A New Year’s Day brick through The Inlander’s rose-coloured windows.
On my way through the Browne’s Addition Rosauers yesterday I picked up two bottles of champagne, a couple peppers, curry sauce, two bottles of tonic water and a free copy of The Inlander.
I should explain the champagne. I thought the 2000s were a miserable decade, and one that will likely be viewed by historians as a pivotal period in which America’s worst instincts devoured its best. Jaded though I am, I still have children to raise, I still have hope that someone will teach me canasta in time for my golden years. I take all reasonable steps, including champagne and medicinal quantities of Guinness, to not succumb to the inner Irish blues that pull at the corners of my smile.
But, apparently, I’m still not seeing all the sunshine in this gray sky, especially here, in Spokane. Here, according to The Inlander’s Joel Smith and Nicholas Deshais, Spokane “finally became a real city in the 2000s” thanks to River Park Square and the turn to the strong mayor system of government.
“This,” Smith/Deshais announce in the first graph of the paper’s 12/31/09 lead news story, “is the decade that did it.”
As to River Park Square in particular, Smith & Deshais think it’s well past time to accept all the expensively promoted economic benefits of the painfully subsidized mall, and slide a big granite slab over the well-documented corruption that was at the heart of the project.
Lots of people who are pleased as punch about RPS are quoted in the story, which advances the rather laughable proposition that even Jim Sheehan’s developments near Main and Division are at least an indirect consequence of River Park Square’s makeover.
Some sense of sobriety in assessing River Park Square’s economic effect would have been useful. In my accounting, the approximate $40 million Spokane will lose to pay off the securities fraud case doesn’t begin to reflect the true financial cost of RPS.
But the deeper flaw in this story is the way it was put together. Not a single RPS critic is quoted in the story to provide a perspective that is different than the one Smith and Deshais are pitching. Rather, the proposition that RPS has been a transcending boon to Spokane gets all the varnish. The story doesn’t explicitly say that the ends justified the means at RPS, but that’s the general thrust of the piece–that it’s time to celebrate a vibrant downtown and put the rancor, the real and hidden costs to the city, and the dirty secrets at the heart of it behind us, because the benefits overwhelm those costs.
As I may have mentioned before, I happen to see the River Park Square story a little differently. Tom Grant, Larry Shook and I broke the RPS scandal through our investigative reporting for Camas Magazine and KXLY. Among other things, that reporting provided the factual underpinnings for the successful federal securities fraud suit against the city and RPS.
I’m still very proud of the reporting but I’m also a realist. The Cowleses still buy ink by the barrel and, for that reason, it’s more likely than not that, a generation from now, the whole matter of the secret files, the fraud, and the enormous costs of the misadventure to taxpayers will have washed away like yesterday’s snowfall. But what’s a little surprising is to see Spokane’s supposedly “alternative” newspaper, The Inlander, seemingly determined to beat the Cowles family at its own public relations messaging.
In their story, this is how Smith/Deshais handle opposing views:
“the RPS scandal is nearly forgotten (except by a few tenacious outsider critics).”
Not to be too much of a stickler, but perhaps the RPS scandal would be less forgotten if Spokane’s journalists reminded their readers more frequently about how the debt service on the securities fraud settlement complicates the city’s current budget crisis.
Yet, the real tip off here is this clever journalistic card trick that seems to eliminate the need to even consider opposing points of view. As Smith/Deshais apparently see it, there’s no need to interview or actually quote anybody with a different point of view because (a) they barely exist, (b) they exhibit tenacious behavior (read, crazy), and (c) they are “outsider(s),” i.e. not real Spokane people.
Well, let’s explore this a little. I would gladly accept the criticism that I and other RPS critics are “tenacious.” But “outsider critics?” What the bleep is that? Do we need Spokane Club memberships?
The journalistic elegance of marginalizing the critics is that Smith/Deshais don’t actually have to burden themselves with naming who they’re dissing. Okay, maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s former councilwoman Cherie Rodgers. Or maybe it’s my old partner Larry Shook. Or the ghost of Mark Fuhrman, the former LA police detective whose radio show abruptly ended after he began asking his own questions about the lack of criminal indictments in the RPS case. Or maybe it’s former Spokane police officer and Pend Oreille County Sheriff Tony Bamonte. Or maybe it’s “Ron the Cop,” Ron Wright, the former California economic crimes investigator who launches regular email broadsides calling for criminal investigations of RPS.
But whoever these irrelevant “outsider critics” are, it’d be useful to know how journalists like Smith/Deshais decide who’s credible and who’s not, who gets interviewed, who gets quoted, who gets to represent the consensus and who gets casually assigned to the nut house.
In all seriousness, the problem with the slanted and superficial reporting in The Inlander story is that it actually brings us closer to the day when something like the RPS fiasco would happen again in Spokane. Why? Because, more so than other places, Spokane’s civic foundation is structurally skewed, markedly, to favor the interests and schemes of the Cowles family and its allies, whose ethics are lamentable at best. I’ve listened to young business people tell me that this is just how it works in Spokane. The unspoken rule (some refer to it as “Spokane nice”) is that if you want to be an insider in Spokane, if you want to stay here, and work here, you better check your conscience and ethics in Reardan, get familiar with your sacred cows, and be sweet about it.
This sort of civic Darwinism will shape a community by subtraction. You will lose people who will speak truth to power or those who will fight for worthy causes that would otherwise go wanting. The exiling of Spokane’s most courageous and decorated broadcast reporter, Tom Grant, is a perfect example, but not the only. Spokane still loses good people, in government and out, because they won’t bend to the will of Spokane’s political and civic cronyism.
While City Hall, under Mayor Verner, is less of a fortress than it was in the 1990s and in the 2000s under Mayor John Powers and his pit bull deputy, Jack Lynch, it would be premature to say we’ve turned a corner in openness and accountability. The city still lobbies annually to weaken the state’s public records act and employs an assistant city attorney who is outspoken in his opposition to central provisions of the law. Lest we forget, the city is still enduring a criminal investigation by the Justice Department for allegedly conspiring to violate the civil rights of a developmentally disabled janitor who was killed by city police officers.
I’ll concede that our night life and the cultural buzz in the downtown core is an inspiring trend. (It’s actually pretty darn good over on Main & Browne, too, by the way.) So, hey, good on us. And the food’s better and more eclectic than it was when I moved here in 1980, too. I love Chris O’Harra and her book store. I’m optimistic about our new city council. I even like the Mobius Children’s Museum in River Park Square.
But to announce that the fruition of River Park Square has led us to a new promised land, where we’re a “real city” for the first time in our history, is a bit much. We’re still closer to Gotham than to Camelot and perhaps a deeper examination of Spokane’s vital signs is in order before we start drinking the champagne of bubbly boosterism that The Inlander’s intrepid reporters have uncorked for us.
Oh, and Happy New Year.
–Tim Connor
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