WELCOME to the debut of “The Truth Is!”, a blog of reporting and commentary that aims to be informative, thoughtful and provocative. At least initially, the blog will have a strong heartland flavor by virtue of the connection of a number of us to Cowles family journalism. I am former editor of the Des Moines Register’s opinion pages. Another contributor, Michael Gartner, is former editor of the paper; he later served as president of NBC News. Another former Register editor who has agreed to contribute, Geneva Overholser, is director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of journalism. Followers of the blog will have access also to the work of Herbert Strentz of Des Moines, a close Register and other newspaper watcher who once headed Drake University’s journalism school. Bill Leonard, a longtime Register editorial writer, will add insights.

“The Truth Is!” will be supervised by my daughter, Marcia Wolff, a communications lawyer for 20 years with Arnold and Porter (Washington, D.C.). Invaluable technical assistance in assembling and maintaining the blog is provided by my grandsons Julian Cranberg, a college first-year, and Daniel Wolff, a high school senior.

If you detect a whiff of nepotism in this operation, so be it. All of it is strictly a labor of love. —Gil Cranberg

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Gilbert Cranberg: CHRISTIE’S ANTICS WITH SEMANTICS

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has been relentless in pursuit of the Chris Christie story. Hardly an evening passes without Maddow pounding on Christie from a fresh angle on how he and his staff inflicted pain on residents of Fort Lee in an apparent payback for the mayor’s refusal to endorse Christie’s bid for re-election as governor.

An angle Maddow has not pursued, nor to my knowledge has anyone in depth, is why documents released by Christie’s office are redacted. (The New York Times has editorialized on the question.)  Blacking out passages usually is done to protect highly sensitive government secrets, so as not to give aid and comfort to an enemy. It’s hard to imagine Christie’s office in possession of that kind of information.

As suspect as the redactions is the clumsy way they were done. Left untouched by the censorship is the highly incriminating statement in an e-mail, “Time for traffic problems in Fort Lee.” There is no way that can be read as anything but a premeditated plan to cause hardship for residents of the community.

Christie has given an expert imitation of being furious at staffers for stupidity and incompetence. The grand prize for both goes to the author of the “time for“ quote and for putting it in an e-mail and leaving it there to be discovered. She has been fired, but she also deserves recognition for honesty.

If Christie wants to truly come clean he will release a redaction-free set of documents, identify who did the redactions and why they were made. That would be unprecedented, but Christie dug himself into an unprecedented hole and made it worse with his antics with redactions.

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