[Ppnews] More Gov’t Informants, More Shoddy Journalism

[Political Prisoner News]

Commentary: More Gov't Informants, More Shoddy Journalism in Case of 
Alleged JFK Airport Plot

Date: Thursday, June 07, 2007
By: 
<http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/sayitloud//site.aspx/authors/10002>Gregory 
Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Those characters at the New York Daily News are at it again.

Of all the newspapers covering the story of the arrests of Muslims 
suspected of plotting to blow up jet fuel lines at John F. Kennedy 
Airport in New York City, editors at the Daily News disgraced 
themselves with this blaring headline on the cover of the June 4 
edition: "Evil Ate At Table Eight: Brooklyn waitress tells how she 
served last meal to mastermind."

The "mastermind" is Russell Defreitas, an Guyanese-American who was 
charged as the suspected ringleader in the alleged conspiracy.

Notice the emphasis on the words "suspected" and "alleged"? Folks at 
the Daily News certainly don't. As far as they're concerned, 
Defreitas and the other suspects have been tried, convicted and 
sentenced. The words "alleged" or "suspected" should have appeared in 
front of "mastermind" on the cover.

The headline purports to quote waitress Sharon Fitzmaurice, who 
served Defreitas just before his arrest. Inside the paper is another 
headline quoting Fitzmaurice: "I was so close to evil and didn't know."

In the first paragraph of the story, Daily News reporters call 
Defreitas "the accused mastermind." But by the second paragraph, 
editors must have told the reporters to drop all pretenses of 
fairness and presumptions of innocence.

"Sharon Fitzmaurice never dreamed that the man who fingered prayer 
beads as he ate salmon at table 8 in the Lindenwood Diner would turn 
out to be the architect of a plot to kill thousands of New Yorkers."

We don't know that Defreitas was the "architect" of anything. We know 
he's been charged. And we know that a convicted drug dealer was a 
government informant who fingered Defreitas and his alleged fellow 
conspirators before they were arrested.

I'm not going to go through yet another litany about why black 
Americans in particular should be leery of any government informant 
used in cases against black defendants. I'll just say that in these 
types of situations, it's best to check the math, even if government 
officials say, "Two plus two equals four."

I will say how stories like this are supposed to be reported. I'll 
use the paper I write for, The Baltimore Sun, as an example.

Soon after joining The Sun staff in 1993, I read the paper's policy 
on how to write stories about criminal suspects. If the cops said 
"John Doe was arrested for the crime" and then gave details, 
reporters had to write that "a man did such and such." We were never 
to write the suspect's name in connection with the crime. Words like 
"alleged" and "suspected" were to be liberally sprinkled throughout the copy.

Only at the end of the story were we to mention a name, and only then 
to say that "police charged John Doe with the crime." Never were we 
to write anything that either implied or said outright that the 
suspect was guilty.

That would be called convicting the suspect in the press, which we 
were supposed to avoid. Responsible newspaper editors do avoid it. 
The better ones know that the relationship of the press to law 
enforcement is often adversarial and heed the late Johnnie Cochran's 
advice that "you can't always accept the official version of a case."

Cochran was referring to the case of Elmer "Geronimo" ji Jaga, aka 
Geronimo Pratt, the former Black Panther Party member who was framed 
for murder by the FBI with the help of a government informant. 
Cochran was Pratt's attorney at his trial in the 1970s and fought 
over 20 years to get Ji Jaga released in 1997.

During that same period of time, editors at the Daily News had a 
routine practice of accepting nearly every official version of a case 
that police and other law enforcement officials presented to the 
public. When Assata Shakur (then Joanne Chesimard), another former 
Black Panther Party member who was alleged to be the "queen of the 
Black Liberation Army," said she had been tried in the press for a 
string of crimes, she was probably referring mainly to the New York Daily News.

A Lexis Nexis search of news stories about Shakur before her 1973 
arrest for killing one New Jersey state trooper and wounding another 
seems to bear her out. Even within the last two years, the Daily News 
did another story on Shakur that all but convicted her of a crime 
that she hadn't even been charged with, much less convicted of.

If that's what Daily News editors consider responsible journalism, 
then I have some advice for them: It's perfectly fine for the Daily 
News to be press agents for police and law enforcement.

Just stop calling the Daily News a newspaper.




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