December 7, 2002
More on the Buffalo News abortion coverageBuffalo Report has received several emails from people at the Buffalo News defending, explaining or justifying the Kopp and abortion coverage detailed and critiqued in "How the murderer James C. Kopp took control of the Buffalo News" (Buffalo Report, 1 December 2002), as well as several others focusing on our other recent coverage of ethical myopia at 1 News Plaza. All of them were prefaced by "this is off the record" or "you can't ever quote or paraphrase me on this" or some variant of either of those two phrases. One letter that came with a "this is off the record" lead was from a writer using an assumed name and a mailbox set up only to write to Buffalo Report under that assumed name. This writer wasn't agreeing with what I'd written, but even so, he or she did not feel safe enough to put his or her name on the letters. I guess that tells us something about the current culture of the Buffalo News editorial rooms: folks whose job it is to tell the public the truth about everybody else are very skittish about publicly telling the truth about home base. Some of those letters were really interesting and thoughtful and I regret the necessary injunction that keeps them private, though I understand and regret the need for that injunction. .
Most of my responses wouldn't make much sense without the comments that occasioned them. except maybe this one: "A newspaper isn't answerable to the public for its internal problems; it's answerable for what it publishes. The fact that there were reasons for that distorted coverage doesn't legitimize the distorted coverage. It just means the paper had its reasons."
Here are some interesting emails that came in from four people not associated with the Buffalo News at all:
Lawyers getting compromised
A lawyer wrote:
Bruce Barket, attorney for Kopp, put himself in the position of being called as a witness against his client. By participating in an interview of his client by two newspaper reporters, there was no expectation of confidentiality, and at least for that communication, attorney client privilege would not apply. Is he serving his client’s best interests by putting himself in a position to be called as a witness in the trial?
Lawyers getting gagged
Another lawyer wrote:
There is a significant problem with these gag orders, not the least of which is that virtually every fact supporting guilt had been delivered or leaked to the press long before the arrest. As Justice Kennedy explained in Gentile v. Nevada, it is sometimes the duty of the defense counsel to counteract such efforts. And it is absolutely clear that the client, and the lawyer have free speech protections which the prosecutor does not – ergo, the judge can muzzle the prosecutor at any time, but needs far greater threat to a fair jury pool to muzzle the defense.
Finding the right women
Another lawyer wrote:
I can think of only one believable reason why the Buffalo News couldn't find a single young or middle-aged woman in all of Erie County who'd had an abortion and was comfortable about it: they didn't look for us.
And a non-lawyer wrote:
I noticed the biased news presentation in the News myself and am really disgusted.
It reminded me of a bogus legislative "hearing" on this issue years ago. While I 'testified' before a shitload of right-wing idiots, the women's editor of the WNY Catholic screamed "murderer" at me and had to be held back by two big time anti-abortionists to keep her from slapping me silly. I was nine months pregnant at the time.
It gets worse. The "holders" were a local gynecologist and a monsignor who was then the director of the Diocese of Buffalo Family Life Bureau. The former had refused me birth control five years earlier because he is a Catholic, and the latter had, just the year before, stuck his fucking tongue down my throat while pressing a dayglo rosary into my hand after I interviewed him about abortion rights. I guess he dug killers.