Massive failure of disclosure by writer brings Seattle Weekly cover story into question*

Craig Silverman — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:33:55 +0000

Seattle Weekly published a remarkable cover story last week. Over the course of more than 6,000 words, it made the argument that true crime author Ann Rule made a series of mistakes and false conclusions in her book, Heart Full of Lies.

The book tells the story of the shooting death of Oregon pilot Chris Northon. He was killed by his wife, Liysa. Seattle Weekly’s story argued that she “was failed by her original lawyer, an overzealous district attorney, and Rule, who claimed that Liysa was not the battered wife she’d portrayed herself to be, but rather a sociopath who’d concocted tales of abuse as a justification for shooting her husband.”

The author of the piece is Rick Swart, the former editor and publisher of the Wallowa County Chieftain**, a community newspaper in the area where the crime took place. He pitched the piece to Seattle Weekly and they published it last week.

The problem is Swart committed a massive failure of disclosure. Here’s how Seattle Weekly’s Caleb Hannan explains the issue in his editor’s note, which is here and was added to the top of the cover story:

What Swart failed to reveal to us is that he’s now engaged to Liysa.

Oh yes, that’s a bit of a problem. After being asked about his failure to disclose this major piece of information, here’s what Swart told the paper:

It’s a freelance piece first of all. I’m selling you a product. So it’s not like you’re my boss and you need to know my personal life. My background is in community newspapers where we write about people we know, people we have relationships with, all the time. We don’t have the luxury of big staffs. So we’re not as able to have those arms-lengths relationships I guess…I’m willing to have all this fall squarely on my shoulder.

Hannan offers a total rebuke to that reasoning:

It should go without saying that this is not a satisfactory response. If you’re writing about your fiancee, or anyone with whom you have a relationship, you tell the reader. Community newspaper, national newspaper, alt-weekly. It doesn’t matter.

He’s right. It’s a bullshit excuse. And now whatever good, accurate work Swart did in reporting and telling the story is pretty much useless. His failure to be honest with his editor and with the public means the story can’t be trusted as it currently exists. Seattle Weekly will have to reexamine and in effect re-report the story to see what is and isn’t true.

Hannan said that’s what they’re going to do:

Needless to say, it’s now clear that our philosophy and Swart’s differ. As a result, we’ll be double and triple-checking the facts he first provided us, facts that were obtained, like we said, from court documents and interviews Swart says he conducted.

We will, of course, let you know what we find out as soon as we find it out. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks, James!

*Correction July 25, 2011: A few seconds after publishing this post I saw a correction I had made to a draft wasn’t reflected in the published headline. So I changed the mistaken reference to Seattle Week to the correct Seattle Weekly. It was done in about 10 seconds so I also fixed the URL to reflect the correction. After checking the RSS feed I realize the mistaken headline made it out to some subscribers, so I apologize if you clicked on the old URL and were sent to an error page.

**Correction July 28, 2011: I originally and incorrectly reported that Rick Swart is the editor and publisher of the Wallowa County Chieftain. In fact, he is the former editor and publisher. Thanks to Josh for reporting this error.

Rest is fine

Craig Silverman — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:00:41 +0000

A few misfires found their way into the September/October issue. In Terry A. Dalton’s piece on Mike Pride, an editor added a phrase asserting that Pride started his thirty-year career at the Concord Monitor on the sports desk. In fact, he started at the Monitor as the managing editor, and had been a sports writer earlier in his career at The Tampa Tribune, among other papers. In that article, we also reported that Felice Belman had left the Monitor three times for jobs at bigger dailies, only to be lured back to Concord. One of those times she left to work on a gubernatorial campaign.
In Steve Wasserman’s bio at the end of the cover story, “Goodbye to All That,” we should have mentioned in the interest of full disclosure that among Wasserman’s clients at the literary agency Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson is the Columbia Journalism Review.
In that same piece, we reported that the books editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had been “shunted aside” in a reconfiguration of the newspaper’s arts coverage, and that book reviews had been “largely replaced” with wire copy. As explored in a piece by Julia M. Klein on page 40, the entire paper was being reconfigured, not just arts, and many jobs were altered. The books editor in fact resigned rather than reapply for the new books job, she says, because she did not like the direction books coverage was heading. The AJC’S current coverage includes more column inches on books and authors than in the past, though a substantial minority of book criticism is from wire services.
In his profile of Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo, David Glenn wrote that TPM “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil.” This assertion ignores some important work done on the story by McClatchy Newspapers’ D.C. bureau.
And finally, we regret that we spelled Catherine Zeta-Jones’s name with a K, and called the Drug Enforcement Administration an Agency.

Regret the Error » failure of disclosure

Massive failure of disclosure by writer brings Seattle Weekly cover story into question*

Rest is fine