for BigTrial.net
At the Feb. 25th press conference in Happy Valley, reporter Gary Sinderson asked me a leading question about prevailing narratives in the media that turn out to be wrong.
Sinderson and I were both lamenting how in high profile sex abuse cases, the media often gets it wrong. It was Sinderson who pointed out that the prevailing narrative in the Penn State case has become the permanent narrative. Because the mainstream media stubbornly refuses to reexamine what they originally got wrong. Even though that involves having to join an ongoing official cover up by the trustees at Penn State. And having to willfully ignore reams of startling new evidence that's finally seeing the light of day.
If you want to see the exchange, it happens at minute 15:30 in the clip below about an X-rated comic book. That's my term for the accusations of the 36 alleged victims in the so-called Penn State sex abuse scandal that would merely be laughable if that X-rated comic book hadn't cost Penn State a total of $118 million.
The reporter's question gave me an opportunity to sermonize about how a prosecutor wins a high-profile media case before it even comes to trial. This is something I can give a seminar on, sadly, because I've watched it successfully practiced over and over again in Philadelphia, as well as at Penn State.
It's called controlling the narrative. And prosecutors are very good at it.
Here's how it's done.
Step one: you have to find a stooge in the media who's willing to carry your water. It helps if they're an uncritical thinker wedded to a particular point of view. [To make this easier, I've included in this show-and-tell presentation photos of a few well-known media stooges, so the species can be more readily identified].
Step two: feed your stooge until the cows come home, and fill the front pages with shocking headlines that carry your narrative.
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| Larry |
Whether it's true or not.
Whether you have to break grand jury secrecy laws to do it.
Because there is no risk; prosecutors typically are immune from prosecution. And nobody in the court system gives a damn about prosecutorial leaks.
Step three: Now that you've permanently tainted the jury pool by repeatedly leaking to your stooge, hopefully, when your case comes to trial, you've got a non-sequestered jury to deal with.
A non-sequestered jury is perfect for your goal of continuing to control the narrative, until you win a high-profile conviction. So you can mount a high-profile trophy-head on your wall, which is what prosecutors live for.
When the trial starts, play constantly to the themes you've previously fed your stooge that have already made lots of front-page headlines, and have been accepted as gospel by the rest of the media pack.
Because nothing in America today is more uniform and monolithic than the mainstream media. Reporters typically are all card-carrying Democratic liberals and committed social justice warriors who think and act in lockstep. So if you're a prosecutor singing a few bars from your hit song, it won't be long before all the reporters in the front row will be nodding their heads and humming along.
In journalism today, nothing succeeds more than a familiar story line. As any reporter knows who has worked the trenches as long as I have, you're OK as long as you're telling your fellow journalists something they already know or believe to be true.
Such as:
-- All Catholic priests are raging pedophiles.
-- All alleged victims of sex abuse are paragons of virtue who never lie.
-- Donald Trump is a combination of Hitler, Stalin and the Antichrist.
The trouble starts when ever you dare to tell them something different.
In the video clip, I talk about how easy it is for a reporter to fall for a prevailing narrative and become just another media stooge. In the Billy Doe case, at first, I fell for it. Two priests and a Catholic school teacher were accused of repeatedly raping a helpless young altar boy.
It sounded credible, because of the widespread sins of the Catholic Church against children, which I also have written about. But after I did some digging, I discovered the shocking truth: none of the allegations were true; the altar boy had made up the entire story.
Let's get back to the formula for controlling the narrative.
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| Moe |
You see the people who sit on benches and work in the courtrooms all believe in a myth from a bygone time of buggy whips and horse-drawn carriages -- that a juror can screen out news reports in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, the internet and social media.
I sat through five months of the Vince Fumo trial back in 2008 and 2009. And watched as the judges and the lawyers and the clerks all played along in believing that the saturation media coverage had no effect on jurors.
Even though the lead media outlet covering the trial, The Philadelphia Inquirer, my former newspaper, had cranked out a total of 714 news stories, editorials and letters to the editor during 2008 and 2009, when the trial was going on. That's a staggering rate of nearly one screaming front-page headline a day.
I was the only reporter in the media pack who, after the trial was over, started knocking on the doors of the jurors, to see if it was true that were actually able to screen out the saturation media coverage of the Fumo trial.
On my initial visit to see Juror No. 1, I had to step over a copy of the Inquirer sitting on her doorstep. The same newspaper that she didn't cancel during the trial. I subsequently learned from interviews with the Fumo jurors that by the end of the trial, every one of them was tuning in to the non-stop media coverage.
But when a court hearing was held over the issue, I watched in amazement as the prosecutors and the judge teamed up to say and write things about me that were provably not true. All to aid in their efforts to keep alive the myth that jurors can screen out saturation news coverage in a high-profile media case. Even though I had just got through proving they couldn't.
I have recounted all of these adventures in a book I wrote about the Fumo case, Target: The Senator; A Story About Power And Abuse of Power. The title is something of a Trojan horse, because I not only cover Fumo's abuses of power, but also the abuses of power by the prosecution and the media.
In the Fumo case, Craig McCoy of the Inquirer functioned as the lead stooge, but he had plenty of help as just about all the reporters, editors and columnists at both the Inky and the Daily News bought hook, line and sinker the prosecution's narrative that Fumo was Satan every minute of his life.
Indeed, when I was covering the Fumo trial, and observing the behavior of my colleagues, I had the same sickening feeling that I used to get on the playground as a kid, when ever I watched a bunch of youthful idiots picking on somebody.
Media bias is a hot topic these days and the latest heretic to testify about is Lara Logan, a former reporter for 60 Minutes. Here's what Logan had to say:
"Every where I go people tell me they have lost faith in journalism. It comes from all people, all walks of life and all political stripes.
"Frankly, I don't blame them. Responsibility for this begins with us.
"It is a fact that the vast majority of journalists in this country are registered Democrats. The colleges we come from are similarly dominated by one political ideology. This matters today because the reporting has become so one-sided . . . It is the one-sided nature of this fight that disturbs me. Is this what the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the first amendment?"
To see a shining local example of what Logan is talking about, I invite you to read the Inquirer's own description of the newsroom, who they are and what they do, in their own words. By definition, they aren't unbiased journalist out there in search of the truth, where ever it leads. No, instead they're proud social justice warriors seeking out stories that prove and uphold the cherished doctrines of their shared political ideology.
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| Curly |
At Penn State, there's another stooge who not only carried the prosecution's talking points for them, such as leaking news about a secret grand jury investigation that basically amounted to placing a want ad for new victims. But this particular stooge also meddled with that grand jury investigation by acting as an agent for the prosecution. She did it by carrying a message to the mother of an alleged sex victim, advising her that the attorney general's office was trying to get in touch with her. And if they didn't succeed, why their grand jury investigation of Jerry Sandusky might go out of business because at the time they only had one customer.
So I invite you to watch the video about the X-Rated comic book, as well as the other four videos posted on this site from the press conference in Happy Valley. It's news that the mainstream media won't touch.
It's also news that the trustees at Penn State, the fiction writers in the state attorney general's office, and Louis Freeh, the author of his own fatally flawed $8.3 million report, don't want you to know.
There's one more component to the ongoing media malpractice at Penn State, namely the racial and sexual biases of the prevailing liberal ideology that rules the Inky newsroom as well as the rest of the mainstream media.
The falsely accused attackers of Billy Doe, along with the falsely accused administrators at Penn State, as well as Jerry Sandusky himself who was clearly railroaded at his trial, are all white males.
While males, in the prevailing view of liberalism, are the least valued human beings on earth. They are the oppressor class and, in the eyes of liberals, are not deserving of sympathy. Indeed, they are, in the eyes of liberals, typically villains, the one class responsible for all the evils in the world.
If the falsely accused at Penn State, and in the Philadelphia archdiocese, were minorities, or females, or gays, or transgenders, they would have more value and be more deserving of sympathy in the eyes of the Inquirer, and the other liberals in the media.
This is the pervasive way of thinking in the Inky newsroom, as anybody who has ever worked there knows. If you are a job applicant, and you are a white male, you automatically go to the back of the line, because the Inquirer willfully discriminates against you. At the Inquirer, preferences in hiring are given to women, minorities, gays, etc. It's a prejudice that permeates that social justice laboratory that is the Inquirer newsroom, and controls their thinking when ever they venture out of their safe space.
When I worked at the Inquirer, they employed a so-called diva of diversity who was in charge of recruiting more minorities, women and gays to the newspaper. She was obsessed with statistics that showed what percentage of the newsroom were women or minorities. I used to call her the newsroom's genetic engineer. I recall her exulting one day with high-fives over the hiring of a reporter who was a gay Asian woman. She was a prize in the hiring sweepstakes, a three-fer, because she represented three desired categories.
And I represented three non-desired categories -- a straight white male.
From years of close observation, I can tell you that the liberal ideology that pervades the Inky newsroom is as iron-clad as any religion I can think of. Or any cult. And all those biases are clearly on display in the journalistic debacles that are ongoing in the Philly archdiocese, as well as at Penn State.
