Not an Unbiased Report

Everyone’s reporting is influenced by their beliefs, including the Yakima Herald’s.

People get into journalism because they have opinions and they want to change the world. Journalism majors are weaned on stories of Hearst more or less instigating a war with Spain, or Woodward and Bernstein taking down a president. Journalism majors live for the fantasy of having such influence to use for fame or infamy. Some settle for the shabby second-place of being imitation hacks in the vein of H.S. Thompson on Vice. Others merely write what they can for the rare paid reporter positions.

Not every writer came from a journalism program, but no one makes his career reporting on events unless he cares deeply about them. This creates passionate journalism highlighting facts which are relevant to the journalists’ personal values, the story he wishes to tell. Facts outside the journalists story are irrelevant and therefore untold.

This is unavoidable, and beyond blame. At least, it is until they tell you they are merely reporting facts and aren’t trying to influence outcomes. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the contradiction and the hypocrisy of a journalist who claims to be neutral. We can’t demand unbiased journalists, but we can reasonably expect our journalists to be honest about what their biases are, and what story they are filtering their facts through.

Here is a story that I see, and the facts that strike me as relevant.

There is a county, the second largest in a state. That county’s politics are dominated by the city which is the county seat and namesake: Yakima. In that city, there is one paper, the Yakima Herald-Republic, which has a near monopoly on web-content for local news. It has the distinction of being owned by a Seattle paper, which feeds it content, and is effectively the local reporter to the AP. There’s another paper with almost no web presence, which mostly reports on business, and may be found in the break room at your office. There is one radio station which significantly covers local events and generally does a good job of it. However that station waits until general elections for significant coverage. Too late for voters to have a real selection between several candidates which might match their views closely. Those choices are only found in the primaries. The radio station’s policy is not to cover primary elections in depth. There are a few evening news stations, but they are based out of other cities far away. Those stations spend the very least possible to get a few minutes of news per night for Yakima.

I’ve been at news events and had friends in the business, and watched and assisted with the process. It works like this: the news photographers roll up 15 minutes or so early. The various networks often help each other with setup. A sort of comradery to get enough quick shots for the story and go home. They test equipment, then get comments from a passerby or two. The story is going to be less than a minute long, so just about any stranger’s two sentences will fill the pair of clips that the story will take. Finding meaningful sources and verifying facts would take time. Shoot it at 3p.m. Edit it up by 4p.m. and make sure everything is ready for the 6 o’clock. If there’s a real story, we can all just repeat whatever today’s AP reporter says tomorrow. They probably did the homework for us. News is a small business around here, and investigation takes staff hours that exceed the margins.

That’s been the status quo that I’ve experienced.

I’ve lamented for years the lack of timely (not to mention trustworthy) information on local events, and also cultural events. Then I ran for elected office, and had interviews with numerous local news sources. Most significantly, print and video interviews with the local paper.

Each of the print interviews misquoted me in minor and in significant ways, then incorrectly summarized my views. The video interviews were professional, the editing left out my core platform and left in issues peripheral to my campaign.

A voter would have never learned what my campaign was about from this level of coverage.

I saw it happen to the other candidates I was running against too.  This naturally jaded my opinion of the local paper, and increased my demand for an additional news source. I wanted a news source which minimized the journalistic bias by allowing the candidates to speak for themselves, but did not allow the candidates to weasel out of answering direct questions. One which set the same questions for each candidate, so that they could not help but reveal their philosophy, knowledge, and method of governing. So long as a reader could find the candidate which matched his views, and all the candidates were equally blindsided, just about any set of fixed questions would work.

After discussing with me and others numerous iterations of how such a publication could work, Kyle Smith informed me that he intended to write this paper. Smith asked me to contribute, as well as design some of our journalistic protocols. I leapt at that. I think I helped produce a paper which gave information not available elsewhere in a format which left very little room for each reporter to insert his bias. Each candidate spoke for him or herself directly to the voter. We got good feedback from four of the six candidates interviewed. The format was a winner, and our new quarterly had a good, but small start.

So what does this have to do with the headline?

Now a simple listing of facts. Do you see the same story that I do? (My opinion in parenthesis. In what I believe to be chronological order.)

1. The editor of the RSR hired the Yakima Herald-Republic to print the RSR. The RSR was distributed through a local printing and mailing company. Its distribution and print volume were limited by the resources of the new venture.
2. Of the candidates interviewed, Keith Effler and Kay Funk made it to the general election. Sandra Belzer, Tony Williams, and Chelsea Mack did not.
3. One recipient of the RSR was a supporter of Ms. Mack, a woman named Galusha. This person alleged publicly and in lawsuits that the RSR played a significant role in the loss of her preferred candidate. (I strongly doubt our small paper had that much influence, but if it did influence anyone, Mack still spoke for herself. I think people who read the article and shared her ideology would find her all the more favorable.)
4. Galusha published a series of speculative and also directly accusatory threads on Facebook, then contacted several people in the news industry. Several of these ran Galusha’s claims as presumed fact.
5. One of Galusha’s first contacts was Kaitlin Bain. Bain’s last position was the hearings reporter employed by the Yakima City Council. Her personal twitter feed primarily recited the talking points of the members of the Council. (Its content hasn’t changed appreciably since she became employed by the Herald. I think she was and still is effectively a spokesperson for several of the current members of the Council.)
6. Effler has based his platform around being unlike those particular members of the City Council, in beliefs, methods, and in understanding of the scope authority. (A person who supports the status-quo would probably not support Mr. Effler. Ms. Bain’s relationship with the City Council can be observed easily on her social media profiles. This may bias her against Mr. Effler.)
7. The Herald ran several stories in quick succession written by Bain which strongly implied wrongdoing by Mr. Effler. However, these frequently reiterated that facts were not yet available, and implied that the lack of facts itself is damning evidence. A bold journalistic tactic. The primary source cited was Ms. Galusha, Mack’s supporter. (I could fill pages with the blatant contradictions in her various statements in public forums, but apparently the Herald found her claims sufficiently credible to be the basis of a series of negative articles about a candidate it opposes. Galusha’s most frequent claim was that Mr. Effler was actually the editor of the RSR, and interviewed himself, and orchestrated the whole paper as an elaborate and effective conspiracy to rig the election. None of these were true, and most could be refuted with publicly available information at the time, not to mention by the actual content of the RSR. But the Herald is neutral, and Brutus is an honorable man…)
8. The Herald discovered that the Herald was the mysterious printer then gave its client, the RSR’s, receipts and account information to Ms. Galusha. Thereby feeding private information within its control to a litigant against a current candidate. (But the Herald is neutral, and Brutus is an honorable man…)
9. Effler interviewed with the Herald’s reporter Bain saying that he had been involved in some discussions prior to the formation of the RSR, and entertained joining the project, but when he decided to be a candidate, he “turned over the reins” and was not involved in the writing or control of the paper, and that the RSR was truly independent from his campaign. He further said that he had sold some photos and graphic design elements to the editing staff of the RSR.
10. Despite that Mr. Effler had told Ms. Bain about the fact that the RSR had always been Kyle Smith’s venture, and that Effler had encouraged Mr. Smith that the RSR was a viable project, Ms. Bain chose to ignore Effler’s admission of initial minor involvement and ran a headline as follows “Yakima City Council candidate says he wasn’t involved with ‘Rain Shadow” (July 27).
11. Effler immediately protested to the editor of the Herald that this is not what he told Ms. Bain at all. The Herald refused to print a retraction.
12. Instead of retracting this headline, Ms. Bain’s next story two days later, hid that she had been told this information from her first interview with Effler. He told the same thing to the public in a live interview elsewhere, and Bain treated this as though Effler never told her about his minor involvement and then contradicted himself. Her headline read, “Expert says candidate’s involvement in ‘Rain Shadow Report’ inappropriate, could break state law” that article again stated that it was “unclear whether the [RSR] violated election laws….” Then strongly implied a probability of criminal consequences. (The article also mentions my name as though the fact that I know Keith is insidious. I know most of the politically involved people in this small town. That’s cute, Kaitlin. You know most of the same people too. Does that also disqualify you from reporting? )
13. Effler states that his attorney informed him that he would have won the case, it would have been costly and generated negative press during the general election. For tactical reasons, Effler settles with Galusha. Ms. Bain and the Herald run yet another article implying that the settlement with no admission of wrongdoing is tantamount to an admission of wrongdoing. By this time, public documents show exactly who Kyle Smith is, and that he is not Mr. Effler. Mr. Smith has published a statement about when and why he decided to start the RSR. However, the Herald article knowing that Effler has always said the RSR was Smith’s project and his idea and instead prints the following, “When questioned, Effler said the handout was originally his idea…”.

The staff of the Herald has deliberately misstated information which it revealed and withheld other information to later incorrectly reveal it, creating scandal for a candidate. It’s refused to correct information it knows is not true, and pretends to discover the fact that it is the printer. It reveals its clients’ private information to their political opponents. How can this paper maintain the pretense of objectivity?

The Herald and its staff are entitled to have political opinions. However, if the story the Herald wishes to run is about a local paper, whose politically-connected staff biases its journalism to manipulate an election, then it should investigate the Herald. I expect no more nor less of the Herald. It is merely a representative sample of our local news culture – the source that the rest repeat. It’s time for another voice – not one based in Seattle.