Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

Mary Foster is an Associated Press reporter based in New Orleans. She has a history of writing positive articles about the famed prison journalist, Wilbert Rideau. Rideau’s memoir In The Place of Justice was released by Random House on April 27, 2010. That same day the Associated Press put out on its national wire service a “review” of Rideau’s book by Mary Foster titled “Prison Journalist Pens Readable Autobiography.” Like all of her other stories about the “prison journalist,” Foster’s review was “favorable”—and that’s a conservative analysis—with the last line concluding: “Now he has provided a wonderful chance to share his remarkable life.”

It can reasonably be assumed that Foster was asked by either Rideau or Random House in advance of the memoir’s publication to write a “review” of the book. It can also be assumed that she was provided with an “advance copy” of the book so she could have her review ready for nationwide distribution on the day Random House released it. Those are fairly safe assumptions.

The problem with Rideau’s memoir is that it contains glaring and very serious factual errors that Foster should have caught. The most significant of these errors appears on pages 164 and 165 of the memoir. In a sophomoric kind of way, Rideau attempts to convey the impact of an article he wrote, titled “Religion In Prison,” which appeared in the January/February 1981 edition of The Angolite, the prison newsmagazine of which Rideau was co-editor. He said the article offended a Baton Rouge Catholic bishop so much that he went to the governor to complain about the prison magazine. He implies that the governor then put pressure on Corrections Secretary C. Paul Phelps but the secretary stood firm against the pressure.

The first serious error in this story is that Rideau misidentified the Baton Rouge bishop. He names him the “Very Reverend John Sullivan.” He said it was “later discovered” that the bishop was a “not-so-reverend pedophile.” Wikipedia informs that John Joseph Sullivan was appointed by Pope Paul VI as the sixth Bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph in 1977 where he remained until his retirement in 1993. He was not a “pedophile” and never served in the Baton Rouge diocese.

The bishop over the Baton Rouge diocese in 1981 was Bishop Joseph Sullivan. He was bishop over the diocese from 1974 until his death in 1982. At least two lawsuits were brought against the Baton Rouge diocese long after Joseph Sullivan’s death that charged the bishop with pedophilia. Those lawsuits were settled out of court by the diocese.

How could the famed “prison journalist” and “convict editor” have made such a glaring error? When a journalist names someone as a “not-so-reverend pedophile,” he/she better have the right name. And before a publishing house of Random House’s stature in the publishing industry goes to print with a book, it has a fundamental duty to “fact-check” such a serious allegation. Apparently no one at Random House did.

The second glaring error is Rideau’s charge that the Catholic bishop was so offended by the convict editor’s article that he “took his complaint and political clout to Governor Edwards but Phelps stood firm.” The problem with this charge is that Edwin Edwards was not governor in 1981; Dave Treen was. In fact, on the same page (165) Rideau named Edwards as the governor in 1981, the awarding-winning journalist wrote: “ … in September 1981, Phelps was fired. Republican governor Dave Treen, who had assumed power the year before …”

Thus,  Rideau names two different men as being governor in Louisiana in 1981 on the same page of his book: Edwards and Treen. Rideau made the error, and Random House proofreaders didn’t catch it.

Standing alone, that could be considered a minor factual error for which Random House proofreaders could easily be  forgiven. But in the context of this story line in which Rideau misidentified a Catholic bishop as a pedophile against the backdrop of the preposterous story that the bishop was so “offended” by a prison magazine article that he took his “complaint” to the governor, the naming of the wrong governor is no minor error.

All this bring us full circle to Mary Foster. She read the memoir, and while she may not have known who the bishop of the Baton Rouge diocese was in 1981, she had to know that Dave Treen, not Edwin Edwards, was governor that year. She is an AP reporter who has reported on Louisiana politics for years.

This raises some interesting questions:

If Foster in fact read Rideau’s memoir and caught the Edwards/Treen error, why didn’t she report it in her review of his memoir? Did she conceal the error?

The fact that she didn’t catch the error raises questions about whether she even read the memoir she wrote so glowingly about. And that’s as bad as concealing the error.

That’s the problem inherent in Wilbert Rideau’s cozy relationship with the liberal media: they refuse to “fact-check” him. A Google search does not reveal any journalist who has reviewed Rideau’s memoir catching the page 164-65 errors.. The Edwards/Treen error is so glaring on page 165 that it slaps the reader in the face. And if famed prison journalist made such a basic error as to who was governor in 1981, an inquiring journalist would—or should—want to know whether the “Very Reverend John Sullivan” was in fact a “not-so-reverend pedophile” as Rideau charged.

There is no excuse for Mary Foster. She is an established Louisiana reporter. Those errors should not have escaped her detection.

But did she have a professional responsibility, morally or ethically, to report the factual errors in her book review?

The liberal media establishment is quick to point out any glaring factual errors made by “conservative” writers/journalists. MSNBC maintains an “error watch” of Fox News. But the liberal media protects its own. Rideau will get a “get out of jail” pass on these journalistic indiscretions by the liberal media because they made him the “famed prison journalist.”

So I guess there is no moral or ethical responsibility to report the truth in book reviews.