Debbie Nathan

Larry Mathews in the Washington, DC area. Kurt Eichenwald in Dallas and New York. Bernie Ward in San Francisco. All involved in child porn scandals while working in the media. And now there’s Dennis Melanson, in Canada. His story has been covered extensively but superficially by the Canadian press, including the CBC. The clip I’m posting, from Canada’s DAILY GLEANER, is the most detailed coverage available (for the web version, click here):

Judge finds former TV host guilty

By MICHAEL STAPLES
staples.michael@dailygleaner.com
Wednesday February 27th, 2008
Appeared on page A1

A former Fredericton TV talk show host found guilty in provincial court Tuesday of accessing child pornography will return for sentencing next month.

Dennis Melanson appeared upset after Judge Graydon Nicholas delivered his verdict. He could receive a jail sentence when he returns to court March 13 at 1:30 p.m.

Melanson, who was charged with accessing child pornography between Jan. 1, 2005, and May 10, 2005, admitted during his trial that he visited child pornography sites on a computer at Rogers Television during the timeline in question.

But he said he was researching the subject as a possible topic for his call-in talk show.

Nicholas said he could accept that argument up to a point, but not after February 2005, the date when Melanson talked to an RCMP officer about child pornography.

Sgt. Jacques Boucher, a cybercrime instructor at the Canada Police College, testified last summer that he appeared on Melanson’s TV show, Melanson Live, in February 2005 to speak about Internet safety.

He said that after the show, he and Melanson discussed briefly the possibility of him returning for another episode to talk about child pornography.

“In my opinion, the surfing the defendant did up to (the) RCMP interview could be educational,” Nicholas said.

Up to that point, the Crown failed to prove its case, Nicholas said. But the fact that Melanson continued to surf the Net for child-porn sites up until May went beyond the desired research, the judge said.

“It is my opinion, the defendant is guilty,” Nicholas said.

He said his decision was a difficult one because of a lack of case law.

Other than the Sharp Decision in 2001, which said there was no accessing child pornography unless it was for a purpose of education, nothing else was available.

Defining how the topic could be applied to education was unclear, he said.

“(There’s) not much case law as to what is an educational purpose.”

In bringing down his verdict, Nicholas warned the public of the consequences of going into areas such as child-porn sites that are forbidden under the Criminal Code of Canada.

Appropriate legal advice should be obtained, Nicholas said.

Melanson, meanwhile, offered no comment as he exited the courtroom and quickly left the building.

But his lawyer, Howard Peters of Fredericton, said his client was disappointed.

“I thought the evidence was clear, following the discussion with Mr. Watters and the RCMP that Mr. Melanson had given the appropriate parties the heads up that he was doing this research or intending to do this research for his shows, which was educational,” Peters said.

Fredericton lawyer Daniel Watters told the court during testimony in November that he encouraged the former host of Melanson Live to do a show on child pornography and that he could surf the Net to see how many images there were, but not to download anything.

Peters agreed there wasn’t much case law and that could be used as grounds for appeal.

The defence lawyer said he wouldn’t do anything differently if he had the trial to do over.

“We knew it was going to come down to a question of this definition or interpretation of education.”

Peters said under the Criminal Code of Canada, such a verdict mandates a jail sentence, but that he would be arguing for a conditional sentence — especially taking into consideration the type of evidence that came forward.

Crown prosecutor Kathy Gregory said she was pleased with the verdict.

Who’s the bad guy: Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera or Nicholas Corbett? The first was a young Mexican man and four-year resident of California who was killed last year by Corbett, a Border Patrol agent. Today in Tucson (see link), Corbett goes on trial, accused of murdering Dominguez Rivera when he was crossing from Mexico into Arizona early last year. Dominguez Rivera had gone home to Mexico in late 2006 to

Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera

visit his family. He was killed while making his return trip to the New York City area* in January 2007. He was undocumented, hence the desert crossing through Arizona when Corbett apprehended and shot him.

The trial is starting today, and I’m waiting for the press to get into the background of both these guys. Especially Dominguez Rivera’s. Because he had a “Vida Loca” tattoo on his hand, there’s lots of loose talk that he was a gang member or some such scuzz.

Is that likely?

I visited Dominguez Rivera’s family in Mexico last year right after he was killed. I spoke with friends and neighbors. I poked

Nicholas Corbett

around his bedroom and examined things like the DVD’s he liked to watch. The only impression I got was that he was a really nice kid. I took some pictures and wrote a photo essay for the Tucson Weekly. Click here to see it.

Word is that Dominguez Rivera’s parents, Laura and Renato, are in Arizona for the trial. I urge the press to go to talk to them, and also to visit his neighborhood in Cuautla, Morelos, to speak with neighbors. He had a girlfriend in the US, too. Go find her. And Dominguez Rivera’s New York City-area neighbors, too.

Do the same for Corbett, who is from suburban Philadelphia and didn’t join the Border Patrol until he was almost too old for the age cutoff (35). What was he doing before? Who was he when he joined? And afterward?

Humanize both these men for your readers and watchers and listeners. This immigration issue is so huge and deep that we need more than trials to explain it.

Francisco’s baby pictures

*My Tucson Weekly article has Francisco traveling to and living in California. One of his parents told me that. The other said he was in Stamford, CT, near New York. It turns out I erroneously went with California in the Weekly piece — trial testimony places him in Stamford, working at a cereal factory. His dad also told me he was at a cereal factory. 

I’ve been too busy the last month to blog much, but developments in the Bernie Ward case prompt this post:

Bernie Ward may have spent a generation in the news and media biz, but three years ago, it now appears, he was just a messed up guy with a computer and too much time on his hands.

Last December I published a piece in CounterPunch about Ward, a well known leftie talk show host at San Francisco’s radio station KGO. He had just been charged by the feds with possessing and distributing some child pornography images on the Internet. Ward’s lawyers claimed he’d downloaded and sent the pictures because he was working on a book about hypocrisy in America. He started the book in late 2004, after George W. Bush won the presidency on a “morality” platform.

Ward supposedly went online to see if people who acted righteous in public would change their behavior when cloaked in the anonymity and privacy of the Internet. He purportedly didn’t know it’s illegal for practically anyone to handle child porn – including journalists. I was interested in his claims because I think there should be a First Amendment legal exception for legitimate media people who want to investigate the prevalence of child pornography. By the time Ward was charged, two other big-name journalists had gotten in trouble over the years for mucking around with child porn. One, freelancer Larry Matthews, was arrested in the late 1990s for downloading material – and eventually convicted. He had not kept notes of his purported research and had no assignment to write a story. The other, former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, ended up jobless last year, after evidence emerged that he’d paid a teenage source thousands of dollars, become an administrator on a porn site that contained sexual images of a 14 year old, and failed to reveal any of this to his editors (see here). Mysteriously, Eichenwald has not been prosecuted, even though everyone else associated with the porn site was. Both Eichenwald and Matthews garnered support from colleagues who assumed their problems came from good intentions, from the desire to do real stories. How would Ward’s identical claim play out?

Well, now we know more. Earlier this week, television stations in San Francisco obtained chat log transcripts of instant message conversations Ward had with the woman who turned him into the police for sending the child porn, the criminal evidence against him (see documents here, at SmokingGun.com). The woman is an Internet dominatrix. And the chat logs show that, whatever Ward was doing with her, it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called “reporting.”

Instead, the logs make clear that Ward was spinning intricate bondage and discipline fantasies with the woman. He spent days communicating with her at length about how he wanted to be sexually humiliated. As for the child porn, Ward first sent it unbidden. Only later, after the woman notified police and started secretly cooperating with them to bust Ward, did she ask him for more pictures. He sent them, along with detailed accounts about having sex with his own teenaged children.

Apparently those scenarios didn’t happen in the real world. It’s safe to say Ward’s incest tales  were fantasy. He has not been arrested for child molestation, and the terms of his bail allow him unrestricted contact with his four kids. (Still! What must it be like now to be Ward’s children, knowing that he talked sexually about them to a stranger on the Internet?)

Unexplainably from a law enforcement point of view, three years went by before the government pursued an indictment against Ward for the small number of porn images he dealt with. This suggests that politics could be behind the decision to go after him after so much time. Regardless, Ward’s florid, extended, and aggressive communications to the woman who turned him in were not journalism reporting. If they were anything beyond sexual fantasy, they can only be seen as vicious, irrational attempts to “sting” people.

Vicious because it’s one thing for an investigative journalist to hang around a scene like a fly on the wall, taking notes on what goes on and occasionally interjecting a neutral remark. It’s quite another – and completely unethical – to offer money, gifts, or other inducements to change behavior. Especially when the new behavior being sought is horribly immoral, not to mention illegal.

And Ward’s claim that he was trying to reveal hypocrisy in his Instant Message correspondent doesn’t wash either. Even if she supported the likes of Dubya, wouldn’t simply exposing her as a dominatrix show her two-facedness? Who needs child porn for that? It makes no sense.

So – book in the works or no book – Ward hasn’t got a journalism leg to stand on. As for the two other media people who also got in trouble, Matthews and Eichenwald, we may never know exactly what they were up to, either. They also behaved recklessly when they took up the child porn story.

Meanwhile, conscientious, ethical investigative reporters won’t go near that story with a ten-foot pole. The law makes it too risky. In the breech, the government makes dramatic, terrifying claims about how widespread child porn is and how it’s connected with the financing of international terrorism. The solution to this crisis, according to cops and politicians, is to censor the Internet and weaken Fourth Amendment protections to allow warrantless searches of homes and computers.

Do we realistically need to entertain these moves? Or are they based on hysteria? No one knows, least of all the media. We won’t find out until the issue of child porn is examined empirically, openly and professionally by competent reporters instead of covertly, by people whose troubles and phantasms get in the way.