Panel examines lessons of West case

A newspaper investigation into misuse of office by Mayor Jim West has lessons for public officials and for journalists, a panel of experts told a packed auditorium at Whitworth College on Wednesday night.

For public officials, the main lesson may be that they shouldn’t expect a private life.

“They have no private life. Unfortunately, that’s just the way it is,” former Spokane Mayor Jack Geraghty said at a discussion sponsored by the Washington News Council. West “in effect gave up his rights to being a private person because he was in a 24-hour job.”

West may have thought his Internet conversations with young men he met on a gay chat line were private, similar to the way a phone conversation would be, said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. But legally, they weren’t.

“If you go into a chat room, any notion you have of an expectation of privacy … is really an illusion,” Kirtley said.

The panel didn’t always agree on the lessons that journalists might take away from The Spokesman-Review’s 2005 investigation that found West had used his city computer to meet young men with whom he had sex, and offered some of them gifts or city positions.

Kirtley and Ted McGregor, publisher of The Pacific Northwest Inlander, criticized the newspaper’s use of a forensic computer expert who posed as a high school student in a chat room that reporters had been told West frequented.

“It’s difficult to expect the public to believe what we report is right if we lied to get the information,” Kirtley said. Police sometimes use deception with suspects but “journalists should not be cops.”

Journalists using deception is an “ends justifies the means” argument similar to what the government uses when it spies on citizens and or bombs a house with civilians when trying to kill a terrorist leader, McGregor said.

“It’s a slippery slope. Where do we go from here?” he said.

But Ginny Whitehouse, journalism professor at Whitworth College, said that while she was uncomfortable with the newspaper’s deception, “I don’t think there were alternative means.” Police were not exploring the allegations surrounding West, she said.

Spokesman-Review Editor Steven A. Smith said the newspaper used the deception as a last resort to get “absolute, positive, irrefutable proof” that West was engaged in illegal activity with young people in the community. Its editors considered every other option they could think of, consulted with an ethics expert and followed guidelines set down by journalism organizations.

McGregor suggested reporters could have simply interviewed West about the allegations, to see how he would react, and Kirtley suggested the newspaper could have demanded West’s computer hard drive.

But West’s actions in the months before the recall indicate that would not have worked, Smith said.

“Throughout the recall he said the stories were fabricated,” Smith said. The city and West’s attorneys fought the newspaper’s efforts to get his computer files under the state’s public records law.

Other members of the panel contended the newspaper acted as judge and jury or forced West out of office because he was gay.

“Voters of the City of Spokane recalled Jim West,” Smith said. “The suggestion that he was recalled for being gay – that’s not our community.”