December 1, 2002
How the murderer James C. Kopp took control of the Buffalo News
by Bruce Jackson
The confession
Admitted murderer James C. Kopp has played the Buffalo News as Paganini played the fiddle—very, very well.
On November 20 the Buffalo News published a four-column wide page-one above-the-fold all-caps-headline story, the central point of which was that James C. Kopp had told Buffalo News reporters Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck that he was indeed the person who had shot Dr. Barnett A. Slepian.
Above the all-capitals heavy black 72-point headline that screamed "KOPP CONFESSES" was a quotation from Kopp: "I did it, and I'm admitting it. But I never, ever intended for Dr. Slepian to die."
The subhead below the 72-point screamer was: "Tells News in jail interview that outrage about abortion prompted shooting of doctor."
So before getting to the byline or the story, the editors of the Buffalo News have devoted two headlines to Kopp's defense: he didn't mean to do it and he acted in what he thought was a good cause.
Here are the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh paragraphs of the story:The statement that Kopp shot Slepian but did not mean to kill him was presented, repeated or paraphrased nine times in that day's Buffalo News. It was repeated or paraphrased three times in the November 21 issue of the News, five times in the November 23 issue of the News, once in the November 24 issue of the News, and once again in the November 27 issue of the News.Yet, despite that admission, Kopp maintains he is innocent of any crime.
Kopp said his outrage over abortion prompted him to shoot Slepian. He insists, however, that he intended to wound Slepian to prevent the physician from performing more abortions.
And he said he hopes that jurors will believe his account and understand his motives when his murder case goes to trial next year in Erie County Court.
"The truth is not that I regret shooting Dr. Slepian. I regret that he died," Kopp said. "I aimed at his shoulder. The bullet took a crazy ricochet, and that's what killed him. One of my goals was to keep Dr. Slepian alive, and I failed at that goal."
I may have missed some. But that is at least nineteen times in eight days—twice in headlines—that James C. Kopp's primary line of defense was given prominent play by the Buffalo News.
What reporters Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck got from James C. Kopp
A terrific story, one that didn't just fall into their laps, either. They worked hard to get it and what they got was a reporter's dream: a statement by a primary character in a public drama that at once throws new light on the drama and changes the way the rest of the drama will be played out.
The November 20 article was a summary of what seemed to Michel and Herbeck the key points of their four-hour November 12 jailhouse conversation with Kopp. In an article the following day Herbeck and Michael Beebe would present reactions to the jailhouse confession and in a third article on November 23 ("Kopp's jailhouse confession put to the test") Herbeck and Michel would present some of the questions raised by Kopp's statement.
Some of the things Kopp said to Michel and Herbeck were obviously false, such as his claim to have gotten Slepian's name from the "Yellow Pages." The two reporters would point out in their November 23 followup article that Slepian was never listed in any Yellow Pages as an abortion provider.
And some of the things he said were patently absurd. Shooting to wound was a hallmark of the Lone Ranger radio show in the 1940s. The Lone Ranger only shot malefactors in the hand holding the gun and it was usually presented as a transiently annoying whack rather than the permanently crippling event that a bullet through the metacarpals is.
Michel and Herbeck were fully aware of that. They weren't vouching for what Kopp said; they were just reporting it. When newspapers quote people they're not necessarily or even usually saying the statements are true or false; they're only saying the people quoted said those things. Quotation marks are important. There's a world of difference between a news article that says "'That woman is an adulteress,' Smith told the judge" is very different and one that simply says "That woman is an adulteress." Sometimes a quotation mark is all that stands between a newspaper and silly speculation or a libel suit.
In a swarm of other articles over the following week the News would give the whole issue of abortion massive coverage, but the November 20 article was about what Kopp said. The "facts" of the article weren't in Kopp's claims about his intentions or deeds, but rather in his words to the two reporters.
An editor's note said that the article published November 20 was based on a four-hour interview that took place November 12. Why the eight-day hold? I assume so the News could line up the rest of its abortion coverage. Michel and Herbeck could have put together their story on the interview in a day. And another day or two for the the two follow-up stories. Kopp's confession, and the fact that he was starting to talk to TV stations, set the schedule for everything to come.
What the murderer James C. Kopp got from the Buffalo News
Kopp didn't talk to Michel and Herbeck because of an urge to confess. You go to a psychiatrist or a priest for that. Kopp has a specific agenda. He's already said he wanted this to be a political trial, which is one of the reasons he replaced Buffalo attorney Paul Cambria with Long Island pro-life attorney Bruce A. Barket, who told the Buffalo News, "Citizens can't vote on abortion in this country....Those individuals on the jury are going to get a chance to vote on abortion in Jim's case."
Getting a favorable verdict is only one of the goals of a political trial. The other goal is to provide a platform for publicity that would not otherwise be available. James C. Kopp didn't murder Dr. Barnett A. Slepian so he could have a trial, get on the stand and make speeches. If that had been his goal he wouldn't have fled the country and hid out in England, Ireland and rural France for 2 ½ years. But once he was caught and a trial was inevitable he saw it as an opportunity to make speeches. If he weren't the defendant in a notorious murder case, who other than the already-converted would give a hoot what James C. Kopp had to say?
But there was a problem: the prosecutor had said he had no intention of letting this turn into a political trial and the judge in the case is known for keeping control of his courtroom.
So Kopp preempted both of them. He got the Buffalo News to give him a week of front-page coverage that he might not have been able to get later. The service the Buffalo News performed willingly and freely for James C. Kopp is a service that Tom Golisano and Michael Bloomberg, with all their megabucks never could have bought for their political campaigns because you can buy inside pages but (I assume) you cannot buy front pages. Front pages you get only if they roll over and given it to you, which is exactly what the Buffalo News did for James C. Kopp.
Would Kopp have given that jailhouse confession if had he been facing a death penalty? I suspect not. But, under the present charges, he's facing a maximum 25-to-life.
And what, exactly, has Kopp given up by that jailhouse confession to two reporters? The extradition deal with France was based on his not being subject to the death penalty. Because of byzantine death penalty politics, New York has no life-without-parole sentence for murderers who aren't also subject to execution. The most he faces is 25-to-life.
He gave the reporters no information about who helped him select Slepian, who aided him when he did his murder in Erie County, who helped him evade capture for 2 ½ years, or his probable involvement in four other sniper shootings.
Kopp gave out a line that made the story irresistible. There was no way the two reporters couldn't have pounced on it or that the Buffalo News couldn't have run it. And then the editors of the Buffalo News decided to reiterate his basic defense strategy story line again and again and again. At least nineteen times.
Kopp won't beat the rap; he's not going to leave Erie County for a place of his own choosing. He knows that. But he could very well wind up with a hung jury. That just takes one. One juror to hang the jury completely or hold out for a conviction on a lesser charge if the other jurors won't accept that he was playing Lone Ranger and just shooting to wound. Juries are sometimes very independent, sometimes swayed far more by well-planned press campaigns than a well-presented case or by external factors rather than courtroom events. It's not that long ago when Klu Klux Klan members who had committed murdered were acquitted by juries after trials in which damning evidence had been competently presented. And how do you feel about the O.J. trial?
If the Buffalo News had set out to contaminate the jury pool in Kopp's favor, it probably couldn't have done a better job.
But it wasn't over yet. The worst was yet to come.
Dancing to Kopp's tune
The day after it ran Dan Herbeck's and Lou Michel's final article on the Kopp confession, the News began a three-day series on abortion: four articles on November 24 and three each November 25 and 26. It represents a huge amount of work.
On the first day of the coverage, the News ran this front-page note: "In this three-day News series on abortion, four local women tell their intensely personal stories. The series examines abortion as two events approach: the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the Buffalo trial of pro-life activist James C. Kopp in the murder of abortion provider Dr. Barnett A. Slepian." Buffalo News editor and vice president Margaret Sullivan said in her Sunday, November 24 editor's report that the abortion series had been many months in the making.
But the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade is January 21, 2003, late into the first month of next year, and nobody knows when Kopp's trial will start because the Erie County D.A. hasn't even finished filing charges.
I find it hard to believe that the News intended to go public with the series at the beginning of Thanksgiving week and the Christmas season. No, those stories were pushed through to piggyback on media flurry surrounding Kopp's confession to Michel and Herbeck. James C. Kopp set the schedule for a full week of Buffalo News abortion coverage.
And it was coverage that surely gave him great delight. Just as he couldn't have known that the Buffalo News would prominently run his main line of defense 19 times in a single week, he couldn't have known that the Buffalo News would attach to its stories on him a series of articles heavily slanted to favor his anti-abortion position.
Eye candy
The left side of the front-page photograph that leads off the three-day series depicts a young man in a bluerainjacket holding a cross with an armless Jesus. To the right is a triple deck of police tapes, the other side of which is a mob. Closest to the camera an overweight woman holds up a wire coat hanger. To her left, a young male in a green sweatshirt grins stupidly. Behind her another young male with a lot of hair and a baseball cap grins. On the left side of the frame a young woman smiles. She seems to be holding up the white and blue sign that says "Keep abortion legal." The series starts, then, with an image of the lone defender of Jesus against a leering sardonic mob.
The caption is "April 1992: Crosses and coat hangers. Thousands of protesters on both sides of the battle gather in Buffalo, one of the many times Western New York has been the focus of the contentious abortion debate."
That is at best disingenuous. The huge April 1992 demonstration happened here because then-mayor Jimmy Griffin invited the rabid right-to-lifers to hold their national event of the season here. Invited by the mayor and pretty much promised that the police wouldn't interfere, they came, and they made Buffalo a national spectacle.
Four women
The key articles in the coverage are four long human-interest stories about four women who talk about their own abortion experience: a middle-class Jew who had one 40 years ago when abortion was illegal, two women who had abortions more recently and who found the experience loathsome, and one woman who walked out of her abortion appointment and had the baby.
To give you an idea of the tone, Charity Vogel writes that one of the women, some time after her abortion, met someone who "forgave her when she finally broke down and told him about it." He forgave her? For what? He was a boyfriend, not a priest, and the abortion happened years before she met him. Then she "began to have nightmares about babies. She would dream about babies outside her bedroom window, crying and begging to be let in. She would wake up in cold sweats, panicking." After going into therapy, she wrote what Vogel calls "her child" a letter in which she expressed her pain, cuddled a teddy bear and pretended it was her baby and wrote a song about her experience titled "Hold You Again" which she sang in church. She went on to have three children, the third of which was born "on the morning of Easter Sunday 1994, just as the sun was rising. "It was at that moment—so symbolic in the consciousness of a woman who aborted a pregnancy that began on Good Friday—that [she] felt herself lifted beyond all the grief and guilt over her past."
Vogel's second story is about someone studying cosmetology who had been sexually abused by her father, her grandfather and her stepfather, and had an abusive and alcoholic boyfriend. Before she got into an unwanted pregnancy, she "appeared to fit right into her cosmetology classes that fall. Her hair, dyed reddish-brown, was cut fashionably short and blown dry in a Princess Diana style. She wore dark eye shadow and red lipstick to offset her creamy alabaster skin." That prose is really there, in the Buffalo News for November 24, 2002, on page A-7, at the bottom of the middle column.
When she decided she needed an abortion she went to a clinic in Fort Worth Texas, where, she said, she was drugged with Valium before the physician asked her the required questions about whether she really wanted to do this and was she making the choice freely. She had extreme pain and then she sat in a room of women all of whom were "crying softly, or staring blankly at the wall." It got worse: "For months, she had struggled with nightmares. She would hear babies crying and shrieking in her head." Then she took part in a healing ceremony in which "she found herself telling her child—the child she didn't have—that they would meet each other in a future life someday when she would be healed and whole and able to care for a baby." She says she doesn't regret it. "I think it was the right decision for where I was in my life." Then she goes on to say that "I would never do it again."
The second article in the abortion series, by Anne Neville, has a large picture of an older woman looking directly at the camera. It is titled, "'I was doing something illegal.'" Is about an abortion that took place 40 years ago. It's the only one reported in all the articles in which the woman isn't portrayed as seriously disturbed by the experience. This woman was well-educated, middle-class and Jewish. She came down with German measles, which meant there was a good chance the child would be retarded or blind, so she decided to have the abortion. She's never had any problems with her choice.
Holly Auer wrote the third article in the abortion series. '''If I have to come back tomorrow, then I won't come back at all,'" which appeared on November 26. The quotation is from a woman who was put off by the long wait at a clinic. She had an abusive husband, wanted an abortion, but the wait decided her against it. She had the baby and she loves it. Her husband kept beating her up. "She teaches Geoff, now 9, that women are special." She remarried, divorced, has a new boyfriend who "understands...'the package deal'—her kids come first." Auer says, "The joy Geoffrey brings to her life today began in a cold parking lot nearly 10 years ago, when [she]grabbed hold of the unknown and swore that whatever it turned out to be, she would make it count."
There is no reflection in these articles, just a huge amount of goo. Auer, for example, tells us that the woman in her profile didn't get an abortion because she was turned off by the wait, but she doesn't say why agencies helping women in that kind of need were so jammed up: in large part because of the ugly and sometimes violent protests of the anti-abortion fundamentalists, some of whose supporters were out murdering doctors who could do the work.
But the series is balanced because they do have that one Jewish woman who had her illegal abortion 40 years ago and still feels she did the right thing and is comfortable about it, right? No, not right. Do you think the sidewalk aborto-terrorists or the Kopps of the world or that kid holding up his armless Jesus in the Buffalo News photograph representing the Spring of Life gives a tinker's damn about a Jew who had an illegal abortion 40 years ago? They're not preaching to Jews, and never were.
Why those four women?
Sullivan wrote in her November 24 editor's essay that the reporters of the Buffalo News were able to find only four local women who were willing to talk about their relationship to abortion—three who had abortions and one who considered it but decided not to have it. She asks, "Why would women talk about such an agonizing topic to a newspaper reporter?"
Another question, at least equally important, is why other women wouldn't let the News do front page stories about their abortions. How much of the difficulty in finding women willing to go on the front page comes from living in a town where local people may very well may have helped finger a local doctor for assassination, where aborto-terrorists scream and picket in front of clinics providing abortion services, and where the city's former mayor invited the most frothing religious fundamentalist anti-abortion activists to hold a major demonstration on the city's streets?
Moreover, going real-name-front-page-picture wasn't the only alternative the News had. They publish stories all the time where they don't reveal people's real names. Maybe they couldn't find women who wanted their picture and address on the front page, inviting the looneys to come and picket their block and harass their families, but surely—if they had looked—they could have found women willing to talk with adequate promises of confidentiality.
To a shoe, the world looks like a foot. If you focus on anti-abortion zealots I guess it's difficult finding people for whom abortion was no big deal. (I just can't go with the "pro-life" tag for those folks. Their hit men have wounded and killed too many women seeking help and too many physicians providing it, and with very rare exceptions the anti-abortion zealots have paid only lip-service to saying such violence wasn't a good technique to achieve their ends.)
It's not that those women aren't out there. It's that Buffalo is not very friendly to them. That story the Buffalo News chose not to tell. Instead of reporting on that problem it became part of it.
Zremski's choice
Immediately below Anne Neville's November 27 piece is an article by Jerry Zremski with a two-tier headline saying "Attitudes becoming more negative on abortion." That article is decorated with three photographs:Zremski describes a man who divorced his first wife because she had psychological problems after her divorce. The man moved to Buffalo and married a Catholic woman. He doesn't believe in abortion, though he'd permit it for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. Zremski tells about a mother who went from pro-choice to pro-life after she became a mother. He quotes Charity Vogel's mother (who is president of the Buffalo Regional Right-to-Life Committee) saying "We have an aging population... And as you age, you get a better appreciation for life-and-death issues and the fact that some things are absolutely irrevocable." He tells us about a woman who got pregnant at 17, decided not to have an abortion and is happy about her choice....a woman who had a friend who had a botched abortion back when it was illegal....a woman who thought a friend who had an abortion so she could fit in her dress for a wedding was tacky.—a 47 year-old white woman saying "Having a child certainly changed my view of whether I could ever have (an abortion)."
—a 22-year old Black woman saying "Abortion is just not right. I didn't come from that kind of family."
—a 66-year-old white man saying "Nobody else but the mother who carries her baby should make that important and painful decision."
The only three people Zremski found in favor of abortion were a student who said it's okay because his grandmother told him his mother had one (in a case not involving him, presumably), a male law student at UB who is becoming moderately pro-choice, and the 66-year-old man in the photograph at the top of the article, John C. Boot, who says the choice should be the woman's, no one else's. The article doesn't tell us that Boot is professor of Management Science at UB, and neither does it give any reason why he should be quoted here. Why quote John C. Boot in an article on abortion? Has he studied the management of it? Is he supposed to represent the man in the street?
How come the only people Zremski quoted as favoring women's choice were two male college students and one male college professor well past the child-bearing age? How come every woman in Zremski's article is opposed to abortion? Is that the true character of American opinion or even opinion in heavily-Catholic Erie County? Not according to the Zogby poll data with which Zremski begins his article.
Gag us, gag us
On Tuesday, November 26, six days after the Kopp's jailhouse interview, and the day the News finished its abortion series, Erie County judge Michael L. D'Amico issued a gag order on the attorneys on both sides and James C. Kopp himself. The gag order had been sought by Erie County Deputy D.A. Joseph J. Marusak who was concerned that with all the publicity "it might be difficult to select an impartial jury." Kopp's attorney, Bruce A. Barket, had no problem with it. He said he agreed with the terms of the gag order.
The D.A. was right to be concerned and Barket was right to be complacent. By the time the gag order was issued, the Buffalo News had given James C. Kopp a full week of free advertising. Erie County D.A. Clark said Kopp's attorney wouldn't be able to get away with asking for a change of venue because of a jury pool contaminated by publicity surrounding the confession: "You don't throw tacks in the bed and then claim the bed is uncomfortable." But why would Barket want to do that? Thus far, the publicity has been contaminating the jury pool exactly as Kopp and Barket want it to be contaminated.
In its November 27 article announcing the gag order, the Buffalo News again ran a standalone paragraph with his defense: "Kopp told The News, in the presence of his attorney, that he shot Slepian to prevent him from performing more abortions but did not intend to kill him, as is alleged in the charge of intentional murder."
Hitler's film propaganda boss Franz Hippler (he made the notoriously anti-Semitic propaganda film Der ewige Jude/The Eternal Jew, 1940) told Bill Moyers in an interview that the secret of successful propaganda is "simplify and repeat." Make your point with a minimum of details and no qualifications and say it again and again and again. The facts, Hippler told Moyers, became irrelevant if the propagandist keeps simplifying and repeating, simplifying and repeating.
The Buffalo News has now repeated Kopp's simplified message at least 19 times. They will no doubt repeat it for him again.
Will the Buffalo News be cops against Kopp?
Clark may use the November 20 Buffalo News article to get additional indictments against Kopp. If he does, he'll have to put the reporters on the stand. You can't just introduce an object in court, like a book, a gun, a fingerprint, or a newspaper article. Someone has to be sworn in and that person must link to the item to the case: "I found that notebook in his briefcase...That is the gun I took from him and put in the evidence envelope....That is his handwriting and his check..." In court, people speak, not objects. Kopp's "confession" to the reporters won't be admissible in court unless the court can get the reporters or Kopp himself to get on the stand and say, "Yes, that's what was said."
Clark may want more. The two reporters spent four hours with Kopp. Four hours of constant conversation transcribes to about 160 double-spaced pages. Their notes and tapes no doubt contain information not in the article.
Isn't much of this hearsay and therefore inadmissible anyway? The hearsay rule doesn't apply in the ordinary way when someone is testifying against interest. You can't get up there and say, "I heard someone say that Fred said he'd done it." But, under certain circumstances, you can say, "Fred told me he'd done it and this is my memory of what he said and here are my notes of that occasion and my tapes of that conversation and I swear that those tapes aren't doctored tapes."
The News doesn't seem happy with the prospect of having to put its reporters on the stand. An article on November 21 reported that,So does the Buffalo News have some principles in this distorted coverage after all—if not about balance or fairness, but at least about their own rights to some kind of journalistic privacy? Probably not: this may turn out to be just editorial posturing and typewriting. It's not at all clear what protections are being violated. Reporters don't have the kind of absolute privilege enjoyed by lawyers, spouses, priests and physicians. New York's press shield law covers confidential information and sources, but, Kopp is hardly a confidential source and, since the 1987 Knight-Ridder case, the shield law hasn't covered notes and outtakes not available from other sources and arguably necessary and relevant to a case in process.Margaret Sullivan, editor and vice president of the Buffalo News, said in response to Clark:
"I appreciate the district attorney's position, but The News will, as always, resist any efforts to make its reporters an arm of law enforcement.
"Reporters aren't police officers," Sullivan said. "They have a different role entirely in a democratic society. As the highest courts repeatedly have confirmed, reporters cannot do their important jobs properly without the projections clearly provided in the Constitution."
There's no question here of who did the talking or what was said. All that's needed is for the reporters to say "I told the truth in my story." All Clark really needs to get his additional charges is for Herbeck or Michel to answer "yes" when he asks, "Did Kopp say the things you say he said at the time and place you said he said them."
It will be interesting seeing how the Buffalo News tries to use the First Amendment to avoid admitting that its reporters told the truth in a front-page article.
Playing the press, the press at play
People play the press all the time. And the press plays people. People want their stories told; the press needs stories to tell. Reporters would have a very difficult time of it if folks didn't send them press releases or call them to say "Here's what I just did" or "You ought to look at what X just did." It's not just detectives who are dependent on friendly callers to get the job done.
But the stories people want told, the stories the press decides to tell and the stories that should be told aren't necessarily the same. Politicians call press conferences all the time to announce things, hoping they'll look good and hoping that they won't get questions that will make them look idiotic.
Part of the job of the press is to present the stories people want to tell, because that is a story in itself, whether or not it is true. If the president of the United States stands up there and lies, that lie is an important fact that people ought to know. If the most notorious accused murderer in local memory is willing to talk about the killing in question, then his comments are important facts we ought to know.
The November 20 story by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck on James C. Kopp's jailhouse confession was good journalism, as were the two subsequent articles that presented reactions to it and problems inherent in it. The rest of it—the hugely slanted series rushed into print to take advantage of the killer's self-serving interview and the nineteen prominent reiterations of his line of defense—isn't journalism. It's turning tricks.