Morial Case: regurgitating press releases isn't reporting.

NO Bull calls Adam Nossiter's piece on the indictments of Morial associates in a public-works scandal "serious wordsmanship."

I call it regurgating press releases from the defense team.

A reporter writing a decent story would at least give some thought to what defense lawyers are saying. He might even ask a question or two about strategy. Nossiter isn't a reporter, he's a stenographer. And he's not very familiar with his beat, as is obvious from this graf:

Those messages should play in a community that has already demonstrated uneasiness with the federal probe into the Morial administration's contracting practices. Eighteen months ago the city's black pastors gathered at Pampy's to denounce it, saying it was fueled by racism and intended to harm black success stories. The feds see contracts that hugely benefited Morial cronies; the black pastors saw a racist attack on black businessmen. An FBI battering ram through the door of brother Jacques' house didn't improve their mood.

The "plantation language" of the defendants' lawyers obviously impressed Nossiter, but he is forgetting that the ultimate audience for this presentation will not be an Orleans Parish criminal jury. This tableau will be played out in federal court. The jury pool for the Southeastern District of Louisiana is overwhelmingly white. Where it's not Republican, it's moderate-to-conservative. The black pastors and their congregations are a minority when the federal jury duty summons are sent out.

That doesn't mean Letten and Company will have it easy when either the current defendants or Morial himself come to trial. Nossiter's racial blinders notwithstanding, he makes a point here:

If a New Orleans-area jury hears that story line, the government has its work cut out for it. The feds often think they can win merely by dumping the FBI's notebooks and recordings into the jury's lap, week after week. But in the courtroom, a compelling narrative trumps a prosecution that seems to have the facts on its side, but isn't capable of telling a good story -- every time.

It's not the racial story line Letten and his staff at the US Attorney's office need worry about, it's the presentation of the evidence. Like so many other corruption trials in the past, the prosecutors have to make sure they don't rely on tons of what they think is factual evidence. While the "lynching" talk won't sell on a white jury from the suburbs and Cajun country, the notion of over-zealous "persecution" rather than "prosecution" is a theme that's helped acquit a number of high-profile defendants over the last 30 years, most notably Edwin Edwards in the hospital-licensing scandal.

Letten's one of the men who eventually got Edwin Edwards, however, under the tenure of (Orleans Parish DA) Eddie Jordan. It will be interesting to see if he can parlay the current indictments into a conviction of Morial.