Last November, the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald had copies of the Foley emails and chose not to print them.
St. Pete Times: The ex-page wouldn’t go on the record, and “our policy is that we don’t make accusations against people using unnamed sources,” writes politics editor Scott Montgomery. “And given the seriousness of what would be implied in a story, it was critical that we have complete confidence in our sourcing. …We concluded that the information we had on Foley last November didn’t meet our standard for publication.” (St. Pete Times chickened out on Foley story, says Norman (New Times) )
Miami Herald: Â Miami Herald executive editor Tom Fiedler says his newspaper saw the same Mark Foley e-mails that St. Petersburg Times had last November and “didn’t feel there was sufficient clarity in the e-mails to warrant a story.” He says: ”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.” (Miami Herald also had Foley e-mails, didn’t write about them)
As a result, the state’s two top daily newspapers got scooped by ABCNEWS.com. And Foley almost got re-elected.
