New York Times bears false witness

Editor's note: The following commentary is reprinted with permission.

When I first saw this story on the New York Times website, I knew it was bound to run on that newspaper's front page, and it did:

MONTGOMERY, Ala., Aug. 20 – They came streaming in from all directions, wearing their crosses and Confederate T-shirts, carrying dog-eared Bibles and bottles of water and enough power bars to last a siege.

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But I was immediately skeptical about this "color story," every sentence written as if a punch line lurked just around the corner.

I had seen endless TV footage of the Montgomery protests, and I had noticed not a single Confederate T-shirt, nor any other Confederate memorabilia, for that matter.

Some of the protesters did wear shorts and T-shirts beneath the infernal August sun, but they were mostly middle-aged and elderly people, neatly groomed and, frankly, kind of dull.

Next time I have a surly crowd chasing after me, this is exactly the kind of mob I want it to be.

But by slyly clothing the protesters in "Confederate T-shirts," Times writer Jeffrey Gettleman was pandering to his audience, eliciting snickers by conjuring up a revival of gap-toothed, barefoot, unreconstructed racists.

So I checked with our reporter, George Talbot, who was there at the same time as Gettleman.

George also saw no Confederate T-shirts among Roy Moore's faithful. He said that at one point on that Wednesday, an unrelated demonstration had been organized by the League of the South, many of whom really are gap-toothed racists, on the steps of the Capitol building up Dexter Avenue. When it ended, some of the participants ambled over to the Moore demonstration at the Alabama Judicial Building.

But when one of the Moore rally organizers saw what was happening, he went to the microphone and asked folks to leave if they were protesting anything other than the removal of the Ten Commandments.

Offended by the announcement, League members retreated from the crowd.

And Gettleman got more than those illusory Confederate T-shirts wrong. In the same story, he wrote that supporters are now referring to Moore as "the Moses of Alabama."

In my column last week, I wrote that Judge Moore is a shameless media harlot, and consequently I have heard from plenty of Moore's supporters. I have also listened to a lot of them on television.

Not one has referred to Moore as "the Moses of Alabama." Reporter George Talbot also has not heard such a reference from any of the Ten Commandments protesters.

In fact, that's the sort of nickname that a smirking bystander might coin. From a true Roy Moore supporter, it would approach blasphemy.

Of course, Gettleman fails to attribute that "Moses of Alabama" wisecrack to any single source. Those "supporters" are anonymous.

Gettleman's article goes on to include the de rigueur reference to George Wallace's "stand in the schoolhouse door," but stunningly fails to note that blacks have joined in the Ten Commandments protests, that black conservative Alan Keyes has been one of the most vocal protest leaders, and that Moore and his followers claim to emulate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in their civil disobedience. They quote Dr. King regularly.

But those facts would undercut the stereotype that Gettleman was trying to evoke.

We Alabamians have embarrassed ourselves enough by electing Moore as our state's chief justice. The New York Times need not embellish that reality by bearing false witness.

And here is the straight of it: All of us in the media need to be more judicious. We have a nasty tendency to zero in on the freakish at the expense of reality, inadvertently using the truth to create a fiction.

I almost did this during our Page One meeting this past Monday, when I initially decided to give big play to a photo of a bearded protester wearing a crown of thorns. We ended up printing that as a much smaller, subordinate element, while larger photos showed normal folks praying and protesting, which portrayed the scene fairly.

As the monument was trundled away Wednesday morning, if you were unlucky enough to be watching television, you saw that all the 24-hour news cameras stayed focused on that one guy who went berserk, screaming insanely, spraying saliva into the sunlight, apoplectic – and oh, so photogenic. The majority of protesters, who just stood there praying calmly, did not make for compelling video, and therefore did not get on your TV screen.

Who said cameras don't lie?

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You can write Mike Marshall, editor of the Mobile Register, at P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, Ala. 36652, e-mail him at [email protected], or phone him at 251-219-5674.