Spokane Paper's Columnist Says 'Frontline' Went 'Into the Tank' for Disgraced Mayor

By: E&P Staff Dozens of comments, pro and con, continue to pour into the forum at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., all reacting to the Tuesday PBS "Frontline" program that criticized the newspaper for some of its tactics in its probe of former Mayor Jim West. He lost a recall vote and was removed from office over charges he had misused his office in promising jobs or internships to young men he had met on gay Internet chat sites, among other charges.

The paper's editor Steve Smith issued a formal rebuttal on the blog yesterday, drawing many more responses from around the country, often quite harsh. Then he put up a commentary by the paper's columnist and bloggers Frank Sennett who had covered the West case closely and believes he is the last journalist West talked with before his recent death. He writes that "Frontline" went "in the tank" for West. Now that has drawn criticism.

Here are Sennett's comments. Other reactions can be found at the blog.

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There's a lot of self-righteous ignorance masquerading as informed outrage in S-R blog comment sections today, not to mention in the New York Times, regarding last night's Frontline report. I wish Jim West were here to see it; he'd be so pleased with himself.

We all thought the mayoral recall election was West's last political campaign, but it turns out he was up for one last quest--this time for some measure of public redemption.

I was harder on West in my columns than perhaps anyone else associated with this newspaper, because I treated him like exactly who he was--a political pro who would say and do anything to keep the ugly truths of his life hidden just beneath that charismatic surface.

He was so good, he got a crew for the respected PBS investigative reporting show to go into the tank for him. Never mind the credible, horrific allegations of child sexual abuse. Never mind the pattern of unsettling grooming behavior toward boys that would have put even Mark Foley to shame. Never mind his close association with two local molesters. He barely knew them, right? Even though he lived with one for a while, ran a Scout troop with another one. Uh huh.

What was transparent to me and to any person really on to West's game was that he was using this documentary as a final shot at reputation repair. The on-camera salute to Spokane as the voters kicked him out of office. The moment when he grudgingly says... "probably not" when pressed about whether he'd vote now for the draconian anti-gay rights legislation he sponsored in the state senate--because that's the answer he knew he had to give.

But the reason no one in the newsroom is losing a wink of sleep over the West story is that they know West was no victim.

Shortly before he died, West sent me a friendly e-mail. I was possibly the last journalist he checked in with. I'd made a joke about getting him back in office because, again, he was a brilliant politician and an effective mayor, two things we currently lack in that particular office. He joked with me without rancor. He knew who he was, and the rest was politics.

You know how you can tell when Jim West is lying and spinning in that Frontline documentary? It's when his lips are moving.

But he's getting the last laugh on this one, and it's hard to begrudge him that posthumous honor, perverse as it is.

Still, I think of all the victims of molestation who can't come forward when they're little and often get sent by their abusers on a hard-luck path in life. The ones who finally work up the courage to level the accusation decades later rarely have any physical evidence to back them up, lacking a "CSI" time machine. So even if several unrelated accusers step forward as flawed adults, if the person they're accusing is a slick, charismatic guy, they just end up getting victimized all over again.