Stevens: The Senator Who Cried LibelOn Friday, we noted Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) vague threats to the media, particularly The Anchorage Daily News. If reporters didn’t stop tying him and his son to the ongoing Veco bribery scandal, then he’d… well, he didn’t say what he’d do. But he’d do something, and those reporters would be sorry.
Well, that wasn’t the first time, TPMm Reader DW pointed out to us. Back in 2005, Stevens was furious that journalists were asking about a 2003 earmark of his which gave exclusive fishing rights of pollock to Alaska natives in the remote Aleutian community of Adak. The papers were zeroing in on a lawsuit which claimed that Stevens’ son, Ben, had an option to buy 25 percent of the fishery there at the time of the earmark. The FBI has since launched an investigation of the Adak measure among many other entanglements between Stevens, his son, and area fisheries.
Reporters’ questions about Adak sent Stevens into a flurry of threats. From the Daily News:
“I know who you’re after,” he said, wagging his finger at the Daily News reporter in his office. “You’re after me, and you’ve done a good job so far of keeping me tied down.”
He said the “attack” on him involving his son in effect alleged a criminal conspiracy and was “very close to libel.”
And when would that suit come? “I’m going to wait and see just how far you go in libeling me,” he replied, according to The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner account of the remarks, which he made to four reporters in his Capitol Hill office. Apparently neither the Daily News, nor KTUU, Anchorage’s NBC affiliate, have gone far enough, because Stevens never sued.
But the possible retaliation wasn’t limited to just legal reprisal. Stevens lamented that he used to have such a good relationship with the Daily News. But then McClatchy Newspapers came along and bought it. From the News-Miner:
Stevens said he personally helped the Daily News with at least two financial challenges over many decades.
“Why the subsequent owners, the McClatchy people, have decided to continue this malicious attack on me, I don’t know,” he said.
“I intend to pursue to find out why it is the owners of these media that I have had a relationship with for over 40 years have changed and decided to maliciously attack me as consistently as they have.”
So, what to do? Maybe McClatchy needed to be taught a lesson. Again, from the Daily News:
He said he didn’t know why McClatchy Newspapers, the California-based company that owns the Daily News, would pursue the “malicious attack” on him.
“But people that live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” he said.
He noted that McClatchy has been sued in Minnesota for allegedly inflating circulation figures for its largest paper, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.
“I intend to find out if they’re pursuing that activity in our state,” Stevens said. “And I intend to show them we can fight back.”
The Minnesota lawsuit was brought by four advertisers. According to a Wall Street Journal account of the case, a Star Tribune distributor whose husband works for one of the advertisers said a Star Tribune field representative told her to order extra papers to boost circulation numbers.
McClatchy maintains the claim is without merit.
Stevens hinted at some kind of congressional action.
“I believe there should be a law, a federal law, that requires truthful disclosure of circulation, and we intend to pursue that,” Stevens said, in the course of venting his ire with reporters.
Is there a connection between his interest in accurate circulation numbers and his anger at media coverage of him?
“I don’t see a connection, any more than you see the connection in connecting me with my son. OK? You draw your own conclusions,” Stevens said.
