(Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
On December 13 we posted a 6,400 word story about a FBI probe into Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and his second wife, Marianne. It was a serious effort to report on a serious matter. My naïve hope was that my colleagues would follow our course and advance this story by expending more resources and pursuing the leads.
We had success getting a number of key people to go on the record and lay out the story. We got key FBI documents from a second Bureau source so we knew what we had was real. We tried to put a complex story into a coherent and verifiable narrative. We contacted three major news organizations about the story before it ran on our website. We offered each of the organizations contact information for our sources, the FBI documents and other information including taped interviews. All three news organizations said they would do the story – yet none of them did.
