Eric Baerren

I have a confession, and it’s difficult to say. Given recent events, however, I feel the need to come clean. Here goes:

Back when I was in college, working for the student newspaper, I met my current Congressman, Dave Camp. I worked on several stories that put me in contact with his office, and I interviewed him a couple of times, including once when he came to campus. Later that day, in fact, he tried to maximize his media exposure in a store selling CMU clothing. It was that afternoon that we had sex.

I won’t go into details, but will add that coming clean leaves me feeling finally relieved.

I was encouraged to come forward by recent events. The public learned the lurid details of what happened at Penn State, and then last week allegations were made public that another Michigan Congressman, Flint Democrat Dale Kildee, molested a distant family member several decades ago. If you can think of a more appropriate time, I’m happy to hear it.

There is one small difference. I made it up. OK, I didn’t make up the part about interviewing Dave Camp, or the bit about him and the CMU clothing. It was a big football game, and Camp really tried to double his media exposure by posing with CMU shirts.

As for the sexual liaison stuff, that isn’t true. Not a pixel of it.

If you’re like the Flint-area media, you take this – right up to the point where I admitted fabricating it – and go public. That’s what they did with the claims made by Kildee’s distant relative.

These were old claims, investigated when they first surfaced. At the time, very little corroborating evidence was turned up, so the journalists investigating did what any responsible journalist would do. They moved on.

What has changed? Very little. The question of whether Dale Kildee molested a distant relative 50 years ago remains entirely a he said/she said matter.

This is not how proper journalism works. Proper journalism is not supposed to encourage or normalize salacious gossip. It is supposed to boil it down and support the truth against falsehood.

Salacious gossip, however, has now become normalized and the story has shifted to whether it damages Kildee’s nephew, who is running for the seat from which Kildee is retiring next year. Hints and whispers point to one or two of his potential Democratic primary opponents as responsible. Other rumors hold that Republicans are making a run at his seat. Nobody appears to care whether there is any truth to the accusations.

This isn’t just unfair to Kildee. It’s also exploitative of his accuser, who has a long history of mental illness and drug abuse. Sexual abuse as a child often leads to both, but not every drug addict or mentally ill person was sexually abused. Kildee’s accuser deserves compassion and discretion because of his personal history. Instead, he’s been used to pump up ratings and page views.

Some might call the entire thing a disgrace to the profession of journalism. I call it something else. I call it an opportunity. If you want to ruin someone’s reputation, all you apparently need to do is accuse them of something awful, because no one is going to double check whether you’re telling the truth.

© 2011 North Star Writers Group

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