The Chris Moeller Archives

The whole truth and nothing but the truth

What a mess the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling has created. Newt Gingrich accepts $5 million for his campaign from one man alone—a Las Vegas casino magnate named Sheldon Adelson. With this money, a so-called Super-PAC supporting Gingrich produces a 27-minute documentary attacking his opponent, Mitt Romney, over the issue of Bain Capital, an asset-management firm co-founded by Romney. The nature of the documentary’s criticism is that Bain Capital has been responsible for thousands of job lay-offs, and exposes false claims by Romney to being a “job creator.” Now Gingrich himself is distancing himself from the ad/documentary/infomercial reportedly because Sheldon Adelson believes its tenor is too harsh towards a brand of capitalism that he strongly supports.

Poor Newt Gingrich. It must suck to be owned by someone.

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When I worked in a newsroom, it was understood that there were distinct limits in how far you could go in calling politicians on their shit. The expectation was that you called it down the line-- Democrat vs. Republican, equal time for each, quote one side, quote the other. That's how the job worked, and I never challenged the status quo. Digging deeper-- looking past the words, or questioning the words themselves-- suggested to others that the reporter had a personal agenda. This is still exactly the journalistic model I see when I watch or read the news from traditional sources, and it's what I'm referring to when I write on the blog about an "establishment" media that refuses to challenge the powerful class because it considers itself part of it or aspires to it. These organizations value their proximity and access to the inner circles of power more than they do the pursuit of truth.

In full sobriety and seriousness, the New York Times' public editor Arthur Brisbane asked the question last week of whether or not his paper "should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about." Wow, I say. Should reporters really concern themselves with facts or just follow through with reporting a politician's claims uncritically, and leave the fact-checking to the opinion page? Did he really just ask that? This is relevatory. Embarrassingly, Brisbane also uses the phrase "truth vigilante" to demean the paper's critics in this respect.

Maybe it's not so surprising now that Judith Miller and the Times could be duped into parroting the Bush Administration's claims about WMD's in Iraq and cheerleading the nation into war. A decade later, the New York Times' ombudsman wonders in effect: Are the Times' reporters to act as journalists or stenographers? And then they wonder why there's a news-gathering gap in this country with enough room to be filled by WikiLeaks and several thousand bloggers, nearly all of which Times officials would consider to be ideologues.

Maybe we wouldn't have as many lies as we have in government today if the politicians weren't so convinced they could utter them with impunity.

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One of the public relations strategies that institutions use to move past their crimes is stalling. They understand that the passage of time reduces inflamed emotions to a low simmer. At Penn State University, a new president is employing the tactic of trying to separate the crimes of Jerry Sandusky from the employer that gave the sexual predator his professional reputation, access to his victims, and the benign neglect necessary to pursue his sexual assaults with license.

The recent actions of those affiliated with Penn State, ranging from the former school president all the way down to the rallying crowds of apologists among the student body, have demonstrated the fact that the school no longer deserves to have a football team, but profit implications have made it such that the NCAA no longer wields the power of the death penalty for a major football program, and the continuing passage of time from the initial public reporting of the systematic molestation of children, make it probable that we will be back to business as usual at Penn State after only a few "down-recruiting" seasons.

I'll let Deadspin's Dom Cosentino remind us why, contrary to President Rodney Erickson's P.R. efforts, "the Sandusky scandal" truly is "the Penn State scandal," and why it was more than just the actions of "one individual" destroying a school's reputation...

Two longtime Penn State administrators have been charged with perjury in connection with Sandusky's alleged crimes, and Penn State is paying for their defense. Penn State University police had a 100-page report about an allegation against Sandusky in 1998—when he was still on the Penn State football coaching staff—but no one at Penn State did anything about it, nor did anyone at Penn State even seem to know it existed for more than a decade. The former head football coach of Penn State's own testimony indicates he couldn't be bothered to disturb anyone's weekend after one of his subordinates told him he saw a child allegedly being raped in a Penn State football building shower. One month after that, Penn State sold land to Sandusky's charity. And as all that was going on, Penn State's former head football coach, a Penn State trustee, and the chairman of Sandusky's charity were pursuing a $125 million real-estate venture that was the idea of Penn State's former president. Penn State allowed Sandusky to host overnight football camps at Penn State branch campuses as late as 2009. The new Penn State president has said he and "nearly all individuals at the university" were blindsided when the grand jury issued its findings against Sandusky and those two Penn State officials, at least before he wasn't, but don't bother asking him anything else about that. Sandusky himself even watched a Penn State football game from the former Penn State president's box months after the former Penn State president, the former Penn State head football coach, the now-on-leave Penn State athletic director, a Penn State assistant football coach, and another top Penn State administrator testified before the grand jury. And that football game was played just one week before the charges against Sandusky were handed down.

That's the most thorough description I've come across for a college football enterprise that should no longer exist.

posted by CM @ 9:19 AM