More Distortions Hit The Web in Siegelman’s Case
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Sometimes in winter, even when there is rare snow on the ground in Alabama, it is better to sleep late. If for no other reason than to give the other Web publishers time to get their acts together before it’s time to put up the morning headlines.
There are some people in the South who have so little regard for what our esteemed president likes to call “the Internets,” however, that they bungle not only the online version of things, but the print edition too.
Knowing in advance that the Birmingham News was going to try one more time today to attack poor little Jill Simpson, a former life-long Republican from North Alabama, and kiss the ass of disgraced former Bush political adviser Karl Rove, I poured the coffee and began searching al.com for the headline. This is what I found:
Internet headline goes here
Upon the final click for the print version, poor Internet readers who take the time to figure it out finally get to this headline in the Opinion section: Siegelman’s Siege. It’s sort of like the Great Tennessee Valley Blackout of 2008. Obscure the story for the people who are not savvy enough or connected enough to get it.
But before we deal with that alternate reality, there are a couple of headlines we need to get to first.
The little Birmingham News reporters have gotten themselves a big time interview with Karl Rove, that mastermind of Bush politics who managed to take over the Alabama Supreme Court a few years back - by fooling the Birmingham and Mobile newspaper reporters with assertions of “jackpot justice” and such. You know, the same Karl Rove they used to call “Bush’s brain” - before we figured out he didn’t have one.
Rove denies lawyer’s Siegelman assertion
They bought it hook line and sinker then, and they are still buying it now. Since they don’t read things on the scary new “Internets,” they didn’t follow the story about Rove having to resign from the White House in disgrace last August in an attempt to avoid facing a subpoena to testify under oath before Congress in a host of national scandals.
Surely they ran an AP story about that in the print edition, but perhaps they were too busy to read it.
Foremost among the charges, the one that most directly affects Alabama, you know, the Birmingham News’ home turf, was the very idea that the Bush administration would fire federal prosecutors and even put former governors on trial for purely political reasons. That just couldn’t happen in the, pure as the driven snow, American judicial system, could it? And right here in honest little Alabama?
Scott Horton at Harpers.org does a fine job of refuting these stories, but we are wondering if the good people of Alabama are reading it. You see, it’s only printed on the “Internets.”
The Alternate Reality of the Birmingham News
The Net vs. The Web
Before I get into a more detailed refutation myself, let me first try one more time to explain to people the difference between the Internet and the Web. It is important, whether you get it or not.
I know this causes the folks at the Birmingham News much grief, because they are not in charge of their own Web site. They just crank out the print edition like they always have, and then turn it over to Advance Communications programmers to stick on the Web with what I like to call “shovelware” software at 4 a.m.
Since they have so little regard for the “Internets,” they don’t bother to check their headlines like they would for the newspaper. Thus the headline glitch. Sorry, but I’m still laughing: Internet Headline Goes Here, Insert Anti Siegelman Headline Here, etc.
Just so you will know, the Internet (singular) is the series of wires and computers hooked up by phone lines and cable lines all over the world that make it possible to do things like check e-mail - and get on the World Wide Web to read things like the online version of newspapers. The only way to read anything on the “Internets” is to pull up a Website in a Web browser. So the headline should have been: Web headline goes here.
Or better yet, they should have just put the actual story headline in their like everybody else : )
Since it’s obvious the programmers over at Advance don’t know the difference, and don’t care, that’s what you get.
But I suppose that is a minor thing and a difference that is lost on most people, so let’s get to the other headline.
Alternate reality goes here.
Since you can read the alternate story yourself, there’s not much need to quote from it at length. Let’s just summarize.
The poor little reporters at the Birmingham News, who are mostly relegated to writing unglamorous local stories about two-year colleges and the minor shenanigans of city councilmen in small towns and such, must get their adrenaline going pretty good when they have a chance to talk to someone as “big time” as Karl Rove. I mean he worked for THE PRESIDENT in that big White House in Washington and he is REAL IMPORTANT.
Talking to him might even get you on the front page, so why bother to ask a tough question? Just pick up the phone, hold the receiver and listen as God speaks. Take down what he says and print it as gospel.
And to heck with the word of one of our own little Alabama citizens, a lawyer no less, who HAS gone to Washington and testified under oath.
There was a time in the newspaper business when sworn testimony mattered. It was considered more believable in a “she said, he said” dispute.
Not anymore, apparently. This is the age of the “Internets,” when you can’t believe anything unless the Christian Republicans say it IN PRINT.
Nevermind also that Karl Rove is a Machiavellian atheist, and probably gay, not that there is anything wrong with that : )
But in this alternate reality, as long as our would-be king George W. Bush still loves him, Rove’s word is still as golden as the Good Book itself.
This is for the record and disputes the main allegation in the story against Ms. Simpson, to wit:
Simpson’s latest allegation that she met with Rove is one she had not made publicly before the “60 Minutes” interview, either in published reports, her affidavit or testimony before congressional lawyers.
This sentence, like another one in another Birmingham News story the other day, which I pointed out myself to editors there to no effect, is aimed like a charge at Ms. Simpson as if she did something wrong.
Simpson raised claims she has not made in previous interviews, in an affidavit or in sworn testimony before Congress.
Republican questions case against Siegelman
What are they thinking? Do they think Congress wanted to wade into the “gay” mine field on this story? With allegations floating around about Sen. Larry Craig in a Minnisota airport mens room? Of course not : )
It’s as if in this alternate print reality they live in down in that new newsroom of theirs in downtown Birmingham, they just can’t get their heads around the fact that Karl Rove worked his evil politics in Alabama just as he did in Washington.
The politics of Bush and Rove got us into this ill-conceived and costly war in Iraq and now has our economy teetering on the brink of a recession. It’s an Orwellian brand of politics that has the grand reputation of America on the ropes around the world for our willingness to go along with secret CIA prisons and torturing prisoners. And, it’s a type of politics that is willing to destroy the great American criminal justice system by using the courts to eliminate political opponents, even if they have to lie and cheat to pull it off.
There was a time when these things mattered in the newsrooms of America, and Alabama. It’s obvious now that the almighty dollar has completely taken over.
For the record, and I’ve already indicated my willingness to testify to this, I have heard from Ms. Simpson all about her dealings directly with Karl Rove, over and over again and late into the night on the telephone on many occasions. I have seen the documents which back them up.
But Ms. Simpson and her lawyer in Montgomery are not going to release any more documents until Karl Rove and the other participants in this scandal, including assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Franklin, are called to testify under oath. And for good reason. They have a pretty good case building up that might land some people around here in legal hot water themselves, including the new head of the Alabama Republican Party, and Mr. Franklin at the so-called Justice department down in Montgomery.
The House Judiciary Committee has many of the documents already. And the members, including Rep. Artur Davis of Birmingham, thought enough of them to call a hearing and not only get Jill Simpson to testify. Respected Birmingham attorney Doug Jones testified under oath as well, pointing out a series of important key events that the poor readers of the Birmingham News still do not know. He said the Department of Justice had indicated there was no case against Siegelman and that the charges were going nowhere, until someone in Washington ordered a top down review of the case - after Mr. Siegelman decided to run against Bob Riley in the 2006 election.
Could that simply be coincidence? Not likely.
Coup de Grâce
Somehow that is all lost on the Birmingham News staff, including the editorial section, where we can now get to the coup de grâce.
Then there was Dana Jill Simpson, a Rainsville lawyer who has been lobbing would-be bombshells for months about the Republicans’ alleged vendetta against Siegelman. On “60 Minutes,” she claimed Republican strategist Karl Rove personally asked her in 2001 to try to get evidence Siegelman was cheating on his wife.
A word about this: It’s not as if Rove hasn’t dabbled before in Alabama politics, and it’s certainly not as if Rove is above playing dirty.
The problem is Simpson. She has dribbled out damaging allegations in such a way as to undermine her credibility….
Well, I guess someone down there finally got onto the “Internets” and figured out that yes, Karl Rove had been here, in Alabama. And yes, he’s a dirty, sleaze ball political dirty trickster who would make George C. Wallace’s campaign bag men look like kindergarten bullies.
But it still doesn’t matter, right? Let’s just treat is as a funny, insignificant fact…
But the problem is Ms. Simpson, they say, who “dribbled out” damaging allegations? Undermined her credibility?
I mean she told the New York Times, Time magazine and me about them last June, ad nauseum. And she laid them out in the fall in documents presented under oath before Congress. It’s just that no one has reported that particular part of the story until now, and of course the Birmingham News never tried. It’s because of how the national television news media works.
The CBS News magazine show “60 Minutes” liked the part of the story about how Mr. Rove wanted Ms. Simpson to look into Don Siegelman’s sex life. It was what we call in the business “something new” or a “new angle” or “advancing the story” or “new details.” It’s not only sensational and scintillating. It’s downright sleazy. And of course it helped get the national audience interested, and I’m told it worked. The show’s ratings were off the charts - except in that part of North Alabama and Southern Tennessee where it was blacked out, of course : )
Gay Rumors
Quite frankly, I did not want to report on that part of the story because it opened the door to bring out all of the other Karl Rove allegations about Mr. Siegelman, a tactic he’s used in every political race he’s ever been involved in. That is to say, what the “60 Minutes” story points to, without revealing it, was that what Rove wanted Ms. Simpson to investigate was this: Whether Don Siegelman was gay.
In political reality, as opposed to science reality, it didn’t make any difference if the allegations were true or not. The rumor can be enough in politics.
Rove did it to Ann Richards in Texas when he was running George W. Bush’s first campaign for governor, and it worked on her. Bush won. That is well documented.
He has already done it to Hillary Clinton.
And this part is lost on the reporters and producers in New York. The same sort of rumor in Alabama helped George Wallace defeat George McMillan in the 1982 race for governor, the next closest election in the state before the 2002 race between Siegelman and Riley. If memory serves, Wallace won by something like 30 votes per precinct in Alabama’s 67 counties. I know for a fact the gay rumor was floating around about McMillan from the Wallace crowd, because I heard it myself and even repeated it to then Birmingham News managing editor Tom Bailey.
But apparently, in addition to just not liking Mr. Siegelman, the Birmingham News and Mobile Press-Register reporters actually believed the rumors. And maybe they still do. I heard those rumors in the bars of Montgomery myself back in 2004 while researching Bush’s time in Alabama in 1972, when he was AWOL from the Air National Guard and working for Red Blount’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Another reason I didn’t report it initially was because it is a long and complicated story with way too many characters to get down in a newspaper or magazine story. It would take a book to document Don Siegelman’s story - and now Jill Simpson’s role in it.
The other reason is that Ms. Simpson failed to find any evidence of a homosexual relationship between Mr. Siegelman and his long-time aide Nick Bailey. So why bring that to light at all?
When the New York Times and Time magazine first broke this story on June 1 of last year - based on two leaks, not investigative journalism - the focus was on the new affidavit itself that brought out sworn evidence for what Mr. Siegelman had been saying all along: It was a political prosecution directed from Washington.
The Whistleblower
Here was a Republican lawyer acting basically as a whistleblower, willing to swear that it was true, and that neither Mr. Siegelman nor Mr. Scrushy got a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Now that is a big story, even in Birmingham, Alabama, which is why I got involved in covering it from that day forward. That weekend, I went to Rainsville and interviewed Ms. Simpson for eight hours and poured over boxes of documents and came away convinced that what she was saying, under the threat of perjury, was true.
The Birmingham News staff, or more likely the management, still don’t believe it, in part because they did not bother to investigate the story from day one. They got beat on the story by the “liberal” New York Times and the little Locust Fork Journal, published on the “Internets.” And they were not going to back down from supporting “you the man” Bush and Gov. Bob “Cowboy Boots” Riley, who have been so good for the state’s economy.
And even in the face of an extensive investigation by the producers at “60 Minutes,” they will not take a good long peak into the reality box. They have to stay in their unreality box, handed to them by loyal Bushie Republican operatives, because it is the economic box that supports them.
There’s really no other way to interpret the delusional reporting that goes on around here, except for maybe the snow. I know for a fact that some of those folks learned a better form of journalism in the universities of the South. But for the sake of the money, they will go on reporting it wrong, either because they have convinced themselves it is right. Or because their conservative bosses demand it.
