And so began the media reign of terror

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO –The cheers of politicians over the resignation of Mayor Bob Filner may soon turn to gasps of horror when they realize that they too may become subject to trial by media circus.

For the women who came forward to complain about Filner’s behavior, perhaps Friday’s denouement of San Diego’s long running political scandal was a day of vindication, but will historians also record Friday, August 23, 2013, as the day when the media terror claimed its first elected official?

As the popular French Revolution once lead to guillotines, will politicians who run afoul of the media bosses also have their political heads chopped off with lurid headlines, broadcast teasers, and  the ridicule of cartoons?  Already there are reports being carried in some media about another well-known San Diego politician having acted in a sexually inappropriate manner.  So, are such reports now the modus operandi for those who would run our city from behind the scenes?

Perhaps Filner deserved all the opprobrium so gleefully heaped upon him during this media storm, but to my way of thinking, justice was not served in this debacle.  We, the people of San Diego, raised to believe in a system in which a person accused of a crime can be fairly judged by a jury of disinterested citizens, were the big losers.  No such trial was given Bob Filner; rather, a back-room deal ended his mayoral administration.

Ask yourself this: leaving aside what day after day  you read in the newspaper, or heard on television, what do you independently know about what Bob Filner did or didn’t do in the presence of women?

Was he, as the media asserts as fact, a sexual predator using his office to thrust unwanted attention upon defenseless women, or was he, as he suggested in his resignation speech, a man burdened with a combination of awkwardness and hubris in his unsuccessful overtures to women?

A jury, fairly sworn in and dedicated to finding the truth, might have decided that question.  Instead Filner was prosecuted and convicted by a mob of media and their political accomplices.  I do not join in the cheers.

Exception has been taken in the Union-Tribune to Filner’s use of the term “lynch mob,” saying that the mayor, who will leave office on August 30,  made an inappropriate analogy between his case and that of murdered African-Americans in the South.

In that Filner paraphrased me by name the first time he used the expression, allow me to say that the lynch mob I think of is the one that 100 years ago pulled Leo Frank out of jail and lynched him after he was tried, convicted, and then facts  started coming out exonerating him in the rape and murder of his factory employee Mary Phagan.

It was that case that led to the creation both of the revitalized Ku Klux Klan and the newly established Anti-Defamation League, two organizations that represented polar opposite moral viewpoints.

One can poke holes into any historical analogy, but there is a keen resemblance to the media circuses that surrounded Leo Frank and Bob Filner, and I dare say, to the one that surrounded the case of Alfred Dreyfus.

To those who say that Mayor Bob Filner should have expressed more shame in his resignation about his actions, I respond, perhaps that is so, but, alas, we shall never know for sure if his defense had any merit.  Due process was kicked out with Bob Filner. In the ensuing fight for power, don’t be surprised if more politicians are paraded through town in a cart.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com