KEISLING: Inquirer and Patriot-News re Kathleen Kane: So much smoke, so little fire

Two of Pennsylvania’s oldest newspapers flirt with irrelevance in Kane case

by Bill Keisling

The closer you look at the legal cases brought by former Attorney General Tom Corbett and his staff — such as the long-running Jerry Sandusky case — the worse they look.

The same can be said about the news coverage of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Harrisburg Patriot-News: the closer you look at both newspapers, the worse they look.

And so it is with the latest political case these two newspapers have cooked up, with the help of Corbett’s chums, against Attorney General Kathleen Kane.

It begins to fall apart if you look at it closely, or thoughtfully.

Despite both newspapers’ best efforts, there is a growing public awareness of what the trumped-up Kane case is really about: the porno emails; the gag orders; the conflicted role of Corbett crony Frank Fina; and the strange telephone calls to Fina placed by Daily News reporter Chris Brennan that burned Kane and started the legal ball rolling against her.

Do these newspapers really want all this aired in open court? Of course they don’t. So both newspapers naturally want Kane to resign now, before the case can get to court.

That’s why this Good Friday the “editorial boards” of both the Inquirer and the Patriot-News again called on Kane to step down.

Kane should quit without so much as a trial or a hearing, both newspapers say.

Not only are these two newspapers being unfair, they’re being silly, and further embarrassing themselves.

Never mind that Good Friday historically isn’t the best day to call for someone’s head, or retirement from public life, or to weigh matters of guilt or innocence.

In fact, guilt or innocence has nothing to do with it.

In the Kane matter it’s all about brazen, bare-knuckle, revenge politics — as both newspapers are quick to admit.

The political sleigh ride is only going to get worse for Kane, the Patriot-News strangely editorialized on Good Friday.

“The worse is yet to come,” the Patriot writes. “It is hard to believe a Republican district attorney who is running for county judge will pass up the political coup to be scored by bringing the charges that a grand jury recommended against Kane, a once-rising star in the state’s Democratic Party.”

In other words, rather than call for fairness, the Patriot tells us to naturally expect politics and unfair treatment of Kane in our courts.

So Kane might as well bite her pillow and throw in the towel, and save us all the prospect of a fair and open trial, where pesky evidence and testimony may come out.

Then there’s the matter of the grand jury leaks, with which both newspapers have for years been trading, with the help of Corbett’s fading cronies.

“Even though her adversaries are guilty of exactly the same kind of grand jury leaks she is accused of making,” the Patriot nonsensically writes, “the state simply cannot have the spectacle of its chief law enforcement officer embroiled in a trial on allegations that include perjury and obstruction of justice.”

Sorry boys, but in our society that’s where matters of guilt and innocence are determined: in our courts, not, thankfully, in your wacky editorial pages.

Attorney General Kane, like everyone else, deserves and should expect full due process and the presumption of innocence, until and unless proven guilty. She deserves her day in court.

The Patriot-News, incidentally, never seemed to care at all about the allegations of corruption that for years swirled around the male, Republican attorneys general who preceded Kane in office.

The Patriot for years was, and remains, a staunch defender of state Attorney General Roy Zimmerman, as all kinds of serious corruption allegations swirled around him.

When things got rough for GOP AG Ernie Preate, who was convicted of serious felonies including bribery and mail fraud in the 1990s, the Patriot simply resorted to what amounted to ethnic slurs against Preate, incessantly calling him “Ernie the Attorney.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer is in a similarly bad historical spot.

In its own nonsensical Good Friday editorial, titled, “Kane Should Step Down,” the Inquirer notes, “The Editorial Board endorsed Kane’s candidacy partly because of her seeming promise as a reformer and professional prosecutor.”

In other words, the problem for the Inquirer is that it once endorsed her for office, apparently without much research, and now it wants her gone, without a trial.

That points to another problem shared by both these old newspapers: No one these days much cares whether a newspaper endorses a candidate for office. As politicians and publishers alike know, it’s doubtful that a single vote any more is swayed, or a single voter goes to the polls, on the say-so of a dying newspaper.

So these newspapers, increasingly irrelevant, must try to convince even themselves of their own relevance.

Problem is, even their own readers aren’t taking them seriously anymore.

In the old days, before the Internet, readers were stuck with these monolithic, monopoly newspapers. But no more.

Today’s readers get information from lots of sources. And readers talk back to the newspapers in comments sections — something that never happened in the old ink-on-paper days.

The problem for the Inquirer and the Patriot-News is that readers already seem to know what the ginned-up Kane case is all about.

One Inquirer reader posted the following comment beneath the Good Friday resignation editorial:

“The most recent piece again relies on ‘anonymous sources.’ Are we really ready to indict a sitting AG based on the say so of Frank Fina, or some other political enemy?

“The Inky should be ashamed. No editorial like this should omit the fact that one of their reporters was subpoenaed to the grand jury to disclose the source of the leaks of secret grand jury material. Fina and his friends seem to think they can disclose secret material and have us trust them. While at the same time have us distrust Kane for leaking secret material.

“The stuff (the Inquirer) has written has been garbage. It may as well have been written by Kane’s political enemies. The Inky Editorial Board should be ashamed.”

In a similar vein, the Patriot’s own readers commented on the porno emails traded by Gov. Corbett’s chums that were dug up by AG Kane.

In other words, the public understands what’s going on, even if they’re not getting the story from these two dishonest newspapers.

The danger of a public trial for the newspapers and their sources is that the subject of porno emails, the copious and ongoing grand jury leaks of materials to the newspapers, and the Philadelphia newspapers’ own role in alerting Corbett’s cronies to Kane’s “leaks” are bound to come out.

Is it any wonder the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Harrisburg Patriot-News want Kane to simply go away, without her day in open court?

A trial, after all, will not only show how ineffective both newspapers have been in reporting the facts, and fighting real political corruption in Pennsylvania. It will also show how both newspapers have been complicit with those in our government who have been for years breaking the law, and laughing about it.

The stakes may be high for Kane, but they’re arguably higher for these two dying newspapers.

The risk for both newspapers is that they will be shown to be even more irrelevant than most already know they are.

If you were on the editorial board of either of these two newspapers, the last thing you would want is the public learning about all this in a fair and open court hearing.

If they’re not careful, both the Inquirer and the Patriot-News will show themselves to be totally irrelevant, powerless to influence anyone, and will have obsoleted themselves.