Is he in the document at all? If he’s not mentioned in the document at all, then wouldn’t your post be off topic? This isn’t about Rideau.

There was one problem: Thomas was—and perhaps still is—a bigot who harbored festering anti-semitic feelings. Pitts was not aware of Thomas’ racially prejudiced views when he attended the Spirit of Diversity Award ceremonies at the White House correspondent’s alma mater, Wayne State University.

Then the dean of the aged Thomas made off the cuff comments to Rabbi David Nesenoff. Those comments went viral over the Internet and there’s no need to rehash them here. The only thing that has to be repeated here is that many prominent media people quickly, and almost uniformly, called her an “anti-Semitic bigot.”

Pitts pretty much drew the same conclusion, but what interesting about the Herald columnist’s June 12, 2010 column, titled “Age Is No Excuse For Bigotry,” was his observations that “Thomas’ peers in the White House press corps [said] there is nothing new about the anti-Semitism she displayed. To the contrary, it was apparently well known to colleagues.”

Oh, really? One of the tenets from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics is that journalist should expose unethical practices of other journalists and the news media.

But, of course, there is that unspoken, unwritten “wink-wink” tenet among journalists to give their “professional colleagues” a free pass on ethics issues. In the Thomas case that translated into what Pitts called an “old-person pass.”

I have been sort of “preaching to the choir” about this very “wink-wink” tenet among journalists who have reviewed the recently released memoir of famed prison journalist Wilbert Rideau, In The Place of Justice (Random House 2010). The ethical issue in the Rideau case is quite simple:

Do journalists reviewing books have a responsibility to (1) read the books they review, (2) and, if so, report significant factual errors in those books, and (3) to truly analyze what the author says in relation to fact and experience?
Rideau’s prison memoir is littered with serious factual errors and factual contradictions.
And memoir has been reviewed by The New York Times and Associated Press, and Rideau has been featured on CBS’ Sunday Morning, NPR’s Fresh Air, and the Tom Joyner Morning Show to promote the memoir.
And not one journalist has recognized the factual errors/contradictions, and if they did, failed to report them. I have recorded these factual errors and factual contradictions at http://www.wilbertrideau-realstory.com – they are reported here, and here, and here, and here, and here.
The Rideau memoir raises serious ethical issues about the nation’s media. The New York Times and other national media outlets devoted a great of coverage to transform Rideau from a convicted murderer into a celebrated convict editor during his incarceration in the Louisiana prison system. The famed prison journalist is now a free “journalist” who published his prison memoir with a $75,000 grant from The Open Society Institute of the George Soros Foundation who hailed him as a “visionary” in criminal justice. Ted Koppel endorsed In The Place of Justice as an “extraordinary book.”
But in the face of so many irrefutable factual errors and misrepresentations is the memoir truly “extraordinary?” And is Wilbert Rideau really the “visionary” in criminal justice The Open Society Institute touted him as to the media?
All media outlets, especially those who have provided Rideau with a forum to promote his memoir, should be aware of these ethical questions about the memoir. More to the point, like Helen Thomas’ longstanding anti-Semitic bigotry, Rideau’s ethical lapses should be in the public forum and subject to free debate. And central to that debate is the issue of whether the national media are giving In The Place of Justice a “free pass” (the wink-wink treatment as they gave Thomas for years) because they are the ones who created “the famed prison journalist” in the first place.