Found Innocent.Org

Celebrity basing over the summer seemed particularly lurid and accuracy-challenged.
If you go strictly by the unsubstantiated headlines, former Vice President Al Gore sexually assaulted a masseuse, laughed in her face and got away with it. All that supposedly happened during a trip to promote himself as a best-selling author and all around cool guy. Al Gore, admittedly, is an acquired taste, to be sure. But, on the alleged assault, Gore responded, through his spokespersons, that all that was news to him. Apparently, it was news to the police, as well, because they had briefly looked into the charges – old charges, by the way – and promptly dismissed them as not credible.
This recent flurry of media activity prompted the police to take one more look, which they did, and they came to the exact same conclusion: Gore’s accuser was unbelievable. Somehow, though, during a fairly slow scandal summer, Gore was again accused of groping the masseuse. The story exploded for about a week, and then went to the elephant’s graveyard of all such over-blown, under-supported stories. For a while though, it couldn’t have been much fun to be Al Gore, if it ever is.
The past few months have not lacked for celebrity scandals; nor have they been short of badly reported, highly speculative and ultimately inaccurate media feedings. Blame a good deal of it on the National Enquirer, but the rest of the media has little reason to feel smug.
President Barack Obama, NFL players Ben Roethlisberger and Mike Vick, both highly paid quarterbacks, and the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, recently killed in a small plane crash, have all figured in the news – and none of them in a good way. Every alleged scandal involved charges that were ultimately rejected, or significantly downsized by investigating authorities. Separating fact from fiction is always a challenge in cases like this. However, rushing to judgment is never difficult at a time when the mere allegation is usually enough for blogs, gossip shows, partisan programs masquerading as legitimate “news”, and even some big media programs and publications that should know better.
In order:
Obama has been accused, repeatedly, of being a foreign national who has never achieved citizenship in the United States. He is also being attacked as a Muslim and a Muslim sympathizer. It has also been alleged, complete with “evidence”, that Obama has been unfaithful to his wife with one or more campaign aides. The National Enquirer ran front-page stories claiming that “on-site hotel surveillance video camera footage could provide indisputable evidence … investigators are working to obtain the tape.”
That Obama “expose” hit the aisle-end display racks right in front of all the check-out counters, complete with photos of the “adulterous” President walking along a beach, shirtless. What they didn’t tell you was that the photo had been cropped to cut out the other alleged conspirators with him, who actually turned out to be his wife and daughters, who were sharing a family vacation with the President. At least in that case, the entire story had to be shame-facedly and publicly retracted by the Enquirer.
Senator Ted Stevens and several of his closest friends perished in a small plane crash in Alaska in August. Stevens was one of the longest-tenured senators in U.S. history and the closest thing to a political monument that Alaska has ever produced. Stevens brought more federal money home to Alaska, for projects deemed worthwhile, as well as pork barrel, than any other Senator in the country. Ironically, he often expressed a morbid fear of flying in small air-craft and speculated that he might one day die that way.
Before his physical death, however, Stevens experienced a far more agonizing political death. In 2008, Stevens became the target of a federal corruption trial as he ran for re-election to the Senate. He was found guilty, and eight days later was narrowly defeated at the polls. Six months after his conviction, the entire case was dismissed on grounds of gross prosecutorial misconduct by U.S. Attorney General William Holder. Among the many problems with the prosecution was the alleged suppression of “exculpatory evidence.” Just in case you aren’t familiar with legal jargon that means that the prosecution only used the bad stuff about Stevens, even though they also had evidence that largely cleared him. That is, of course, the worst ethical violation that a prosecutorial team can commit.
Holder, a Democrat exonerated Stevens, a Republican, at the height of partisan bickering mainly because the prosecution against him had been so badly flawed and compromised. The media did a very good job covering the first part of the story, that is the flawed conviction, but not so much on the second part, that is, the exoneration. Why do the media pick and choose which end of a story they decide to be thorough with? Because on the back end there was no blood to be tasted.
On April 7, 2009, (according to widely published reports) federal judge Emmet G. Sullivan formally accepted Holder’s motion to set aside the verdict and throw out the indictment based on what he called the worst case of prosecutorial misconduct he’d ever seen. He also initiated a criminal contempt investigation of six members of the prosecution. Although an internal probe by the Attorney General’s office was already underway, Sullivan said he was not willing to trust it due to the “shocking and disturbing” nature of the misconduct.
Turning to sports, Michael Vick threw a birthday party for himself over the summer and one of the guests (who may or may not have been invited) walked outside and promptly found himself the target of a gunshot blast. For a guy like Vick, still smarting from his prison sentence for financially backing a dog-fighting ring, the party, in and of itself, was a stupid idea. More stupid was the identity of the shooting victim, who turned out to be one of Vick indicted accomplishes from the dog-fighting venture.
Vick took his lumps on those decisions and earned every one of them; however, at no point was he under police investigation for having any part in the shooting. But, he was certainly under media investigation. Hundreds of sports writers and celebrity gossips did their best to link Vick to the crime through innuendo, guilt by association and that old stand-by, well-if-he-did-one-thing-he-probably-did-the-other one-too. When you are chatting with your buddy in the sports bar, that line of reasoning works very well, but not when you are supposed to be earning a living as a journalist. Sure, convict Michael Vick for being an idiot, but not for being a shooter.
Ben Roethlisberger, another NFL quarterback, may well have been the most special case of all. He did do some of the things of which he was accused and he paid a price for that, including loss of money (fines), playing time (four game suspension), the respect of his team-mates (they un-elected him as team captain) and untold endorsement possibilities. His crime could be unofficially recorded as acting like a pig with women who were only too happy to begin consorting with him at the beginning of the night, but who changed their minds as the drinks flowed and his behavior became even more horrendous.
At no point, however, according to the police who investigated Roethlisberger, did his actions cross the line into criminal. That should be an important distinction. The NFL did hit him with a reasonably stiff punishment, considering the absence of any criminal conviction. The punishment was not stiff enough for many fans, but that was where his own team could have stepped in – and it did not. Blame ownership for that, not a mere cretin like the uncouth quarterback. The media covered the saga almost as savagely as they went after dog-fighter Vick. And that is where it should have ended, but, as usual, the Ben Roethlisberger still had legs. What ensued was one of those endless spring-and-summer seasons of accusers stepping forward, from every state in the union, it seemed, to report that they had been in bar with Roethlisberger and he had been up to his old tricks. The media dragged those allegations, kicking and screaming, right into the current NFL season.
So much for the scandal-challenged summer of 2010.
These are just a few of the examples where many readers are probably familiar with the names because of the headlines generated. And, is there another lesson to be learned from all this? Of course, there is. At a time when “journalism” has never been in worse shape, the temptation to run with any story, regardless of the absence of merit, investigation and relevance, has never been more overwhelming.