Posted on 08/08/2002 1:40:46 PM PDT by churchillbuff
Butterfly Meets Bazooka An L.A. Times community news reporter is fired for e-mailing a congressman by Johnny Angel
Thomas: Fully in favor of his own free speech
BRIAN ROBIN LIKES TO PERUSE THE HILARIOUSLY irreverent, progressive Web site Bartcop.com. One Sunday night in July, in the privacy of his Lancaster home, Robin came upon an item about an appearance by Congressman Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) on CNN, where he repeated the Republican Party mantra that blames the year's corporate criminality on Bill Clinton.
Robin couldn't let Thomas, a career politician who wields great power as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, get away with it. Robin put together an e-mail, with the opening salvo "Surely you can't be that stupid," and went on to compare Clinton's achievements to Bush's and Cheney's various business failures and wrongdoings. Along the way, he took a swipe at Thomas himself: "I'm not a morally bankrupt Republican congressman who opts for partisanship ahead of truth."
And then, says Robin, who covered high school sports and golf for two years for the L.A. Times community edition in Ontario, "I brainfarted."
His personal e-mail server wasn't working, so he sent his critical message on his company's e-mail system. Two days later, he got a phone call from Thomas' office simply asking him to confirm that he worked at the Times. He did so. Later that day, he was summoned by Tom Johnson, lead editor of the Times' community sections, and suspended; a week later, he was terminated. "I knew when I was called in on the 23rd that I would be fired," he says. "My boss went to the mat for me on it, but it was clearly a done deal."
"It was a stupid thing to do," says the 37-year-old sportswriter. "I knew that sending that out on company e-mail was wrong, and I deserved a suspension. But I never dreamt that the Times would fire me over this. Maybe a slap on the wrist or a reprimand, but I have a pristine employment record over the two years I worked there.
"It's like using a bazooka on a butterfly."
The Times' policy, as written in the employee handbook, is that the company e-mail system is not to be used for personal reasons. (That's nice, but it's hard to imagine that Times employees don't e-mail friends and spouses, or occasionally book airline fares online. Doesn't everybody?) My phone message seeking comment from editor John Carroll eventually made it to Times spokesman David Garcia, who said he cannot discuss personnel-related issues. You can't blame them for ducking on this one.
Robin said he couldn't find out exactly what transpired after Thomas' office got his e-mail. Did Thomas himself play a role in getting the sportswriter fired? No one is saying at the congressman's office one way or the other. "I contacted Thomas' office in Kern County, and they referred me to the D.C. office," Robin said. "I tried to call his chief of staff and left two unanswered messages and was referred back by one of the people in the office to my own congressman (Buck McKeon). My wife talked to them, and they suggested looking into the House Ethics Committee."
Calls to Thomas' office and his press secretary Jason Poblete didn't elicit much. Both gave a terse "no comment at this time." When asked who reviewed the congressman's e-mail, Poblete repeated: "No comment."
For now, the father of two young children is worried about his future. "I would love to be able to confront Bill Thomas and ask him why he or his staff are so thin-skinned and ask them why they did this to my career and my family. And I'd also like to ask them if they'd have contacted the Times if the e-mail had been some complimentary thing. All I did was exercise my right of free speech, and it got completely blown out of hand."
It's not only the congressman or his underlings who blew the transgression out of proportion. You have to wonder why the Times caved in, and erred in its heavy-handed treatment of Robin.
Weekly Web Exclusive: Read the complete text of Brian Robin's offending e-mail.
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Congressman Thomas, Surely, you can’t be that stupid. I mean, even for the standards of the current Republican Party, which has turned from the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt into a hateful, dogmatic and uncompromising group (except in the case of big business, when you become the party of Stepin Fetchit), your comments on CNN are so completely out of line, they defy logic. To blame Bill Clinton (our last legally elected president) for the current corporate shenanigans completely flies in the face of truth and logic. The president you and your ilk impeached for lying about oral sex presided over a country that lowered teen pregnancy rates 22 percent, dropped the crime rate by roughly the same amount and knocked nearly half the welfare recipients off the rolls. While those numbers were dropping, so were the numbers in divorce, teen drinking, teen suicide and abortion. But that doesn’t jibe with your partisan rantings. Everything’s Clinton’s fault, from your faulty perceptions about this country’s moral laxity to the state of the military — which was cut to pieces by George Bush I and his secretary of defense — Dick Cheney. Without a scintilla of regret or moral thought, your party has embraced corporate crooks, polluters and other moral rot. It wasn’t Bill Clinton who cooked books at Enron, Global Crossing, Worldcom and who knows how many other companies. It wasn’t Bill Clinton who engaged in accounting fraud while working as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company (see Cheney, Dick). It wasn’t Bill Clinton who engaged in insider trading while leading yet another company into bankruptcy (see Bush, G.W.). It was Bill Clinton who lied about a blow job. Somehow, I don’t see the comparison. Then again, I’m not a morally bankrupt Republican congressman who opts for partisanship ahead of truth. Respectfully yours, Brian Robin Lancaster, CA
Thanks, Johnny Angel, for saving me the trouble of reading farther.
No it wasn't...but it was Bill Clinton's Commerce Dept that cooked the books for 2 years that we know about. Grossly overstating the health of the economy for 1999 and 2000 (a presidential election year coincidentally). It was Bill Clinton's ex Treasury Secretary who helped arrange highly questionable and probably illegal loans to Enron from Citibank, and that same former official, (see Rubin, Robert) who made telephone calls to the White House and the Treasury Dept urging government officials to lean on rating institutions to avoid downgrading Enron's credit ratings, at a time when it was sliding 100 miles an hour into bankruptcy, a move that is grossly improper and should be illegal.
Now we need to look at all of those scores of incredibably great days that the Dow had EVERY time Clinton faced a new scandal, allegation or testimony. Bad news for the clintons ALWAYS coincided with a booming day on Wall Street. I wonder what Rubin and his pals had to do with that.
Wow, you have a high tolerance for liberalism. I didn't have to read further than "LA Weekly."
So he's whining because he lost his job for sending a hateful and totally assinine email to a US Congressman from his company server, proving that he is NO more unbiased than the twit who wrote this article...and lost his job.
What an idiot. What a pile of stinking compost the left wing is.
Sending a "Hey, what time do you want me to pick you up?" Email is the type of "personal" Email you might deserve a "slap on the wrist" for but, he went way over the top with this gem.
The little, idiot cry-baby deserves to lose his job.
My congratulations on an alert staffer in the Congressman's office who spotted this breach of ethics and brought about a completely fair and appropriate resolution. Also, congratulations to the Times for handling this matter with professionalism and objectivity.
Of course, he can't shoulder the blame himself.
"Why they did this to my career" -- This clearly demonstrates the mindset of many liberals.
No sense of personal responsibility at all. What was the congresscritter supposed to do sit still and take it? Their favorite liberal congresscritters wouldn't have...
I read a fair number of liberal websites, and to call that one irreverent is ridiculous. It's just plain stupid. The guy who writes it is full of moronic conspiracy theories, among them the claim that Rush Limbaugh's ear problems were faked because he wanted to quit radio because his ratings were dropping because everyone knew he was an idiot now.
Even weirder, the guy who writes for that site likes to spam various Internet sports boards with off-topic political rants and links to his site.
If I was a liberal I'd be embarrassed to admit an idiot like bartcop was on my side. He's a left-wing tin foil hat type. And the fact that an LA Times reporter would actually believe in that site is sad.
;-)
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