HB: What other examples are there of media bias?
LW: In this Mumia affair there have been many allegations of his misconduct, including allegations of him confessing. In 1995, there was an article in the Washington Post, which featured an interview with Maureen Faulkner, and it was talking about how she was outraged that Abu-Jamal had been able to publish a book. The article started with an anecdote from her where she claimed that in court, during the trial, when her husband’s bloody shirt was displayed, Mumia turned around, looked at her, pulled his dreadlocks back, and smiled at her.
However, the official court transcript documented that Mumia was not even in the courtroom on the day that Mrs. Faulkner claimed this smiling incident took place. So, I wrote a column questioning this account and others. Maureen Faulkner wrote me a three page, single-spaced letter calling me everything but a child of God.
I wrote her back and said, “Ms. Faulkner, listen, if there are any ambiguities in this matter, it’s because of you and what you said.” So she then claimed that the Washington Post reporter had gotten the wrong date. She then cited an Inquirer article that says she
left the courtroom after the shirt was displayed. However, when I checked it, the article did not say anything about Mumia turning around and smiling at her.
When you look at the rest of the articles from the trial, nowhere does Ms. Faulkner say that she had to leave the courtroom because Mumia smiled at her.
Interestingly, that article Mrs. Faulkner cited did quote the trial prosecutor telling the jury that his Office had made no deals with key prosecution witness Cynthia White. Of course, after the trial, the DA drop a lot of criminal cases filed against White. If the deal didn’t exist on that date, it happened soon after. The jury never knew White was getting
special deals from the DA – which is another element undermining a fair trial.
This smiling incident and other incidents are things where I fault reporters. The problem with much of the media is that due to turnover, there is not much institutional memory, and not enough people who have the expertise to write intelligently about such things. Apparently, that Washington Post writer must have never covered a trial, because otherwise she’d have known that at a high profile trial such as this, there are many people and 80 percent of those people are looking at every twitch, movement, smile, or frown from the defendant. A question should have been asked as to who else saw this and why it wasn’t reported. But that article didn’t contain that type of question.
No one saw this allegedly objectionable action.
That seems so consistent in a parallel to the alleged confession. No one heard this confession, except for Gary Bell (who was Faulkner’s partner) and he didn’t remember it until over two months later. Gary Wakshul initially reported that the “negro male made no comment,” but after a police brutality complaint by Abu-Jamal, he suddenly remembers the confession. Wakshul and Bell allege that there were over a dozen officers in the area who also heard the confession, and in 25 years not a single one came forward.
In 1995, the defense tried to get Judge Sabo to issue subpoenas to bring them in and ask them what they heard, and why they didn’t report it. Sabo refused. He said “These are officers. They’re honorable people, so I’m sure if you ask them, they’ll come in.” They were asked and didn’t come in. Then, in his opinion, Sabo wrote that there was no contrary evidence that the confession didn’t take place, because all the people who testified in court said there was a confession. By his rulings, Sabo made certain that officers would not come in and testify.
The first person to allegedly report the confession was hospital security guard Priscilla Durham. Interestingly, she claims to hear a confession to a murder, but does she talk to a detective, uniformed officers, or police internal affairs?
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