November 4, 2006

Tennessean Has Moore on Parker Speeding Ticket Video as Lawyers, Judges Say Parker's Claim Untrue

The Tennessean has published its expanded version of the story it first put online yesterday regarding the courtroom video of state Senate candidate Mary Parker claiming that Nashville judges routinely give lawyers like her a pass when they get speeding tickets.

The paper also has a second story in which a selection of Nashville lawyers and judges say Parker doesn't know what she's talking about.

Despite the claims of state Senate candidate Mary Parker four years ago, lawyers in Nashville aren't getting a break on their traffic tickets, said local attorneys and one judge.

Even the Nashville lawyer who posted the video of Parker on his blog says he doesn't know of cases where judges in Metro have dismissed traffic tickets simply because a defendant has a law degree. "I don't know that that's a policy in Davidson County," said Nashville lawyer and Republican activist Nathan Moore, adding that he's paid plenty of his own tickets. "The whole point of this I think ... this shows that [Parker] thinks that, as a lawyer, she's above the law."

The presiding judge over Metro's General Sessions courts also denied allegations of the practice. "I'm not aware of any lawyers just walking into the courtroom and getting their cases dismissed," Judge Gloria Dumas said.

Media Coverage Analysis
Kudos to The Tennessean - which has endorsed Parker - for paying attention to the blogosphere on this story, by the way, though their coverage doesn't serve readers as well as it could.

The paper does give credit to Moore for first posting the video in the local political blogosphere but it doesn't give readers the name of Moore's blog or its web address, MooreThoughts.com. Nor does it provide readers direct link to the video, making it difficult for readers to find the video - especially if they are not very web or blog-savvy. YouTube.com, where the video file is hosted, makes it very easy for any website, including Tennessean.com, to embed the video on its own web page, as I have done here. The paper should have done it, so readers could view it themselves and come to their own conclusions about what Parker meant.

Traditionally, news media gives credit when other media break a story, as happened here, but newspapers seem loathe to give readers too much help finding blogs. I suspect that trend will only increase as blogs increasingly beat newspapers to publication with significant news stories, as Moore and the Nashville blogosphere did here. If so it will be a bad decision - newspapers that want to rapidly grow their online audience should have special sections of their websites devoted to coverage of the local blogosphere and local-connected stuff appearing on YouTube - updated several times a day.

Background
As seen on the video, Parker stands before Williamson County Circuit Court Judge Tim Easter and claims Nashville judges routinely drop speeding tickets for lawyers. But now Parker is claiming she misspoke when she said this:

"Quite frankly, in Nashville lawyers who get speeding tickets, they just get, they just get dropped. You walk in and the judge drops them. I don't know what happened here so I came down and found out that doesn't happen."

Parker's new Kerryesque spin as reported by The Tennessean is that she just meant Nashville judges routinely drop tickets for people in general, not just lawyers.

News of the video clip from Parker's appearance in a Williamson County courtroom four years ago broke first on Nashville-area political blogs including MooreThoughts.com and here, and then went national via a mention on Instapundit.com.

I emailed Parker's campaign Thursday seeking her reaction to the video, and got a different reply from the campaign than the response Parker gave to the newspaper. The emailed response said, "It was simply a video of Mary Parker fighting a speeding ticket in open court. Thank you for your concern."

But of course it was a video of Mary Parker, a lawyer who thinks she should be making laws to govern the people of Tennessee, telling a Williamson County judge that Nashville judges routinely dismiss speeding tickets given to Nashville lawyers like her, and that she was hoping for similar preferential treatment in Williamson County. It is plain from the video that is what she said and meant, her current spin notwithstanding.

Thanks first to blogs and then The Tennessean, the people of the 23rd state Senate district can see that now.