The real question in the Foley scandal is what did the media know, and when did they know it?
Once again, either knowingly or naively, the mainstream media could not resist the October surprise story, even as it unveiled their own lack of integrity in reporting.
In a candid interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, ABC producer Maddy Sauer explains how they broke the Foley email story. What she does not explain is when they knew about the emails, how long they held on to the story, and who decided when to release the information.
Here’s a portion of the transcript published by Democracy Now:
Amy Goodman: Tell us exactly how this went down. Tell us how you developed this story.
Maddy Sauer: Well, it started on Thursday, when we ran a story on our website after we had obtained some emails that were written to a 16-year-old former congressional page from Congressman Foley that the page had forwarded on to a congressional staffer, saying that they made him uncomfortable.
And these were certainly not the sexually explicit emails we later obtained, but they were strange things that you wouldn’t think that a congressman would be writing to a junior in high school: “What do you want for your birthday? What kind of stuff do you like to do? I like to work out. I like to keep in shape.” And it was enough that the young boy had gotten a little freaked out by it and forwarded it along to a staffer. And those were the emails we had initially obtained, and we did a story on that on Thursday.
Amy Goodman: And how did you get this information?
Maddy Sauer: They were passed to a colleague of mine from a source, not someone from a Democratic campaign, a source on the Hill.
And when we talked to Foley's office about those emails, they seemed to know all about them. “It’s no big deal. He is overly friendly. He’s overly engaging. If he’s guilty of anything, that’s all he’s guilty of. He’s very close with the pages. He has worked with the page program for some time.”
So we published that story, and then almost immediately we began receiving emails from former pages, some going back as far as five years, who said this is the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more here.
And Thursday night, I started reaching out to them by phone and email and talking to them Thursday night and Friday morning. And Friday morning, I received transcripts from two different former pages that were instant messages between former pages and the congressman, and they were very sexually explicit, and they were very similar. Both of them contained similar language, similar requests that the congressman had asked the young boys to do.
Read entire transcript
Sauer does not explain when ABC originally obtained the emails or who the “source on the Hill” is. Though Sauer notes it was not from a Democratic campaign, she does not say if the source is Nancy Pelosi or other leading Democrat with an obvious motive for wanting a scandal five weeks before election day.
And do your teenagers keep written transcripts of their email or instant messages for years? Were they planning to use them for blackmail later in their careers? Why didn’t any of them notify authorities?
In an AP story about former Foley chief of staff Kirk Fordham resigning, we learn that, in fact, media had questioned Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who was sponsoring the 16-year-old page who received the original emails, last November. Reporters questioned him a second time in the spring about the same emails. Alexander says he notified the boy’s family and discussed the messages with John Boehner of Ohio on the House floor.
Read entire story.
So why no breaking stories at that time? If reporters and producers were genuinely concerned about teen safety on Capitol Hill, surely someone would have blown the whistle.
Sauer acknowledges ABC’s first story was about these same innocuous emails, where Foley asks for a picture of the boy and asks what he would like for his birthday.
ABC decided to air the story that was already 11 months old. Only then did other pages come forward, Sauer says, with other emails and salacious instant messages.
How did they discern their authenticity? We are left to simply trust ABC.
Ironically, CNN tried to interview someone at Stop Sex Predators, a blog site that posted the Foley emails. The person slammed the mainstream media for not breaking this year-old story in the first place.
Check it out.
The Republicans also successfully manipulate the media. Goodman herself, in speaking to a packed Student Union Ballroom at UNM Sept. 28, noted how the New York Times admitted to holding the story on the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program for 13 months when The Times could have exposed it a month before the 2004 presidential election. Editors explained administration officials convinced them it would be bad for national security to break the story.
And remember Memogate: another October surprise story that back fired big time. CBS News admitted it could not verify the authenticity of memos about President Bush’s National Guard Service. The fallout resulted in four CBS employees being ousted and in the resignation of Dan Rather.
They just never seem to learn. Time and again we see corporate media surrendering their allegiance to readers in order to play politics and influence elections.
In another predictable move, the mainstream media felt duty-bound to publicize the Zogby poll done during the same days the Foley scandal was breaking – giving the Democrats a predictable lead. They fail to mention polls a month before an election are virtually meaningless to actual election outcomes anyway.
When the media falls prey to such political calculations, or worse, are knowing accomplices in them, their role is not lost on discerning readers.
