Reporter for Spokane Paper Exchanges E-mails with 'Frontline' Producer

By: Joe Strupp After the PBS series Frontline last week aired an hour-long documentary about the Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., and its coverage of former Mayor Jim West -- who was booted out of office after the paper revealed his online searches for young gay men -- strong reaction raged for several days. It climaxed with the newspaper's editor, Steve Smith, making strong charges against Frontline for allegedly committing several key factual errors -- and the producers of the program answering with a strong point-by-point reply that pointed out mistakes on the paper's part.

That's where it has stood since last Friday. The Spokane paper has not yet attempted to counter the producers' latest shot.

Reached by E&P, Editor Steve Smith declined to respond to Frontline's latest assertions, and he has not taken up the question again on the newspaper's blog where he, and many others, had weighed in last week.

"I don't know if I was expecting a response," says a Frontline spokesman. "Some [of the issues] are matters of conjecture, some are matters of fact. We'll have to keep watching it."

But now a revealing back-and-forth exchange between the paper and the program has surfaced.

Spokesman-Review Reporter Karen Dorn Steele, who wrote numerous stories about West and appeared in the Frontline program, penned her own critical appraisal in an e-mail to producer Rachel Dretzin, which she sent last Thursday. That sparked a response from Dretzin on Friday.

The messages, obtained by E&P, show that each woman had strong feelings about how the story was presented. Here they are in full.

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Dorn Steele's e-mail, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006:

After having spent hours with you and your production crew during your forays to Spokane, I am disappointed and disturbed by the program I watched on Tuesday night. I found it to be fundamentally unfair to The Spokesman-Review's public service journalism and to the Spokane community as well.

Jim West was no victim, and we deserved better on Frontline, a series I have always admired.

While your Greek tragedy about a bullying newspaper and the closeted man it destroyed may have been entertaining for a national audience, it does not come close to the real story that played itself out so painfully in Spokane in 2005.

Your errors of fact are bad enough (detailed already by our editor, Steve Smith), but your omissions are even more telling. So many important elements of the Jim West saga appear to be discarded in your documentary because they did not fit your biases.

Where, for instance, was Shannon Sullivan, the divorced mother of a Cub Scout who was so enraged by West' s online and real-life abuses of power that she single-handedly launched a recall drive and battled West's lawyers all the way to the Washington Supreme Court? Her moral outrage apparently didn't fit your story line.

And where was the Supreme Court's opinion, an 8-1 verdict that concluded that the recall should proceed and Spokane voters should get the chance to decide whether West's behavior was "an improper exercise of an official duty."

You noted -- inaccurately -- that the FBI absolved West of all charges. In fact, the agency decided not to prosecute him on a narrow public corruption statute that required the Jack Abramoff-style illegal expenditure of public money. The FBI investigation confirmed West's behavior as reported in The Spokesman-Review.

You did not tell your viewers the results of the Spokane City Council's independent investigation.

Council investigator Mark Busto concluded West had violated state law and the city's workplace policies by using city computers to download pornography and solicit sex partners on the Internet while traveling on city business_ a firing offense in the private sector. That report must not have fit your story line.

And where was West the politician on social issues? Your portrait of his public stances and private hypocrisy is woefully sketchy.

West not only sponsored the bill to ban gays from teaching in public schools and day care centers that you mention, but also proposed making teen sex a criminal misdemeanor and castrating sex offenders.

And where were his bullying tactics, including his angry outbursts towards fellow politicians and the death threat he left with a lobbyist? Where was his continuing opposition to the domestic partnership benefits law the Spokane City Council passed while he was mayor?

Fortunately, your verdict on our journalism is outweighed by the opinions of our peers. This year we won the University of Oregon's Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism for the West project (the other winner: Curt Eichenwald of the New York Times, who also faced difficult ethical decisions while navigating online to report on Internet child predators). Last week, we were awarded second place in investigative reporting for the West stories in the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association's C.B. Blethen Awards competition, where we compete against far larger newspapers.

Bill Morlin and I have already won many national awards in our reporting careers. Bill was a Pulitzer finalist for his reporting on white supremacists, and I am a George Polk Award winner for environmental reporting.

Far worse than maligning us, you portrayed Spokane as an ignorant, narrow town where West thrived only because he masked his gayness and where people tossed him out of office when they discovered his true nature.

That is far from the truth. Our readers understood the difference between homophobia and West's public and private behavior. He was recalled in a landslide because of his political hypocrisy and his abuse of power, not because he was gay.

Frank Sennett, one of our columnists, said it best this week when he wrote that West "was a political pro who would say and do anything to keep the ugly truths of his life hidden just beneath that charismatic surface."

You fell for his charisma and his story line _ the bullying newspaper and the brutal outing. Your work suffered for it.

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Dretzin's response:

Thank you for your note. We're naturally sorry that you and others on the staff of The Spokesman-Review are unhappy with the program. We remain grateful for the cooperation you gave us and applaud the transparency of your news gathering operation which naturally invites scrutiny - both admiring and sometimes critical.

We do feel you are entitled to a specific response to some of the assertions you make in your letter. In regard to our so-called errors of reporting, we refer you to the FRONTLINE website where a detailed response to Steve Smith's blog is posted or will be shortly.

The story of Shanon Sullivan, while compelling, was not relevant to an examination of the newspaper's investigation or West's hidden life - the subjects of our film. The film does clearly represent the public's sense of outrage over West's alleged abuse of office.

Your assertion that the Supreme Court determined that West's behavior was "an improper exercise of an official duty" is - in our reading -- factually wrong. The matter before the court was whether the recall election ballot synopsis was legally sufficient under state election law. The quote that you refer to is in fact from that ballot synopsis.

The court emphatically did not rule on the facts of matter or whether West had committed wrongdoing. In fact, the court's majority opinion begins, "First, we note that the role of courts in the recall process is highly limited, and it is not for us to decided whether the alleged facts are true or not".

We do not say the FBI absolved West of all charges, as you assert. We say that the FBI found insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges - there's a difference. Actually, however, the US Attorneys Office offered the following synopsis of their decision, which goes a long way toward absolving West of the charge that he exchanged jobs or internships for sexual favors:

The central allegation was that the mayor denied citizens 'honest services' by providing city hall jobs or internships in exchange for sex. The investigation uncovered no evidence that had occurred. A review of city records reveals that virtually every person who applied for an internship with the city was offered a position. There was no indication that West had improperly assisted any potential employees or interns.
It is true that we did not mention the City Counsel's investigation. It seemed superceded by the FBI investigation, and was certainly treated as such by your own paper before you knew what the FBI would rule.

We disagree that our portrayal of West's social stances was sketchy. In a 60 minute program we obviously cannot detail every one of West's votes. We chose the single bill that argued most forcefully for his having opposed gay rights; namely, the bill to ban gays from teaching and day care work in Washington State. We also gave him the opportunity to point out that he had made only a handful of votes on the subject of gay rights over a 20 year political career. No one could argue that West was not an opponent of gay rights, but it can be fairly debated how forcefully he pursued an anti-gay agenda or how deeply he involved himself in social issues. Veteran political reporters we talked to uniformly agreed that West was not primarily a "social conservative"; that he was primarily a fiscal conservative who left social issues for others.

Regarding your point about West's altercation with a lobbyist. Again, this was outside the purview of our program. We were not doing a biography of Jim West - much that was negative as well as much that was positive was left out. In the biographical sections of the film our time did allow us, we tried to stick to the relevant issue - his struggle with homosexuality.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we did not intend to malign Spokane, nor do we think we did malign Spokane. We do not assert that Spokanites tossed West out of office because he was gay. If that had been all you had reported that would be one thing, but your paper alleged that West was a pedophile and had used his office to lure young men into sexual relationships. These issues, as you point out, were certainly more important to the voters than West's sexual preferences. To the extent that we take issue with the Spokesman-Review, it is on the question of how well-founded these allegations were and how you went about reporting your story. If the voters of Spokane, in their wisdom, had decided that West was unfit for office because of his evident interest in young (legally-aged men), or because of his perceived hypocrisy, so be it. In fact, they were deciding on the basis of those and other, less well-proven allegations.

We were not taken in by Jim West's charisma (a less charismatic man might be hard to find). Jim West was not particularly articulate in his own defense, and certainly did not offer us a "story line". We based our film on a reading of the facts of this case as best as we could discern them.

Again, we thank you for your cooperation and time.

Rachel Dretzin, Muriel Soenens, Barak Goodman, and the rest of the FRONTLINE team