For many in Pennsylvania, the suicide of state Treasurer Budd Dwyer remains the day when the Philadelphia Inquirer permanently ran off the rails and began its decline, and state politics became a blood sport
This is Part 2 in our series: The moral and ethical decline of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Read Part 1 here. Part 3 deals with Inquirer’s handling of current events involving Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane. Read Part 3 here.
There remains to this day a hole in the wall in the office of the state treasurer of Pennsylvania.
The hole was created by the .357 Magnum bullet that first blasted horrifically through the head of state Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, before passing through the wall.
Dwyer had just finished pleading his innocence at a press conference in his office, complaining bitterly to the assembled reporters about his unfair treatment, when he dramatically pulled out the giant gun, put out his own lights, blasting the hole in the wall as he did.
Rather than replace the entire section of the wall to repair the infamous bullet hole, a succession of state officials have elected to simply seal the gaping hole with a plaster plug.
From time-to-time the plaster plug falls out, and drops to the floor, like some sort of frightening reminder to everyone in the office, and the public, of what politics in Pennsylvania have become.
Like the hole in the state treasurer’s office wall, there remains a hole in the hearts of Dwyer’s friends and family, and his co-workers, that never healed.
And there’s a hole in the story published by the Philadelphia Inquirer about what led Budd Dwyer to suicide, a hole that the Inquirer has also never attempted to repair.
That the Philadelphia Inquirer unfairly singled out Budd Dwyer for prosecution and personal destruction is indisputable.
For many in Pennsylvania, the suicide of state Treasurer Budd Dwyer remains the day when the Philadelphia Inquirer permanently went off the rails, created a fall guy, and made state politics a senseless, inhumane blood sport, not governed by facts, fairness, or basic human decency.
Now the Inquirer and its sister publication, the Daily News, are attempting to do the same thing to state Attorney General Kathleen Kane. The newspapers have appointed themselves judge, jury and prosecutor, with intimations that they have secret connections in to the courts of law.
As was the case with Budd Dwyer, these chest-thumping bullies simply want Kane to resign, without the benefit of fair hearings, or open due process.
The Inquirer’s present coverage of Kane eerily recalls what they did to Budd Dwyer, complete with buzzwords, drumbeats, calls for resignation, and foreshadowing of doom.
Except, in the Kane case, it’s possibly worse.
This time, the entire Kane “scandal” has been manufactured internally, in the offices of the Inquirer and Daily News, with the help of their angry sources, who are avowed and threatened political foes of Madame Kane’s.
“Should Kane resign?” the Inquirer bluntly asked its readers in a poll in July 2013, a year before the current flap erupted. (Even today the Inquirer’s readers don’t think Kane should resign, as a majority, 3003 readers, say she shouldn’t quit, to 2816 who say she should. So much for barrels of ink at the Inky.)
This January, the Inquirer ran a story headlined, “Lawyer: Kane won’t quit if charged.”
In the first paragraph, for the fourth word, the Inquirer predictably uses the buzzword “embattled.” If Kane is embattled, it’s because she’s battling the Inquirer, not the voters who put her in office.
The lede reads:
“A lawyer for embattled Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane said Saturday that she would not resign if charged with leaking confidential grand jury information to a newspaper.”
The Inquirer staff seems incredulous that they should be defied — by a woman, no less. They seem to be saying, Why go to all the fuss, bother and expense of court hearings, thorough investigations, or elections, when everyone should just do what we say?
Other pack reporters and old-line newspapers quickly picked up the Inquirer’s drumbeat. They’re also presumably unhappy that Kane went up against their insider sources who badly mishandled the Jerry Sandusky case.
This is the anatomy of the smear this time:
“Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s credibility is damaged and she should resign, two lawmakers say,” ran a Harrisburg Patriot-News / Pennlive headline this January.
“Kathleen Kane no longer is able to remain as Pa. attorney general,” opines Triblive.
“Should Kathleen Kane resign from office?” apes the Allentown Morning Call a few weeks later.
So it is with pack reporters. Monkey see, monkey do.
State Treasurer Budd Dwyer would understand this drumbeat of pack news reporting. The same thing happened to him, even while he was professing his innocence and attempting to defend himself.
As we’re now seeing with AG Kane, the Inquirer repeatedly called for Dwyer to resign, well before his trial, and well before they ultimately helped push him to suicide.
“Whom does Budd Dwyer think he is kidding?” the Inquirer editorialized in May 1986, months before his trial.
“Until the charges against Mr. Dwyer are resolved, he cannot remain credibly as state treasurer,” the Inquirer demanded. “…He apparently needs to hear it from every legislator, party functionary, editorial page and good-government group who thinks his continued service undermines faith in the functioning of the commonwealth. Let the chorus begin.”
With this we see how the Inquirer tries to get “the chorus” to sing. Even though, with the Inquirer, it’s more like a broken record, with sour notes, than a chorus.
A month later, in June 1986, the Inquirer again insisted Dwyer resign in an editorial titled simply, “Mr. Treasurer”:
“People in far less responsible offices routinely take leaves or resign when their integrity is so seriously questioned. Not Budd Dwyer,” the Inquirer wrote. “…Being a public official at such a high level as Dwyer requires more than the presumption of innocence every American is entitled to. People have to trust you and believe you’re doing right by them. That’s a little tough when you’re facing serious criminal charges. Richard Nixon was never convicted of anything and even he was smart enough to quit. Budd Dwyer could at least show the same ethical sensitivity.”
Hearing the Philadelphia Inquirer talk about “ethical sensitively” is rather jarring.
What they were doing, we now know, was driving Budd Dwyer to commit suicide in front of their own reporters.
After Dwyer’s conviction, in December 1986, the Inquirer ran yet another editorial, this time bluntly headlined, “Budd Dwyer should resign.”
“If Pennsylvania Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer had a shred of dignity he would have left long ago. But he does not and he has not,” the Inquirer huffed. “Either Dwyer goes quietly upon sentencing next month – as state law commands – or he faces impeachment proceedings, a prospect that has Democrats fairly drooling.”
We now know there was a third possibility.
At his fatal news conference the next month, Dwyer again professed his innocence, and said political enemies and their stooges in the press corps had blithely set him up, unfairly destroying his life and his good name.
Dwyer complained to the pack reporters, “I realize that you are news reporters and that I am just another piece of meat to you.” In other words, he believed he was being treated as less than human, like meat in a mechanized slaughterhouse.
So Budd Dwyer was going to give them what they really wanted: dead meat on the floor.
Here was a man who, innocence or guilt aside, clearly was pushed to his psychological limit, something those at the Inquirer fail to see to this day, or to take responsibility for.
The day after his death, the Inquirer decided all this was somehow not enough, and that they should continue to kick the dead horse. They even ran a front page photo of Budd Dwyer blowing his head off, like a trophy.
“Perhaps the ultimate tragedy for Dwyer was that he must have shattered the illusions of any who might have believed he was wrongfully accused,” the Inquirer wrote. “In lacking the courage, the hope or even the curiosity to learn at least what his sentence would be, he just gave up.”
But this wasn’t about “courage.” And Dwyer didn’t give up. He was making a statement, about them, and their lynching crew, whether they could comprehend it or not.
In the intervening years, FBI documents helped provide a much fuller picture of Dwyer’s case. It’s clear now that Dwyer had been set up, and unfairly singled out, by his political enemies, and the press, especially the Inquirer.
But you’d never know that by reading the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Readers have to get the full story elsewhere.
And so it is for Kathleen Kane.
In Dwyer’s case, many Inquirer readers quickly understood what happened, and the Inquirer’s horrific role in his unjust death.
A week after Dwyer’s suicide, the Inquirer ran a letter from reader Chistoph May.
“R. Budd Dwyer was tried and found guilty by one jury and two judges: One judge had announced publicly his belief in Dwyer’s guilt and intention to make an example of him; the second ‘judge’ [the media] was a press that had publicly tried, convicted and crucified Dwyer like so many others,” May wrote to the Inquirer’s editors.
“In the end, (Dwyer) chose to make a statement with a volume that would not be shouted down by a self-righteous rabble-rousing press. He had been publicly assassinated in his office by the media; there is justice in his choosing to let them see his body fall there.”
And so Budd Dwyer lies in his grave, beneath a keystone grave marker.
