Fechter on Fechter
May 8, 2007 at 4:31 pm by Wayne GarciaOne day after what he terms a “chaotic” departure from the Tampa Tribune, where he wrote for 17 years, Michael Fechter was taking it easy, lounging around the house and (at my request) reflecting on his career at the daily.
Fechter was one of the longest-serving hard news journalists left in the paper’s Metro section (along with folks such as Lindsay Peterson and William March). And while he has had his share of high-profile stories, it is the series of pieces he did on Sami Al-Arian that will forever define his career there.
The stories have been so controversial in some quarters (perhaps nowhere more so than in the pages of Creative Loafing) that Fechter’s departure warranted news stories in both morning dailies.
He is going to become editor-in-chief of Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism website. In a news release sent out late last night, Fechter was quoted:
“My decision to join the Investigative Project is based on the simple
fact that no other organization does a better job of researching and
investigating worldwide Islamist terrorist groups. Steve Emerson and his highly professional staff have consistently been ahead of the curve, even alerting the CIA and FBI to terrorism connections. At this critical juncture in our history, I consider their work to be crucial to our national security.”
This morning I got to speak at further length with Fechter, and here is a partial Q&A of our conversation:
Q: How did it come about that you joined Steven Emerson’s company?
A: “I thought it was time to move on, and was trying to figure out what I could do in the world beyond work for the Tampa Tribune, and I want to stay in Tampa for family reasons. I heard about this job and asked if it could be telecommuting.”
Q: Does the fact that you are going to work for Emerson, who is so identified as a critic of Al-Arian’s, taint your work in the eyes of the general public?
A: “It’s funny because it depends on which reader you speak of and how much overlap there may be [in terms of which newspapers they read]. If you read the Tampa Tribune and not you guys [Creative Loafing], you wonder why there is a story in the paper today.”
Q: What stories are you most proud of in your body of work?
A: “I’m proud of the Al-Arian stories and the paper’s commitment to it. In the same sense, its not the only thing I did. It just happened to play out the longest.” [He also cited his work investigating Greater Ministries and raising questions about the leader of the effort to bring the USS Forrestal to Tampa.]
Q: What do you say to the critics of his Al-Arian stories, which they call anti-Muslim and biased?
A: “It’s silly, it’s just plain silly, and your colleague [Creative Loafing's senior group editor John Sugg] is just plain silly in what he says and does. A lot of this debate has been people distorting what I wrote and what I did. We wrote that Sami had connections to people and groups that he lied about for a decade, and one of the entities that he lied to was his employer. [Fechter said the trial proved that was correct.]
“[For those who say my departure calls for a revisitation of the stories I wrote on Al-Arian,] knock yourself out, because it’s a paper trail.”
“[In the matter of his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, and his deportation hearings, Al-Arian] was lying about who [Al-Najjar] was. Did he break the law? I’ll respect the jury verdict, but he lied.”
