When the Smoking Gun Misfires
That was wrong. Gorajczyk said no such thing to the grand jury investigating the DuPage 7–he didn’t even appear before it. The grand jury did get a secondhand account of Gorajczyk’s story from an investigator working for the special prosecutor, but earlier drafts of the Tribune’s story awkwardly blurred the story’s provenance: “Knight, Gorajczyk recalled later, told him…” Later editing that made the passage more specific also made it inaccurate.
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An innocent mistake, argued the Tribune. But not a mistake that would ever have been made, I suspect, if the Tribune’s case against the prosecutors had hung on Gorajczyk’s supposed testimony. All Gorajczyk provided was a telling detail supporting a conclusion the paper had already come to. Before the grand jury heard from anyone–before it even convened–the Nicarico prosecutors were being denounced by Tribune columnist Eric Zorn and the Tribune editorial page.
In 1972 Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post falsely reported that Hugh Sloan, the former treasurer of Richard Nixon’s reelection committee, had told a grand jury that H.R. Haldeman oversaw a secret slush fund that financed the Watergate break-in. This looked like a smoking gun pointing at the Oval Office. No one was closer to Nixon than Haldeman, the White House chief of staff. But while Woodward and Bernstein double- and triple-checked what Sloan knew, they weren’t as careful about what he’d said. They read too much into silence–sources who didn’t confirm but didn’t deny, a Justice Department attorney who said nothing at all but didn’t hang up. The morning the story broke, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler called it “a blatant effort at character assassination that I do not think has been witnessed in the political process in some time.” It turned out that Sloan hadn’t told the grand jury about Haldeman because he hadn’t been asked.
When it does it’s often filtered antiseptically through Baghdad. For example, a May 10 New York Times story datelined Baghdad began like this: “A Marine task force swept through a wide area of western Iraq near the Syrian border, killing 100 insurgents and raiding desert outposts and city safe houses belonging to insurgents…American military officials said Monday. The attack, involving more than 1,000 troops including a Marine regimental combat team that includes soldiers and sailors, appears to be the largest combat offensive in Iraq since the Marines invaded Falluja six months ago.”
“I encourage you at some point during your deliberations or at some other time–these are yours to keep–that you spend the time to read this series. It is important award-winning journalism and is shedding light on our societal problems so that people like Steve Buckley don’t have to spend three years in prison when they are innocent.”
