| Saturday, September 30, 2006 |
| Did the media participate in the Foley cover-up? |
Legitimate questions are being asked, in and out of the blogosphere, about whether Republican congressional leaders participated in a cover-up of Rep. Mark Foley's creepy behavior with interns, including possible criminal conduct regarding the sexual propositioning of minors.
But if Dennis Hastert and other GOP leaders knew about the emails sent by Foley to teenaged former pages, they clearly weren't the only ones. Several news outlets apparently knew, too, including at least one major Florida newspaper, the Tampa Tribune. Here's part of what the Tribune's editors had to say today about it's conduct in the case:
In November of last year, we were given copies of an email exchange Foley had with a former page from Louisiana. Other news organizations later got them,too. The conversation in those emails was friendly chit-chat. Foley asked the boy about how he had come through Hurricane Katrina and about the boy's upcoming birthday. In one of those emails, Foley casually asked the teen to send him a "pic" of himself. Also among those emails was the page's exchange with a congressional staffer in the office of Rep. Alexander, who had been the teen's sponsor in the page program. The teen shared his exchange he'd had with Foley and asked the staffer if she thought Foley was out of bounds.
There was nothing overtly sexual in the emails, but we assigned two reporters to find out more. We found the Louisiana page and talked with him. He told us Foley's request for a photo made him uncomfortable so he never responded, but both he and his parents made clear we could not use his name if we wrote a story. We also found another page who was willing to go on the record, but his experience with Foley was different. He said Foley did send a few emails but never said anything in them that he found inappropriate. We tried to find other pages but had no luck. We spoke with Rep. Alexander, who said the boy's family didn't want it pursued, and Foley, who insisted he was merely trying to be friendly and never wanted to make the page uncomfortable.
So, what we had was a set of emails between Foley and a teenager, who wouldn't go on the record about how those emails made him feel. As we said in today's paper, our policy is that we don't make accusations against people using unnamed sources. And given the seriousness of what would be implied in a story, it was critical that we have complete confidence in our sourcing. After much discussion among top editors at the paper, we concluded that the information we had on Foley last November didn't meet our standard for publication. Evidently, other news organizations felt the same way.
Since that time, we revisited the question more than once, but never learned anything that changed our position. The Louisiana boy's emails broke into the open last weekend, when a blogger got copies and posted them online. Later that week, on Thursday, a news blog at the website of ABC News followed suit, with the addition of one new fact: Foley's Democratic opponent, Tim Mahoney, was on the record about the Louisiana boy's emails and was calling for an investigation. That's when we wrote our first story, for Friday's papers. ... Of course, after that, another news organization, ABC News and its reporter, Brian Ross, were credited with breaking the story (it was actually originally broken by a blogger.)
And the Tribune's explanation doesn't clear up the fact that they had the emails, and understood the clear implication of them, and yet decided not to publish a story. The family of the alleged victim appears not to have wanted the story squashed -- nor did they dispute the implication that Foley had made inappropriate contact with their son. What they wanted was their names kept out of it, and having worked in a newsroom, I can tell you that that would have happened anyway, since most news organizations have a policy against naming minors, or their family members, because that, too, would identify them (particularly since the minor in question is an alleged victim, not a perpetrator.)
So the Tribune -- a conservative-leaning paper that got kudos from myself and others in 2004 for withholding its endorsement of President Bush on principle -- gets no brownie points for killing this story nearly a year ago. They belatedly are reporting it, but in the meantime, Mark Foley has had 11 months to pursue his passion for blue Internet chats with young teenaged boys he met through the congressional page system, which he apparently used as his personal escort service. In this case, the Tribune and any other media outlet that knew about the emails protected Foley just as surely as his GOP bosses did.
Had it not been for the blogosphere, Foley might be emailing one of your sons tonight.
Related: Who knew? Foley's honorary roadie stint, his frienship with Sonny Bono, and other highlights of a thoroughly destroyed political career.
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Tags: Mark Foley, Florida, Republicans, GOP, scandal, pages, Congress |
posted by JReid @ 11:29 PM   |
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