million cars, yet won’t let government officials and police inspect his bridge or the vehicles that use it.

Matty’s legal and polemical red herrings would become moot if the federal government would 1) condemn the Ambassador Bridge as a public nuisance of the 9/11 variety, given the 300,000-gallon bomb consisting of gasoline and diesel fuel he stores directly underneath the span or 2) seize the bridge for public use, forcibly purchasing the bridge for a fair-market-value price.

Either one or both of these actions combined would show Matty’s lawsuits and public posturings for what they are — fish bait.

Last gasp tactics by a mogul with his back to the, well, bridge.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in Me & Matty | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Swim in the Rouge?

Posted on June 9, 2009 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

If somebody would have told me 20 years ago that the Rouge River would be fishable and swimmable most of the time, I would not have believed it, and yet we have done it.

— Jim Ridgway, executive director of the Alliance of Rouge Communities, former member of nonprofit Friends of the Rouge board, vice president ECT

Could I have misunderstood? I was sitting in the audience at the annual Gladfest on the Rouge. I looked down at my notepad. Sure enough, my hand had written what my ears heard.

He really said it!

The Rouge is “swimmable” and “fishable”?

I was astonished that a public figure would take on that risk. I mean, what if someone took him at his word and dove in? A guy fell into the Rouge back in 1985 and wound up dead.

Astounding: I had just heard a public figure recommend the Rouge as a great big swimming hole.

I wanted to shout, “Hey, Jim! If you believe the Rouge River is truly ‘fishable and swimmable most of the time,’ why don’t YOU try it?”

Test it out, see if it’s truly “swimmable.”

I could show you some great places to frolic in the Rouge.

They wouldn’t be “fishable and swimmable most of the time” by my or even state of Michigan water quality standards.

I heard that astonishing remark October 23, 2008 at the annual festival of self-congratulation known this year as “Rouge 2008.” It was hosted by the UM-Dearborn (though not for free — ARC will pay UM-D $7,200 for the next posh shindig in 2009).

“Fishable and swimmable”: To me, it sounded an awful lot like W’s boast of “mission accomplished” about Iraq. Except at UM-D they forgot the aircraft carrier.

Specially for the next Rouge Gladfest, I’ve made a list of “swimming” holes.

Six-gated sewer dumps poop into Rouge at Six Mile and Telegraph in Detroit. Joel Thurtell photo

Six-gated sewer dumps poop into Rouge at Six Mile and Telegraph in Detroit. Joel Thurtell photo

For starters, how about taking a dip in front of that huge, six-gate concrete and steel threshold to a giant storm water and sewage retention basin at Six Mile and Telegraph in Detroit? According to Wayne County’s former environment director, Jim Murray, hundreds of thousands of gallons of combined rain water, poop, pee and miscellaneous industrial and automotive waste bombard the Rouge from these six gates when it rains hard.

Just dive off the concrete lip in front of those gates. Don’t mind the stench of sewage and the sight of crusted toilet paper, soggy sanitary napkins and bedraggled condoms. Go for it!

Okay, it’s true: I don’t believe the Rouge River is “fishable and swimmable most of the time.” I believe the reverse — it’s almost never safe for recreation.

But my perspective is quite different. Jim’s at once executive director of a public agency — the Alliance of Rouge Communities — that in his own words “fights” the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality on the strictness of community water discharge permits. At the same time, he’s vice president of a private company that contracts with government agencies — including ARC — to plan and execute water quality improvement jobs. Government agencies and private contractors have a prime interest in having you believe a river they collectively spent $1.6 billion to clean is actually safe for human contact.

Me, I’m just a guy who wanted to paddle a canoe up that river and wondered how safe it would be if I fell in.

I found a pretty clear-cut answer to my question back in 2005, when I was a Detroit Free Press reporter. Over five days, Free Press photographer Patricia Beck and I paddled a canoe 27 miles up the Main Branch of the Rouge, from Zug Island in Detroit to 9 Mile and Beech in Southfield. The last days, I had raging infections on my hands and arms, feet and legs, contracted from contact with the river.

Swimmable?

Untouchable.

I was told by a scientist with the engineering firm Camp, Dresser & McKee that based on lots of E. coli tests, in 2004 the Rouge was safe for swimming at best 5 percent of the time.

In my view, five percent is not “most of the time.” Since 2005, most of the E. coli testing has been abandoned. There has been no E. coli testing in the Main Branch since 2005. Yet where it still is being done, in the Middle Rouge, the river often is too polluted for swimming.

Because of reduced testing, our best comprehensive numbers still come from 2005 and before.

Five percent of the time means, of course, that 95 percent of the time, the river is NOT safe.

Those figures I got from CDM were for bacteria alone. They took no account of toxic chemicals and heavy metals suspended in the river’s water and in its banks and bottom. According to University of Michigan-Dearborn geology Prof. Kent Murray, neuro-toxic and cancer-causing substances are in the river, as well as bacteria from animal and human waste.

As for fishing, if you were lucky and caught a fish, I don’t think you’d want to eat it. Perusing the Michigan Department of Community Health fish advisories for the Rouge River will make you dizzy. Bottom-feeder line: Don’t eat Rouge River fish! Toxic chemicals make fishing a dubious activity in the Rouge. I’m surprised an official would claim the Rouge is “fishable…most of the time.”

Another prime fishing and swimming hole might be the waters of the Rouge in

Inflatable oil containment boom on Rouge River. Joel Thurtell photo.

Inflatable oil containment boom on Rouge River. Joel Thurtell photo.

front of those inflatable booms just east of the I-75 bridge. The booms are supposed to hold back oil and other industrial pollutants that escape from the city of Detroit’s sewage operation near the O’Brien Drain. A year ago, I was writing Detroit Free Press articles about a spill of hundreds of gallons of oil from the O’Brien Drain into the Rouge.

For some reason I don’t understand, no regular water quality testing has been done in the Lower Rouge where all the heavy industry would, one would think, have some impact on the water quality. Amazingly, water is tested upstream in places like Plymouth, Livonia and Northville, but not in Dearborn, Detroit, Melvindale, Allen Park and River Rouge, despite the presence of two steel mills, concrete, gypsum and salt plants and the largest single-site wastewater treatment plant in the U.S.

Must be okay, right? So in that spirit, I recommend another exciting swimming spot — where Baby Creek flows into the Lower Rouge. Same place where in 2002 some 19 million gallons of industrial chemicals mysteriously were dumped into the Rouge. The upstream plant owners responsible were recently convicted of illegal dumping in federal court.

I have more swimming holes.

Take a dive into Newburgh Lake, the Livonia pond where Jim Ridgway’s company, ECT, had a $12.5 million deal with Wayne County to dredge PCBs from the bottom of the lake to make it “fishable and swimmable.” Despite the company’s promise to remove all fish health advisories, the lake is still not 100 percent safe for fishing. The Michigan Department of Community Health still lists PCBs as present and warns women and children to limit the amount of Newburgh Lake fish they eat.

I learned from Kent Murray that Newburgh Lake is being contaminated by trichloroethylene (TCE) leaching into ground water from an old Livonia industrial site.

Amazing: At the Rouge 2006 party, I heard Kelly Cave of the Wayne County Department of the Environment tell the crowd that Newburgh Lake was ready to swim in. Why do public officials want us to swim in a toxic cesspool?

There were some pretty bad results from E. coli (sewage) testing at Newburgh Lake during the summer of 2008. According to MDEQ’s Christine Alexander, ECT and ARC were in charge of monitoring..

Or, how about a dip in Phoenix Lake on the Middle Rouge in Plymouth Township?

Sewer cover beside Phoenix Lake. Joel Thurtell photo.

Sewer cover beside Phoenix Lake. Joel Thurtell photo.

A good day to have gone swimming in Phoenix Lake would have been last summer on June 25.

On that day, the count of E. coli bacteria in a water sample taken from Phoenix Lake exceeded state standards by a factor of nearly 18. While that day’s measurement was by far the highest reading, it was hardly atypical of readings in summer 2008: Of 12 water samples taken from Phoenix Lake over the summer, seven contained too many colonies of bacteria for swimming.

In nearby Wilcox Lake on the Middle Rouge, half of the dozen samples contained too much bacteria for safe swimming.

More great swimming holes: Near 7 Mile Rd. in Detroit, in 2005, many, many E.

Chlorine and partially-treated sewage, anyone? Sewer outlet in Beverely Hills. Joel Thurtell photo

Chlorine and partially-treated sewage, anyone? Sewer outlet in Beverely Hills. Joel Thurtell photo

coli readings were too high for swimming. Some of the samples had thousands of colonies of bacteria — one reading was 18,000, when the maximum even for partial body contact (boating) is 1,000. More than 20,000 bacteria colonies were found in a sample taken near Rotunda, in Dearborn, where in 2005 many readings were too high for swimming. In Oakland County, numerous samples taken from Riverside Park in Beverly Hills were too high for swimming.

I mentioned those raging infections I got from putting arms and legs in the Rouge. Antibiotics quelled the inflammation. Really, it was nothing when you consider what happened to Kenneth Hagstrom in 1985 after he fell into the Rouge and swallowed several mouthfuls of river water.

A couple weeks later, the 31-year-old auto mechanic from Novi was dead. Cause of death: leptospirosis, aka “rat fever.” A fatal infection he contracted by drinking water that had wild animal pee in it.

Kenneth Hagstrom’s death from leptospirosis shows that we have more to worry about from river pollution than human waste. Animal waste is an important factor, though it can’t be controlled by waste water treatment plants, retention basins and gigantic sewer interceptors.

One thing is sure: FOTR can haul all the cars out of the Rouge it wants. It’s great PR. But the cars aren’t hurting the river. Removing them is a cosmetic effort, at best.

All the hoopla in the world won’t replace those DO and E. coli readings, which are the REAL measure of the river’s health.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in Adventures on the Rouge, Lakes and streams | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

“Up the Rouge!” — the audio version

Posted on June 3, 2009 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Almost there: The audio version of the Wayne State University Press book by Detroit Free Press photographer Patricia Beck and me will be for sale next week. 

The audio book will be published by Hardalee Press of Plymouth, Michigan.

There’s plenty about our book on its blog, uptherouge.com.  You can even order it through a shopping cart using major credit cards and have it shipped to your home. Soon, the audio book will be for sale the same way.

Pat and i paddled, towed, dragged, pushed and tossed a canoe 27 miles up the Main Branch of the Rouge River over five days in June 2005. It was a Detroit Free Press project and fueled a 2-day series about the Rouge October 12-13, 2005 that won the Harry E. Schlenz Medal for Public Service of the Water Environment Federation in 2006.

Last March, Wayne State University Press published the book version, with dozens of amazing photos Pat took from the bow of the canoe. While Pat was taking pictures, I was describing what we saw and did for a little digital audio recorder hung from a loop around my neck. The narrative of our book, “Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River,” is largely based on that audio log, though I did plenty of original research for the Prologue and Epilogue.

Since the Press was not interested in producing an audio book, we retained the audio rights to the book. A couple months ago, I spent nearly five hours reading my text at my friend Ken Sands’ recording studio. I hired an audio studio to create a master set of discs. They also edited into the narrative the sounds of our trip.

You can hear the roar of blast furnaces on Zug Island.

Scolding of redwing blackbirds annoyed by the invasion of our canoe.

Rush of water over the dam at Henry Ford’s Fair Lane mansion.

A red-eyed vireo talking from the tops of trees somewhere in the heart of Detroit.

The rat-a-tat-tat of a woodpecker drumming on a tree.

Near-continuous explosions from the firing range of the Detroit Police Department as cops practiced marksmanship near the Rouge.

And much more.

The experience lasts about five hours and is captured on four CDs. The CDs will be packaged in a fat DVD case with a cover resembling the book’s cover. The individual CDs will have labels that also resemble the book cover.

The price will be $35, same as the book. The audio book should be available by June 10 and by that time, we will have a shopping cart on uptherouge.com so you can order the audio book as well as the book.

Posted in Adventures on the Rouge | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

That hole in their story, again

Posted on May 27, 2009 by hro50ta1

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

Posted in censorship, Joel's J School, Subpoenaed reporters | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments