“The publishers were tinkering
with these stories.”
—Kevin Taylor, former S-R reporter and copy editor

ALISON BOGGS, the reporter whose October 1996 story was so drastically altered, refused to talk to me about her experience. But she evidently complained to others.

Former bond counsel Roy Koegen told me that Boggs confided in him that she was so upset by the improper editing of her River Park Square stories that she requested transfer to the paper’s Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, bureau.

Kevin Taylor, a former Spokesman-Review reporter and copy editor who worked at the paper for 18 years, confirmed Koegen’s account.

During his seven years on the copy desk, between 1994 and 2001 — critical years in the development of the Cowles mall — Taylor was appalled by the special treatment he saw given to River Park Square stories. Unlike the way other stories were handled, he says, when a River Park Square story hit the copy desk, the first thing the assistant city editor did was call managing editor Chris Peck to come in and review it. This was always in the evening, long after Peck had gone home for the day.

“Peck would come down… wearing a Hawaiian shirt instead of his business suit… go into his office, which had glass walls; everybody could look right through and see him. And get on the phone and hunch over his computer and be talking and typing away. The knowledge around the copy desk was that he was reading the story — it didn’t matter which reporter had written it, whether it was Alison Boggs or Rachel Conrad or Stephanie Craft or Oliver Staley. Those River Park Square stories were all read to Betsy Cowles, and they were altered. Paragraphs were moved around, some stuff was taken out, quotes reacting to things in the story were added in later… Peck would leave his office, nod to whoever the assistant city editor was and say, ‘Okay, it’s back to you,’ and go home. And it was really horrible. It was a really depressing and demoralizing experience to know that here we were, newspaper of record for the city, and the owners of the paper, the publishers, were tinkering with these stories, and that the newsroom was going along with it.”

Alison Boggs was a friend of his, Taylor told me, and she confided in him that the she was “upset and demoralized about what was happening” to her River Park Square stories.

“What she would write would not be entirely what was in the paper the next day. And yet it still had her name on it. It was just a bad thing that was happening to her stories.”

Taylor believes that the coverage of the Cowles mall was an important factor prompting Boggs to transfer out of the Spokane newsroom.

“I did not edit articles.”
—Betsy Cowles

BETSY COWLES attempted to dodge questions about her editing of news stories when she was deposed in the federal securities fraud case.

“Do you recall ever editing any of the drafts of articles relating to River Park Square that were submitted to you for review prior to the publication of the article?” asked plaintiff attorney Gary Ceriani.

“I did not serve as an editor, no, I did not edit articles,” said Cowles.

Ceriani: “Well, I was using edit in the generic sense, not the newspaper sense. What I meant by edit was change, correct, modify, alter. Did you ever do that to an article that was submitted to you for review before its publication?”

Cowles: “I recall a, I recall instances where a fact was incorrect and I would call the city desk and say no, the project is not an $80 million project, it is now a hundred million dollars project, that kind of thing.”

Ceriani: “Do you know whether the same courtesy was afforded to any other persons who were quoted in those articles, i.e., a chance to review them prior to publication?”

Cowles: “No.”


LIKE BOGGS, reporter Rachel Conrad refused to talk to me. Oliver Staley, however, corroborated Taylor’s account.

“Were stories involving the Cowleses handled differently from other stories?” I asked him, when I was doing research for the Camas magazine article “All In The Family.”

“Oh, clearly,” he said. “They’re the only sources who pre-approve the story.”

Questionable editing of River Park Square stories wasn’t the project’s only “morale killer” in the Cowles newsroom, says Taylor, who now writes for The Inlander. Reporters were universally disgusted, he says, that Betsy Cowles was also using the paper’s First Amendment attorney, Duane Swinton, to serve simultaneously as her River Park Square real estate attorney.

“I mean here’s the guy who’s supposed to be on our side to help us pry records into the public view,” says Taylor, “who was also hired by the Cowleses to represent River Park Square. It’s a direct conflict of interest, because he was keeping secret information and documents from the very group of journalists at The Spokesman who would ask him to help, in other circumstances, to pry those documents loose. It was incredible that he would do this and that the newspaper… would not see the conflict or not at least comment upon it or do something about it. And it went on for years. It was nasty.”

Swinton remains The Spokesman-Review’s First Amendment attorney, says editor Steve Smith, Chris Peck’s successor. Smith said he has “mixed feelings” about the situation and twice tried to find a good alternative to Swinton but has been unable to do so.


The Newspaper’s Quasi Mea Culpa

IN AN ATTEMPT to repair the damage done to the paper’s credibility by its River Park Square coverage, The Spokesman-Review appointed editor Doug Floyd as ombudsman, a short-lived position. In a rare mea culpa, Floyd wrote about the problem on January 20, 2002 under the headline, “Credibility hit deserved in our RPS treatment.”

“When you’re a reporter or editor covering the dealings of your boss’s family, it’s going to influence your frame of mind,” he wrote.

“From October 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 October 16, 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.”

The problem with Floyd’s admissions, however, is that the newspaper never corrected the record.

Camas magazine senior editor Tim Connor brought this to the attention of Smith in a January 3, 2006 letter and package of attachments. In his response, Smith promised an audit of the paper’s River Park Square reporting. So far, that audit has not been performed.

Former Spokesman-Review reporter Oliver Staley once told me that he and his colleagues had long “chafed” over having to report on a business project owned by their employers.

“You can’t feel good about doing this crusading reporting,” said Staley, “when you feel that it’s your employer who you’re crusading against.”


Counterfeit News

IN THE WAKE of the death of River Park Square patron Jo Savage, the Cowleses commissioned an engineering study to assess the garage’s condition. Copies of the study were made available through the Cowleses’s public relations firm, Rocky Hill and Knowlton. Among the many aspects of Cowles conduct troubling to Cowles reporters, the family’s involvement of Hill and Knowlton in The Spokesman-Review’s news operations ranks high.

As reported in “All In the Family,” Hill and Knowlton, one of the world’s largest public relations firms, has an international reputation for concocting bogus science and planting fake news stories to serve its clients. The Cowleses hired Hill and Knowlton to provide Cowles Publishing with the kind of “media training” usually reserved for organizations on the receiving end of media scrutiny. Publisher Stacey Cowles denied to me that any Spokesman-Review news personnel attended a November 2000 Hill and Knowlton training session at the newspaper. But The Spokesman-Review’s then-top editor, Chris Peck, told me that he took part in the training at Stacey Cowles’s invitation.

In Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, a book describing the “hollowing out of democracy” by a massive public relations industry devoted to manipulating public opinion, Hill and Knowlton receives prominent attention. At the time of the book’s publication, 1995, the authors note that Hill and Knowlton was still in court answering criminal charges for its involvement dating back to the 1950s in “selling death” for Big Tobacco. Most of the book’s Hill and Knowlton references chronicle its role in a host of notorious modern propaganda episodes, including the “Torturer’s Lobby,” the phony story of dead Kuwati babies used by the U.S. to justify the first Gulf War, and the company’s CIA connections.

In a section headed “Is It Real Or Is It Memorex?” the book ranks Hill and Knowlton among the world’s master news counterfeiters.

“The Spokesman-Review reporter who informed me of the [Hill and Knowlton] media training was dismayed that Cowles executives sought guidance from a company that is notorious for deceiving the public,” I wrote in “All In The Family.”

Contrary to the conventions of journalism, Spokesman-Review stories about Jo Savage’s death so far have not included comment from developer Betsy Cowles. Instead, the paper has quoted Rocky Hill and Knowlton spokeswoman Jennifer West, a Cowles stand-in.

That hardly suggests changed editorial policy following the ombudsman’s confession of bias.


The New Editor’s Challenge

THREE YEARS BEFORE Jo Savage died, Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen sounded a grim warning when he testified before a U.S. Senate committee on the dangers of concentrated media ownership. If single news organizations are allowed to dominate their markets, he said, it would put the nation at risk. “I don't want to be overly dramatic,” he told the panel, “but I think we would see the beginning of the end of our democracy.” When asked for an example of a community whose interests had been harmed by concentrated media ownership, Blethen answered reflexively: “Spokane, Washington.”

Asked to elaborate, he cited The Spokesman-Review’s handling of River Park Square. The irony of Blethen’s warning is that The Spokesman-Review is the kind of local family-owned newspaper that’s supposed to offer a wholesome alternative to the homogenized fare of the nation’s media leviathans.

In a recent tape-recorded interview, editor Steve Smith said he expects his long-promised audit of Spokesman-Review coverage of River Park Square to soon begin. When I asked him about the audit’s purpose, he replied:

“It’s a great question. Stacey asks me that periodically. My staff asks me that periodically. The reasons are primarily internal. I’ll be just very frank with you. I’m not doing this audit for you or Tim Connor or Camas magazine. Frankly, I don’t give a rip how you all come out on this. I’m not doing it for Bill Stimson. I give even less of a rip for Bill Stimson’s views on all of this. [Dr. William Stimson, director of Eastern Washington University’s journalism program and a former Cowles reporter, has criticized The Spokesman-Review’s River Park Square reporting.] I’m doing this for the following reasons.

“One, I think it’s healthy for my staff — the people who are still on payroll at The Spokesman-Review and who were intimately involved in this controversy from its earliest years forward. It’s critically important for them to have the opportunity to talk to an impartial panel, observer, analyst about what happened, why it happened, how it happened, and what their role in it was. They’re good journalists, and they’ve been taking a lot of s**t over the last several years, some of it from you guys, and they’ve not had an opportunity to speak for themselves…

“Secondarily, one of the outcomes… will be a set of recommendations from the panel to me on how we might in the future handle coverage of the family… Having an outside panel evaluating standard professional practices and policies and ethical guidelines and develop a set of rules that we can follow, is good for us.”

Smith acknowledges that there are problems with the study he plans to commission. The first has to do with the organization he wants to hire, the Washington News Council. The second is that he has only $10,000 to spend, a sum he admits is inadequate.

“I’m not a huge fan of news councils philosophically,” Smith says. But everywhere else he turned for outside review, he encountered a personal conflict of interest because of longstanding friendships with the would-be reviewers.

Many journalists, like EWU’s Stimson, see news councils as being made up of companies and organizations that would, in effect, like to give media watchdogs a little obedience training. “The value of journalism in our society is that it’s the one institution that’s unsupervised by government,” says Stimson. “It’s the one American institution that’s totally free. News councils, basically, want journalists to apologize for doing good journalism.”

Bill Morlin, the senior Cowles reporter with 34 years on the job, agrees with Stimson. News councils, he says, “many times don’t represent a broad view of the journalistic profession. They represent other interest groups, political or business groups. Many times there’s only token journalistic representation.” For that reason among others, says Morlin, various professional organizations he has belonged to over the years oppose news councils. (He cites the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press.)

The Washington News Council’s membership roster underscores Morlin’s skepticism. A founding board member was Jim Ellis of the Seattle law firm Preston Gates and Ellis, which was a defendant in the River Park Square securities fraud case. Steve Boyer, a current Washington News Council vice president, is also an executive vice president of Rockey Hill and Knowlton, the Cowleses’s public relations firm.

While Morlin applauds Smith’s efforts to examine The Spokesman-Review’s record of covering River Park Square, he doubts the Washington News Council is suited for the job. Morlin wanted it emphasized that I approached him for comment, and that he had no involvement with River Park Square coverage.

“I think Steve Smith should deserve praise from the community and from those who have been critical of the newspaper’s coverage,” says Morlin, because “he’s looking at issues that didn’t occur on his watch.”

Nevertheless, Morlin generally agrees with the anonymous Spokesman-Review reporter who told me that the paper’s reporting of the Cowles mall created a stench.

Choosing his words carefully, Morlin put it this way: “It’s my belief that the newspaper’s coverage of the development phases and the public/private financial arrangement surrounding River Park Square left a credibility stench that is still lingering in the newsroom and the community. My comment is not directed at any one single person that’s a current or former member of our staff. It’s sort of a general observation I’m directing at a variety of people.”

Steve Smith’s other problem in seeking an independent audit is money. Smith told me that various sources he had consulted about the examination estimated it would cost $50,000. That’s $40,000 more than he has to spend. If it takes the assignment, the Washington News Council itself, says Smith, will have to raise the difference. Clearly, that further muddies already murky water. Will the News Council want to raise funds to analyze a “stench” implicating one of its own members?

But even that dilemma may be minor compared to the greater credibility challenge now facing The Spokesman-Review. The April 8, 2006 death of Jo Savage, and the way the Cowles paper has covered it so far, makes it likely that the legacy of River Park Square will figure in Spokane’s future for some time to come.

At issue now is whether the Cowles family and city officials willfully ignored repeated warnings that the River Park Square garage might not be safe. How honestly will the paper pursue the story? The Savage coverage to date poses concerns. The paper never reported on the 1996 Walker study raising questions about the physical condition of the Cowles garage. Betsy Cowles herself, River Park Square’s developer, has yet to be quoted in a story about Savage’s death. Not only that, the paper makes no mention of whether comment from Cowles was even sought.

Jonathan Brunt, The Spokesman-Review reporter covering the Savage story, says he has left messages on Cowles’s voicemail, and that she responded with messages on his voicemail.

“The messages that were left by Betsy were, ‘Call Jennifer West [of Rockey Hill and Knowlton]. She’s gonna be able to provide you the information you need,’” Brunt told me.


“MORE THAN 200 YEARS AGO, Thomas Jefferson said he foresaw battles ‘between rapacious capitalism and democracy,’” Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen said in his May 2003 Senate testimony. “Jefferson understood that power and size, left unchecked, would invite abuse and would crowd out civic values and would overwhelm the public interest... It has always been that the most serious problem in American journalism is not what we cover, but what we don’t cover. When the watchdog stops barking, we’re all in trouble.”

For her part, former Spokane City Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers sees only one way the credibility cloud over The Spokesman-Review can ever be lifted.

“The Cowles family should either get out of the newspaper business or get out of the real estate business.” —L.S. (July 14, 2006)

—END—


Link:
The Washington News Council responds to this article.


RELATED STORIES

Death by Parking
Were poor maintenance and improper inspection
of the Cowles garage fatal?

‘A Newspaper Monopoly Town’
An old Harvard economics thesis foreshadowed
the River Park Square controversy


REFERENCES AND LINKS

Betsy Cowles Memo to Jim, Stacey Cowles, Feb. 1, 1996
Obtained during litigation, this confidential memo of River Park Square developer Betsy Cowles notes the family’s “ground rules,” which included the plan to contribute no more than $15 million toward the redevelopment project.

Betsy Cowles's Editing, Oct. 22, 1996
This one-page fax discovered in 2003 during the securities fraud litigation shows that a Spokesman-Review news story draft by reporter Alison Boggs was substantially altered. A forensic documents expert hired by Camas magazine concluded the notations were likely made by Betsy Cowles. Ms. Cowles refused to comment. Also see Camas magazine story, “Breaking the News,” Oct. 2, 2003.

Defeating the Mayor, June 26, 2000
Betsy Cowles writes to PR consultant John Giese of Rockey Hill and Knowlton to say that she and her brother Stacey want to be sure Mayor John Talbott, a River Park Square critic, is defeated in the next election. She notes, “we probably need to be more behind the scenes than up in front.” Talbott was defeated in November 2000. To read the related Camas magazine story, click here.

Letter to Newspaper Editor Steve Smith, Jan. 3, 2006
Camas magazine senior editor Tim Connor wrote to Spokesman-Review editor Steve Smith, attaching a list of documents damaging to the River Park Square project that were never reported by the newspaper.

Steve Smith to Tim Connor, Jan. 4, 2006
In response to Connor’s letter of Jan.3rd, Smith promises an independent audit of the newspaper’s coverage of River Park Square. “It will look at whether or not we did our job as a news organization.”


CAMAS MAGAZINE
Independent reporting on the River Park Square controversy.
Especially, see the following articles:

“Investigation Wins National Prize,” April 13, 2004
“How The Spokesman-Review Subverted Democracy in Spokane, Washington” Lands Top Journalism Award

“All in the Family” (part 1), Mar. 22, 2001
In the evolution of Spokane's controversial public/private partnership, boundaries blurred between The Spokesman-Review, the Cowles mall, and the city. Can citizens trust the daily newspaper to provide fair reporting on the publisher's business interests?

“All in the Family” (part 2), Mar. 29, 2001
How Stacey and Betsy Cowles compromised their newspaper and the city

“All in the Family” — Big League Spin (Sidebar), Mar. 29, 2001
The reputation of Hill and Knowlton

“Camas Wins Journalism Award,” June 2, 2002
“All in the Family” by Larry Shook wins top national award

“Cowles Conflict of Interest Draws Censure,” May 15, 2003
In a U.S. Senate hearing, Seattle Times publisher criticizes Spokane family

“Breaking the News,” Oct. 2, 2003
Betsy Cowles apparently edited a crucial RPS story in a way that significantly changed it, and she may have lied under oath about her actions.

“Under the Influence,” August 16, 2001
An 11th-hour crisis with AMC, threatening 40 percent of the garage’s projected revenues, was kept secret from bondholders and the public. See: Part 1, Part 2, and “Box Canyon.”