I’ve been open to the possibility that the WSB-TV news story with the Benoit home answering machine messages was spontaneous and not planted. After talking today with a competing Atlanta journalist who was also on the open records list, did not receive the new CD with the phone messages at the same time as Tom Regan of WSB — yet still thinks Regan’s story, bad as it was, resulted from his own enterprise — I am even somewhat partial to the innocent explanation.
But I’d hasten to add the double meaning of “innocent” here. Even if Regan and Channel 2 are innocent of the charge of being used, they are also innocent of — another way to put it is “oblivious to” — how the sheriff’s report on the Benoit double murder/suicide falls short of the mark, most especially in failing to produce cell phone voicemail. Almost certainly, that evidence would be half as cheesy as the home phone messages, and twice as valuable in terms of being a real tool for telling the story of the weekend of June 23-24, 2007.
Anyway, the Atlanta journalist, who asked me not to name him, said he and his news organization did not know of the answering machine messages prior to the Channel 2 story on April 30. “We had to ask for them afterward…. At first I was a little concerned. Then I heard the recordings [and realized there was little to them].”
Even so, my source expressed doubt that the sheriff’s office planted the story: “We [the media] have pestered the hell out of them for months and they are tired of us.” He also called Tom Regan a good reporter; “I suspect he has stayed on the story and found out about the answering machine messages on his own.”
Which, if true, brings me back to my original two-part comment.
Bully for Channel 2.
Now — would you like to join me in pursuing the real Benoit phone message story?
Irv Muchnick