Reporter Who Uncovered Shrub's DWI Forced Out - Is Now a Trucker

*******QUOTE*******

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/01/17/embracing_the_open_road_of_life?pg=full

.... After 30 years as a reporter, 29 of them at the Portland Press Herald, Ted Cohen six months ago embraced a new profession: trucking. .... ...necessitated by a career crisis. Cohen, who is 53, was the reporter who during the 2000 presidential campaign learned of George W. Bush's arrest for drunken driving in Kennebunkport 24 years earlier. He told an editor at the newspaper of his find, he said, but the paper never published the story.

When the arrest was uncovered by a Portland television station and a barrage of news reports followed three months later, the Portland paper's decision to ignore the story became a story unto itself. Cohen said the Press Herald made him the scapegoat in the matter.

In March of 2004, Cohen left the paper, by his account, after being demoted and punished for a number of alleged infractions. Press Herald editors, including the manager editor, Eric Conrad, declined to comment. ....

Cohen might have stayed with reporting, but for the story that slipped away -- the scoop that top political reporters at big papers had been searching for and unable to uncover.

''I called the police chief and asked if he had dirt on Bush," said Cohen, whose beat at the paper included coverage of Kennebunkport. ''He said, 'Yes, we did, in 1976 for drunk driving.' "

Cohen told his supervisor what he had learned. The supervisor, Andrew Russell, he said, told him to drop the matter. ''I left it at that," he said, much to his chagrin. ....

********UNQUOTE*******

can render many a good person scared, I wouldn't be too quick to judge this man.

Let's see:

Abbie Hoffman writes about Poppy and the October Surprise. Hoffman's dead, "a suicide."

Mark Lombardi creates art about the Bush Family Evil Empire. Lombardi's dead, "a suicide."

Jim Hatfield writes about Bush and cocaine. Hatfield's dead, "a suicide."

Gary Webb writes about CIA and Iran-Contra drug running. Webb's dead, "a suicide."

Gee. Appears Cohen got off lucky.

What Robert Parry said:

The Bush Rule of Journalism

By Robert Parry
January 17, 2005

“Don’t take on the Bushes” is becoming an unwritten rule in American journalism. Reporters can make mistakes in covering other politicians and suffer little or no consequence, but a false step when doing a critical piece on the Bushes is a career killer.

The latest to learn this hard lesson are four producers at CBS, who demonstrated inadequate care in checking out memos purportedly written by George W. Bush’s commanding officer in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. For this sloppiness, CBS fired the four, including Mary Mapes who helped break last year’s Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

A painful irony for the CBS producers was that the central points of the memos – that Bush had blown off a required flight physical and was getting favored treatment in the National Guard – were already known, and indeed, were confirmed by the commander’s secretary in a follow-up interview with CBS. But even honest mistakes are firing offenses when the Bushes are involved.

By contrast, journalists understand that they get a free shot at many other politicians who don’t have the protective infrastructure that surrounds the Bush family. Take for example the case of reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post who misquoted Al Gore about his role in the Love Canal toxic waste clean-up.

'Delusional' 

The misquote in late 1999 prompted knee-slapping commentaries across the country calling Gore “delusional” because he supposedly had falsely claimed credit for the Love Canal clean-up by saying “I was the one that started it all.” But Gore actually had said, “that was the one that started it all,” referring to a similar toxic waste case in Toone, Tennessee.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/011705.html

Danny Casolaro was in the process of uncovering "The Octopus," the organization we now call the BFEE. He was found dead in the bathtub of his hotel room, a suicide who wrote a "suicide note" in a style he wouldn't have ordinarily used.

If Cohen just got stuck in a truck, he's the lucky one.

.. dead people were found at his ranch? They worked there or something? Maybe it was a * warning to Rather!

Funny, that story just seemed to come and go by the wayside!

such a career crisis? Actually, considering the state of journalism these days, I think he's actually ahead of the game now.

I also agree that "left it at that" doesn't exactly endear one to his professional journalistic integrity.

so was only "marginally employed" by them anyway.

If he had a "bombshell" and sat on it, he wasn't much of a reporter anyway..

Truckers make better money than reporters in Maine:)

after that happened. It now broadcasts the WB network and no longer has its own news department.

This is so sickening, I can not believe it. These people are disgusting, evil, stupid, and not mention also hypocrites. My tolerance for the RW Elite ends today.

these days, for reporters the choice is do a critical peice on the Bushies and end up "suicided", or stay quiet and let the bullshit continue.

when tv news took it over. But it finally died when small-town competing papers consolidated into one daily per town. This got completed in the 80's or so, and now each paper has absolutely no competition. The great thing about the internet is that this is where the competition between writers is.

Also any political truth will not come from pundits and commentators who fill the spots of what used to be journalism, it will come from internet researchers leaking stories to ex-pats like Greg Palast. Journalism may have been the worst thing that ever happened to politics because it crammed the myth of objectivity down everyone's throat. Now that journalism is dead maybe we can have our mudslinging, hair-pulling, bloody battle of politics back, because everthing under the sun is political, including the "reporters" pretending to be "objective".

edit: I think the best true reporting is coming from people for whom it is a hobby. Anyone paid to do it professionally in this country is just like a secretary taking dictation.

They seem to have let this one live.

never using words that a 6th grader wouldn't comprehend. It also has one of the most ignorant dittohead opinion writers that you will ever have the displeasure to read; M.D. Harmon. He must get the daily talking points memo from the WH, because he has never strayed from the party line and his writings are perilously close to being completely plagiarized from certain RW magazines.

Here's his latest.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/viewpoints/harmon/050117harmon.shtml

http://www.opednews.com/parry_011905_bush_journalism.htm

in which Parry points out that if a journalist crosses the bushes, the journalist is cast off by the media which previously hired them, and how, unable to find work thereafter, despondency and depression end their lives ... i really am concerned on reading this story about the welfare of ted cohen, and pray to God that some media outlet will recognize and reward cohen's courage in telling a truth about the snottiest, most aberrant idiot son an equally aberrant idiot family has ever had.