It’s been a year this week since two dozen readers joined several editors and reporters, plus Publisher Stacey Cowles, to discuss The Spokesman-Review’s coverage of River Park Square and its controversial parking garage.
We didn’t expect a favorable verdict that night and we didn’t get one. The newspaper’s performance had been unsatisfactory in certain regards and some of the citizens invited to the Credibility Roundtable could be trusted to itemize our shortcomings.
There was City Councilman Steve Corker, whose campaign had sharply criticized the city’s parking garage deal and the newspaper’s treatment of it.
There was developer John Stone, who that night said the newspaper assesses local building projects based less on their merits than on who is behind them.
There was civic activist David Bray, who had written more than half a dozen letters to the editor, chiding the project, the newspaper or both.
In addition, some participants liked the mall project itself but felt the newspaper had been too timid about explaining its value. Some were uninterested in the whole issue and wished the paper would stop obsessing about it. Some were journalists from broadcast and academia. Some were just involved citizens.
The one person in attendance who probably knew the least about the issue but the most about journalistic ethics was Joann Byrd, editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and former ombudsman for the Washington Post. Early in the session she summarized our dilemma:
There is no better opportunity to destroy your credibility than to have the company that owns your newspaper get involved in an issue that becomes big news, she said.
If that happens, overcoming the conflict-of-interest peril will require extra effort. Readers are likely to be skeptical about that story and others too.
Byrd stressed that the burden would be on us to explain what we were up against. Make plenty of room in our public forum for alternative voices, she advised.
It set the stage for a spirited evening. Here, a year later, are a few reflections from this ombudsman.
When you’re a reporter or editor covering the dealings of your boss’s family, it’s going to influence your frame of mind, more so if you’re inexperienced but even if you’re seasoned. That situation won’t corrupt a principled journalist but it can lead to faintheartedness.
When, for example, the terms of the Nordstrom lease with River Park Square were being withheld, S-R reporters should have been turned loose to go after that information and get it into the paper — as they would have done if different developers had been involved.
Meanwhile, The Spokesman-Review’s editorial voice repeatedly beat the drum for the project, denouncing its critics along the way. (For the record, I was a member of the editorial board throughout the period.)From Oct. 17, 1996, through July 15, 2001, 17 staff-written editorials mentioned River Park Square, consistently promoting it, urging political support for it and scolding those who objected to it.
That doesn’t count several columns written by then-editor Chris Peck, following similar themes.
Even Publisher Stacey Cowles made a rare Opinion page appearance on Oct. 26, 1997, when, in place of the customary editorial, there appeared his column explaining the merits of the downtown development. Accompanied by an artist’s rendering, it consumed more than half the page, far more space than usually afforded guest or syndicated writers.
Who could blame readers for perceiving the newspaper as an arrow in the development’s quiver?
Meanwhile, the dissenting views that Joann Byrd urged us to make special room for have not been accommodated. We ran a guest column by Sheila Collins, one of the Credibility Roundtable participants, but we turned down another by Eastern Washington University journalism professor Bill Stimson, also a participant.
I’m the person Stimson contacted about the piece in which he said The Spokesman-Review should contract with an independent writer to investigate and report on our coverage of River Park Square.
I said I could see arguments both for and against using his piece, but that I’d refer it to Chris Peck. I did. Peck said no.
When Stimson, a friend and former colleague, persisted, I said I’d bring the matter up again. The answer was still no.
It was a missed opportunity for The Spokesman-Review and instead of passing the buck I should have argued strenuously for publishing Stimson’s column.
As other such opportunities come along, we should heed Joann Byrd’s sound advice.
