Dear Ms. Barnes,
In today's Strib you write: "Every election season, we run a public records check on every candidate fro a major statewide office and publish any significant records that we find, whether the candidate is a Democrat or Republican.""
Unless you care to maintain that a misdemeanor conviction for theft is "insignificant," that statement is untrue on its face.
The facts are these:
In the 1982 statewide gubernatorial election, DFL candidate for Lieutenant Governor, Marlene Johnson had been convicted of shoplifting, pled not guilty, and was convicted on June 3, 1970. No record of that arrest was published in your paper until I provided official public records of the incident to your reporter a week prior to the election in return for a promise of anonymity. Within twelve hours, your paper had broken the promise in a front page article headlined "Marlene Johnson arrests disclosed by Whitney ally."
As a result of your betrayal, I sued. The case eventually made its way to the United States Supreme Court as Cohen v. Cowles Media, 501 U.S 663 (1991), where I won what has become a landmark decision of First Amendment law. The Court held that notwithstanding your plea of freedom of the press, you have no freedom of the press to dishonor your contracts.
You also do not have the freedom to iterate false and misleading statements concerning your checking and publishing public records without being called to account.
