Ethics Corner: 2000 Bush Story Haunts Reporter?

By: Allan Wolper Get ready for The George Bush Drunk-Driving Defamation Suit ? soon to be filed by Ted Cohen, a 53-year-old former reporter for The Portland (Maine) Press Herald, against his old bosses. The problem? Cohen alleges the Press Herald is publicly humiliating him because it won't forget he told the media that his paper refused to publish the story on Bush's drunk driving conviction during the 2000 presidential campaign because it was old news.

The suit, which is being drafted, may attract a brigade of reporters to Kennebunkport, where the Bush family has its summer home.

"I'm suing them because they're ruining my professional career, and my good name," Cohen told me. "It's all a reporter has. The only thing I did wrong was to give them a story they failed to print."

President Bush never mentioned the conviction until WPXT-TV, a Fox affiliate in Portland, broke the story five days before the 2000 election. John C. Campbell, one of the attorneys now involved in filing the suit, is counting on the media's hunger for presidential gossip to generate sympathetic stories for Cohen.

The suit may be a legal nightmare for Frank Blethen, the CEO of the Seattle Times Co., whose family owns most of The Seattle Times as well as the Portland Press Herald.

Cohen's targets are Ryan Blethen, Frank Blethen's son; Jeannine A. Guttman, executive editor and vice president of the Press Herald, and managing editor Eric Conrad.

On Jan. 31, 2001 ? the week after George W. Bush was sworn in as president ? Guttman suspended Cohen for a week without pay because he covered a severe snowstorm by telephone. The Newspaper Guild filed a grievance, and last month Cohen received $1,000 for his lost pay as part of a settlement in which the paper admitted to no wrongdoing.

The Press Herald left Cohen alone until September, 2002, when Ryan Blethen, 31, the fifth-generation scion of the family, was made a regional editor. Blethen immediately took Cohen off the Kennebunkport beat he had been on for 10 years ? a move that sent a message to the Press Herald newsroom that the Bush OUI (operating under the influence) conviction was off-limits during the 2004 presidential campaign.

"I just wanted to move people around, shake things up a bit," Blethen said in a telephone interview. "We do those kinds of things all the time around here."

Maybe. But pulling Cohen out of Kennebunkport was not a routine transfer, according to sources. "Ryan never told me I was being reassigned," said Cohen, a Press Herald reporter since July, 1975. "I found out when some other reporters asked me what I thought about it."

Since then, Cohen charges Ryan Blethen won't process his overtime, threw away expense vouchers, and called him at home with assignments while he was on vacation. Blethen declined to discuss any of these allegations with me.

On March 9, 2004, Cohen asked to go on sick leave, too stressed out to work with Blethen any longer, he said. One week later, the Press-Herald, prodded by another Newspaper Guild grievance, agreed to let Cohen be examined by Dr. Jane Glass ? a specialist who often consults on workplace issues for the paper.

Dr. Glass' verdict: Get Cohen a new editor, or bring in a mediator. Guttman ignored the doctor's report and wrote Cohen a letter ordering him to return to work.

Then things got testy. Cohen told Alex Irvine of The Portland Phoenix about his parting from the paper and expressed his bitterness at the way he was being treated.

In that article, Irvine quoted part of a statement Guttman and Conrad had circulated to the media calling Cohen "a disgruntled employee" who had sent out "false and misleading statements" about his problems at the newspaper.

And so a court case was born, patterned on the libel action filed a half-dozen years ago by Ralph Cipriano, a former investigative reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Cipriano received a reported $1 to $4 million settlement after Robert Rosenthal, then the Inquirer's editor, told The Washington Post his reporting was not "truthful."

The Maine Department of Labor recently awarded Cohen unemployment benefits ? ruling he left the Press Herald because it was affecting his health. The newspaper has appealed.

"Ted abandoned his job," said Jeannine Guttman. "He wouldn't come back to work. This case is not about what happened in 2000 with George Bush ... Ted has been a great journalist."