Payne: Weiner, Conyers, and personal judgment (The Michigan View 06.07.11)

Posted by hpayne on June 8, 2011

Last November, TheMichiganView.com received video and still photos of Rep. John Conyers, D – Detroit, reading an explicit article in Playboy while in-flight from Detroit back to his Washington, DC office. Like the pictures that have brought shame to Rep. Anthony Weiner this week, the photos were not illegal – but they provoked questions about the judgment of two leading U.S. congressmen.

Ready to put these guys in charge of national health care?

Significantly, both the Conyers and Weiner footage surfaced via social media. Welcome to the post-MSM media universe. Welcome to accountability, new media-style.

The Weiner episode – involving risqué, sometimes-sexual photos that the married congressman admitted sending to young women – was a story driven by the new alternative media. It is a story that would have been inconceivable fifteen years ago. Not only did Weiner send the news via Twitter, but the news organizations that broke the story – Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government.com – and the TV network that publicized it – Fox News – are recent phenomenon. Mainstream media like NBC News chose to ignore the story. Fifteen years ago that would have been enough to cover the story up. But today, the Internet and Rupert Murdoch have fundamentally changed the media landscape such that Weiner – one of the Democratic Party’s leading liberal voices – was forced to confront the allegations, his own lies, and his judgment.

In Michigan, TheMichiganView.com is one of the new media that are breaking news that otherwise would not see the light of day. Though Conyers’ perusal of Hefner’s finest is hardly a crime, his brazen reading of pornographic material on a commercial flight calls into question his judgment – and compelled a shocked bystander to record the moment.

Like the BigGoenment.com story, we came by the video on social media, via Charlie LeDuff – a Pulitzer Prize-winning, former New York Times and Detroit News reporter – who had received the video, confirmed it, and posted it on his Facebook page. Charlie at the time was between jobs (if he were to gain that footage today, he would likely air it on Fox 2 News where he is now one of Detroit’s best-known reporters). Social media was his news outlet.

Like Twitter, Facebook is a publishing medium that did not exist fifteen years ago. When we learned of LeDuff’s news, we verified his source and then made repeated calls to Rep. Conyers’ office to ask for comment. The congressman refused to take our calls and would not respond through a spokesperson.

Playgate – like Weinergate – created a national sensation when it was picked up by The Drudge Report. View page views reached record highs. Significantly however, the story got little traction in Michigan’s MSM.

Unlike national media, Michigan still lacks mass media TV alternatives like Murdoch’s Fox News and the Drudge Report. The Michigan media establishment ignored the story. It’s hard to imagine the MSM ignoring a similar story if involved a Michigan Republican – say, Rep. Tim Walberg.

Just days later, the questions about Conyers’s judgment were were back when the congressman was caught in a ethics breach involving the leasing of Cadillac SUV for his son on the taxpayer dime.

Leadership is sorely needed today in Washington and Detroit. Thanks to social and alternative media, the public knows better the human frailties of pols they’ve entrusted billions of their tax dollars to.

 

 

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