KYRS: The Karen Dorn Steele interview

Today at 1pm, tune into KYRS Thin Air Community Radio (FM 92.3 & 89.9) to hear Tim Connor’s interview with award-winning investigative reporter Karen Dorn Steele. Both are brilliant journalists, and Steele will discuss the challenges of covering Hanford and, inexorably, sensitive topics like her departure from the Spokesman-Review.


(Steele at the S-R in a 1989 photo. Image courtesy of Center For Justice .)

It’s not actually a live broadcast. The broadcast will come from the digital recording Connor, CFJ’s Communications Director, made of his June 17 ^th interview for a popular feature that appeared online July 4 ^th , titled “Outside Looking Back.” (DTE note: Required reading.)

“It was great to see how much feedback we got from all over the country on the published interview with Karen that we ran last month,” Connor said in an email to CFJ subscribers.  “KYRS was immediately interested in the remarkable content of the interview and, as it turned out, the audio from the stereo digital recorder I used for my notes is broadcast caliber. So, we lucked out and it’s terrific to be able to share this with Spokane radio listeners. Karen Dorn Steele is one of my heroes and, to her credit, she answered all my questions—-even the hard ones—-without flinching a bit.”

Looking back on the interview, the feedback is justified. Steele touches on various local topics, provocative and frustrating: Spokane Clean Air, a bullying bureaucracy, the Jim West investigation, and the state of Spokane media concluding at the Spokesman-Review now , she couldn’t do the kind of reporting on Hanford she did in the eighties. Below is one of many unforgettable exchanges:

TC: You’ve commended the Spokesman-Review for giving you the time and resources to develop the story that earned you so much national attention, and that is your work on the health, safety and environmental problems at Hanford. You once shared the story of being approached by an FBI agent in the Spokesman-Review newsroom in 1984 to talk about why you were so interested in reporting on plutonium production at Hanford. To me it sort of crystallizes the tension in the whole Hanford story, which is the dueling realities about a secret place supposedly there to protect America’s interests in the world, and the other side of this interpretation of Hanford is that it is essentially a betrayal of democratic expectations of government accountability and, with regard to exposed workers and downwinders, the expectation that the government would look out for their interests. How did you feel about it at the time, when you realized that the FBI was there because the government saw you as a threat to national security?

KDS: I was not completely surprised because I knew that the material inventories at the plutonium plant down there were still highly classified. But it also made me angry because we were not asking for the secrets of building a bomb or any of those kind of things that should legitimately be probably secret. We were just trying to find out what the history of accidents was and the history of environmental pollution had been at Hanford. And so, I’m a stubborn Norwegian. I just kind of got my back up really. First of all I didn’t think an FBI agent should be sauntering into a newsroom. That’s not proper. It sends a chilling message. And secondly, it made me angry.

Once again, check out KYRS , Spokane’s very own community radio station for the full interview at 1pm.