One of the interesting "oversights" of the Missoulian, in its quest for a Pulitzer Prize, was not only the fact that it couldn't muster any decent reporting from Florio on the disastrous results of virtually every single prosecution witness. As I have mentioned before, the ultimate journalistic failure of that enterprise was the fact that a reader solely of Gwen Florio's "coverage" could not have understood the not-guilty verdict.
Whereas anyone who attended the trial, or read virtually any other account, would have readily understood that verdict.
And, the Missoulian was fully entitled to interview the willing jurors afterwards. Does anyone wonder why that story was not run? Ordinarily, that's important coverage on a controversial trial. It's one of the things that attorneys routinely do after a trial, and you read about these kinds of stories -- juror stories -- all the time. I have no doubt that the Missoulian did that follow-up, because that's standard journalism on this kind of controversial trial. The Missoulian did not then publish the story. It was censored. I have no doubt it was because the juror comments were entirely the opposite of the ongoing Missoulian narrative of this case, and so Missoula was prevented, by an editorial decision, from getting, literally, the full story about this trial and that verdict. It was decision designed to protect the newspaper and its reporter from the full implications of their biased coverage. Indeed, it implemented the ultimate in biased coverage: none at all. As though it didn't happen.
I spoke to a few of the jurors. For the Missoulian to have run an article on their opinions of the trial, the Missoulian would have admitted to facts and perceptions that ran directly contrary to its news coverage. The "story" would have become, how could a Newspaper get it so wrong? The Missoulian simply refused to run that story. Indeed, it censored key "news" to preserve its shot at a Pulitzer. This journalistic scandal continues to unfold. If there is a legitimate Pulitzer to be won, it is "how a local newspaper found a politically correct angle, pushed and pushed that angle, censored all contrary information, actively attempted to contaminate a jury pool, intentionally and egregiously misreported the trial testimony and lost the case."
The jurors did not find "Jane Doe" credible. Each successive prosecution witness made her "story" even less credible, since the State could only find "enablers," not objective witnesses.
One comment overheard: "I understand what a character witness is. The County Attorney's office seemed to find just the people who made this whole episode look less than credible rather than more credible. Most of us had our minds made up before the prosecution finished its case."
I think jurors and observers were similarly perplexed over the assistant Dean's testimony: "isn't it against the rules for faculty to have students over for sleep-overs all the time? I wasn't impressed by her testimony about the case as much as I was horrified at how far this seemed to cross the line and how she actively solicited students to sleep over at her house. If this had been a senior male faculty, with grading power over their careers, with a house full of invited male or female students casually sleeping over all the time, that would have been the headline."
The Missoulian's huge empty "hole" on coverage of the jury verdict speaks loudly to what the reporters undoubtedly were told when they researched it.
