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Foley Story Shopped to Media
Who was shopping a story about Congressman Mark Foley and his e-mails and contacts with one or more male pages?
It’s still a mystery. But the answer may reveal that politics -– not an effort to protect kids –- may have been at play.
Story Continues Below The e-mails that ignited the current scandal were communications between a former male page who resided in Louisiana and Foley.
The St. Peterburg Times, a Florida newspaper more than a stone’s throw from Louisiana, says it was contacted last November and "were given copies of an e-mail exchange Foley had with a former page from Louisiana.”
The Times editors, on their paper’s blog, added that they were not alone when contacted by the intermediary for the young page.
"Other news organizations later got them, too,” the Times said.
But the paper never ran the story because the e-mails were nothing more than "friendly chit-chat.” Sex was not mentioned in the e-mails.
Another paper approached to run the Foley e-mails was the Miami Herald.
Miami Herald Executive Editor Tom Fiedler confirmed that his paper reviewed the same emails.
He said the paper "didn't feel there was sufficient clarity in the e-mails to warrant a story."
"We determined after discussion among several senior editors, including myself, that the content of the messages was too ambiguous to lead to a news story," Fiedler said.
Apparently no paper wanted to touch the story.
Late last week, however, a blogger posted the Foley-page e-mails to his blog. On Thursday, ABC News picked up the story for its own web blog, detailing the innocuous emails with a comment from Foley’s Democratic opponent, Tim Mahoney. Mahoney called for an official probe of Foley’s contact with the page. Shortly after ABC News published the story, it is claimed an unknown person contacted the news outlet and offered the instant messages that Foley had with another page -– one’s with salacious sexual talk. Upon hearing of ABC’s instant messages, Foley immediately resigned. But with these messages and communications -– some three years old -- why did the media wait so long to report them when they could have prevented a potential child predator from acting? And who was shopping these e-mails and the Foley page story to media? And why were they published just weeks before a congressional election? House Speaker Dennis Hastert has noted that the instant messages were "reportedly generated three years ago." In a letter seeking a federal probe, he noted that "It is important to know who may have had the communications and why they were not given to prosecutors before now. "I request that the scope of your investigation include any and all individuals who may have been aware of this matter -- be they members of Congress, employees of the House of Representatives, or anyone outside the Congress," Hastert wrote. Hastert has raised an important and good question, one that federal investigators should investigate. Editor's note:
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