Category: Media

Media

Two Stranger Reporters Put on Leave for Investigation Into Potential Ethical Violations

By Erica C. Barnett

Two reporters from the Stranger—Ashley Nerbovig and Hannah Krieg—have been put on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation into allegations that they behaved unethically by failing to disclose and lying about a separate ethical breach by former Stranger editor Rich Smith.

Full disclosure: I worked at the Stranger from 2003 to 2009.

The investigation stems from a story that has been circulating in Seattle political circles since last year: Smith, who was then the Stranger’s news editor and the head of its endorsement board, had a one-time sexual encounter not long before the November election with Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who was then a candidate for Seattle City Council. Rinck was elected in a landslide last November.

In an email to staff yesterday, Rob Crocker, the chief financial officer of the Stranger’s parent company, Noisy Creek, announced that Nerbovig and Krieg had “been placed on paid leave,” and that both “are prohibited from representing themselves as employees of Noisy Creek or any of its properties. Their access to company information and communications is also suspended.”

The sternly worded email nods to the fact that Stranger reporters are now represented by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which is reportedly defending them against the allegations.”In the interests of fairness to Hannah, Ashley, and all other members of Noisy Creek, we need to undertake an internal investigation, which we hope to resolve quickly,” Crocker wrote. “We have contacted the Noisy Union and will be coordinating with them,.”

Hannah Murphy Winter, who replaced Smith as editor of the Stranger last July, told PubliCola, “I can’t speak to the nature of the investigation until it’s been completed,” but noted that “the allegations are serious.”

Smith was fired late last October for reasons unrelated to the incident with Rinck. “We weren’t aware of Rich’s alleged conduct at the time he was let go,” Murphy Winter said.

According to sources, the investigation that’s happening now concerns whether Nerbovig and Krieg  knew about the incident and lied about it to their editors. The investigation is also looking into allegations that they told their editors they just learned about the incident recently and attempted to convince people associated with Rinck to support their cover story. The Stranger has rarely put reporters on leave; the last time they did so was after a barrage of right-wing threats in response to a joke Nerbovig made on X about the first Trump assassination attempt.

There’s no evidence that anyone in Rinck’s circle agreed to lie on the reporters’ behalf, and the investigation, which Murphy Winter said would be “quick,” is reportedly intended to determine whether the allegations against the two reporters are true.

Smith and Rinck declined to comment. PubliCola sent questions to Nerbovig and Krieg and received a response from Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild representative Courtney Scott, which read: “Due to the ongoing investigation regarding Hannah Krieg and Ashley Nerbovig we have advised them not to respond to these questions. The Noisy Creek Union and The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild are cooperating with The Stranger’s management team in the investigation and have no other comments at this time.”

It’s obviously unethical for a reporter or editor to have intimate contact or a romantic relationship with a candidate or elected official the paper covers, because it creates a conflict of interest that calls the publication’s integrity into question. Any news staffer in that situation would be obligated, at the very least, to immediately tell their supervisor and stop covering that person or participating in editorial decisions that involve them, including not just endorsements but daily coverage and story assignments. Lying or concocting a false story to protect a colleague who committed an ethical breach is also an unambiguous ethical violation. The obligation to avoid dishonesty is spelled out in many publications’ code of conduct.

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Murphy Winter replaced Smith as editor of the Stranger after Noisy Creek—a new venture started by former Grist CEO and 2016 Congressional candidate Brady Walkinshaw—bought the paper last July. At that time, Smith returned to his former position as news editor, and was fired from that position three months later.

While Murphy Winter couldn’t confirm any details about the investigation, she did note that the Stranger has “an employee code of conduct that we expect our employees to adhere to,” and that lying about or covering up an inappropriate relationship or incident “would very clearly fall into the terms of that code.”

There may be knee-jerk condemnations of Rinck for fooling around with the news editor of a publication that gave her their endorsement. But by all accounts, the Stranger had already endorsed Rinck, a progressive, before the incident took place—and her opponent was appointed council incumbent Tanya Woo, whom the Stranger called “[o]ne of the dimmer bulbs in the council’s already flickering chandelier, [who] evinces zero capacity for discussing complex legislation, no will to put forth any major legislation of her own, and otherwise displays total fealty to the corporate class.” (Thesaurus much?)

That said, the incident reflects poor judgment on both sides. For Rinck, who was running for office, it was clearly a lapse in judgment, of the sort that male politicians tend to get away with unscathed. For Smith, it appears to have been an ongoing ethical violation, since he did not disclose the incident to his bosses after it happened.

Smith did, however, reportedly tell Nerbovig and Krieg several months ago. The two reportedly did not disclose what they knew to management until earlier this month, when they said they had just learned about the incident for the first time last week. Apparently, in one version, I was the source of the supposed rumor: Someone who overheard me blabbing about it while out drinking with a group of journalists told them what I said. This did not happen.

Media, Police, Uncategorized

“I Drag Him, I Throw Him to the Side”: Right-Wing Activist Claims “Self-Defense” In Attack on Trans Woman

Cop’s verdict: “He’s fuckin’ lying, dude!” 

By Erica C. Barnett

A fired local TV reporter who now makes videos for Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk’s youth group, Turning Point USA, admitted punching and dragging a trans woman along a sidewalk near a temporary migrant encampment earlier this year, telling Officer Nicholas Burgess he was acting purely in “self-defense” after a “mob” of people tried to prevent him from doing “my job as a journalist.”

PubliCola reported on the incident, in which multiple witnesses say ex-KOMO news staffer Jonathan Choe repeatedly punched the woman and dragged her along the sidewalk, ripping out her hair, in April. Since then, we obtained body camera footage of Choe’s conversation with police through a records request.

The video shows that immediately after Burgess hung up with Choe, the other officer in the car shouted out, “He’s fuckin’ lying, dude!” Burgess responded, “I don’t know” before turning off his camera, ending the tape. Burgess later wrote that he found Choe’s claim of self-defense “plausible,” but his partner, after listening to Choe’s version of events, clearly did not.

“As a journalist, what I do is I show up and get video and do interviews,” Choe told Burgess, who responded to Choe’s 911 call from his car and put him on speakerphone. “And as I was at the press conference, about two, three minutes in, I’m recording, and then the crowd turns on me after they notice what I was doing. And a lot of folks in this crowd don’t like my kind of reporting, because I tell the truth, so they basically said I wasn’t welcome there.”

As we reported earlier this year, multiple witnesses reported that Choe pulled out a retractable baton and wielded it in a threatening manner in the vicinity of a Angolan migrant who was living at the temporary camp near the Garfield Playfield. The woman Choe punched and dragged told us she put her body between Choe and the man but did not touch him. A heavily edited video Choe later posted on X showed him taunting a person holding their hands in the air, calling them a “little soy boy” and repeatedly threatening to call the police.

Later, according to several witnesses’ official statements to police, he punched the woman in the face and dragged her by her hair, ripping out a chunk of it before grabbing her phone and running away, dropping his baton in the process. The witnesses who told police what happened included a Parks Department employee who happened to be working nearby.

In his call, Choe appears confident the police are on his side, telling him he was just trying to report on what was happening when a “Hispanic kid” “bumped” him, forcing Choe to attack her in self-defense. (In addition to mentioning the woman’s ethnicity three times in a seven-minute call, Choe consistently misgendered her.)

So, Choe continued, “I’m trying to clear the situation. I push this guy away. My hand gets tangled on this guy, so I’m on the ground. I’m walking away from this guy, and this guy’s on the ground, so I’m pushing him off, and then I leave.”

Choe—who told Burgess he has sent SPD “numerous hours” of video in the past—emphasized that he was definitely capable of “beat[ing] up” the woman he punched and dragged. “If I wanted to beat him up, if I wanted to attack him, I easily could have, but I left the scene,” Choe said. He added that he wanted to press charges against “at least the Hispanic kid.”

“I’m sick of being bullied,” Choe continued. “I get assaulted at these things all the time.” After Burgess suggested his version of events was pretty confusing, and told him the woman said Choe had assaulted her, Choe chuckled loudly. “That’s hilarious,” he told the officer. “Yeah, if ‘assault’ means I defended myself, because they instigated everything. Last I checked, in America, I’m allowed to defend myself.”

Choe appeared keen to make sure the cops knew he was a serious journalist with real credentials—not some random weirdo wielding an iPhone and a retractable weapon at a refugee camp. “I’m trying to do my job as a journalist. I have a long history in the city. I have a full body of work. And, you know, people are on the far left accuse me of all kinds of things, and they now try to be the victim the moment I defend myself. … I’m gonna stand for truth.”

Choe never posted any evidence that he was assaulted. He told the officers he put his phone away during those critical moments, “so the actual self-defense piece is not recorded.” This is par for the course: Videos from other events Choe has attended show him instigating conflicts by rapidly invading people’s personal space, then running away while threatening to call the police or claiming someone assaulted him, often with their phone.

Choe did not respond to a request for comment. The last time we reached out to Choe about this incident, in April, he responded by boasting about his follower count on X and his new position at Kirk’s organization, which he described as a “national cable channel.”

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Media

What Seattle Will Lose If It Loses the Seattle Channel
City Council candidates Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Tanya Woo on a recent episode of “City Inside/Out.”

By Erica C. Barnett

In planning for a potential $260 million budget shortfall this year, Mayor Bruce Harrell asked most city departments to come up with potential cuts of 8 percent—a worst-case scenario the mayor’s office avoided by using about half the funds from the JumpStart payroll tax to pay for staff and services that are usually funded through the city’s general fund.

One department that did get gutted—not cut by 8 or 10 percent, but slashed in half—is the Seattle Channel, the city’s award-winning source for arts coverage, interviews with elected officials, campaign debates, and other original programming.

Harrell’s budget proposal would eliminate the jobs of three videographers who film, produce and edit programs and meetings, two half-time web positions, a senior producer, and the channel’s  operations manager. The cuts would mean the end of all original Seattle Channel programming, leaving only city council meetings and mayoral events.

During a recent presentation to the City Council, City Budget Office director Dan Eder that with the decline in cable subscriptions, the cable fees that help fund Seattle Channel are no longer enough to keep it going. “At this point, we just didn’t have enough money available to us… to continue that program,” Eder said.

In an email, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, Callie Craighead, made a distinction between “primary programming of government affairs” and “supplementary” or “additional” programming like the original work that has been the Seattle Channel’s mainstay for the past two decades. “Should the revenue forecast improve or if the City can arrange for other funding solutions, we would be supportive of restoring this additional programming,” Craighead said.

The cuts would save about $1.6 million—about 0.085 percent (0.008) of a $1.9 billion general-fund budget that includes tens of millions of dollars in new spending on police overtime, planning for the 2026 FIFA World Cup (which will include six matches in Seattle), and downtown beautification projects such as removing the fountain in Westlake Park.

The city has known about the decline in cable revenues for many years; last year, Harrell’s budget suggested using new tax revenues, based on the recommendations of the city’s Revenue Stabilization Work Group, to sustain the Seattle Channel and other programs with dwindling or unstable revenues. After voters elected a new, anti-tax city council last. year, Harrell changed his tune, issuing what amounted to a no-new-taxes pledge.

Shows that Harrell’s budget would eliminate immediately include “City Inside/Out,” a public affairs hosted by broadcasting veteran Brian Callanan; Art Zone, a “weekly love letter” to local arts and culture hosted by Nancy Guppy; and BookLust, a popular interview show hosted by Nancy Pearl, along with 20 other shows. Callanan, along with longtime producer Susan Han, has a year-to-year contract with the channel; both will lose their jobs if the cuts go through.

Gary Gibson, who managed the Seattle Channel from 2002 to 2007, recalled that the city set up a commission in 2001 to help revitalize the city’s cable-access channel, then called TV SEA, which only aired city council meetings and mayoral press conferences.

“It was a vehicle for putting out council meetings and the mayor’s press conferences—that’s all they did. There was no original programming and there was no enterprise reporting or any kind of content creation.” The commission said the channel should create engaging shows that would have an audience beyond meeting watchers, and put those shows online so people could watch them any time. “They had this idea to create a democracy portal—a two-way communication between government and the citizens,” Gibson said.

Now retired from broadcasting, Gibson led the channel through its transition in the early 2000s, from a standard public-access cable channel (called TV-SEA) that aired mayoral press conferences and council meetings, into a unique online resource offering original shows like “City Inside/Out,” “Ask the Mayor,” and election debates.

Under Harrell’s plan, the Seattle Channel would once again be little more than a portal for council meetings and press events.

Han, who has been with Seattle Channel for 17 years, said she “did expect some belt-tightening” this year, but was surprised that Harrell proposed eliminating all of the channel’s award-winning programs. “We’re just going to have to really fight to try and save the show,” she said, referring to “City Inside/Out.” “I don’t know if we have the ability to save the station.”

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Harrell’s cuts would eliminate coverage that no one else in the city is providing—coverage that’s made possible, in part, because Seattle Channel is part of the city itself and has spent decades building trust with city leaders. The tone of its coverage is genuinely fair and balanced, and producers go out of their way to give both sides of an issue or campaign an opportunity to make their best case.

For example, during the heated debate over a proposal to recall then-council member Kshama Sawant in 2021, Han was able to convince Sawant to appear on a panel, moderated by Callanan, with representatives from the “Recall Sawant” campaign. It was the only time Sawant and her opponents sat down for a debate.

“I tried to get her own the show from April until November, and she finally said yes,” Han recalled. “That’s the thing with producing our show—you make a lot of phone calls before you hone into the right balance. And it’s not like we’re being paid hourly. We just really care that we have the best version of that show.”

Later this week, Callanan said, the Seattle Channel will hold another debate between proponents and opponents of the $1.55 billion transportation levy—a measure that has received little recent coverage from the shrinking local press corps or campaign reporters, who are largely focused on  national and state races.

“It’s going to be half hour, we’re going to have opposing sides, and we’re going to present some pretty comprehensive coverage on an issues that’s huge” to the city, Callanan said. “Here are the pros,  here are the cons, here is what both sides say. It’s that type of reporting” that will be lost if Harrell’s cuts go through, he said.

“Art Zone with Nancy Guppy” is another longtime staple of the Seattle Channel’s coverage.

Beyond election debates, the Seattle Channel provides ongoing coverage about the details of what the city council, mayor, and city departments are up to—everything from profiles of department leaders to half-hour sit-down interviews with council members. “I think this is something city should be really proud of,” Callanan said. “For me, it’s the idea of the city standing behind this ethic of preserving quality journalism that provides transparency into what they’re doing.”

While the Seattle Channel serves as a forum for elected officials, it isn’t a mouthpiece—which is one reason many mayors and council members have complained about the channel’s coverage over the years. Common complaints include charges that the channel gives too much time to opposing views; that its reporters should be producing promo pieces for elected officials, not journalism; and that it’s unreasonable to expect officials to sit down and answer questions.

Callanan said his goal has always been “talking to local officials in the best way possible. I want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to provide those avenues for local officials to be in front of people, have people ask questions, and have the officials respond.” However, he added, “It has been more and more challenging to get public officials to commit to interviews.”

Sometimes, this pushback has led to involuntary programming changes; for example, former mayor Ed Murray ended “Ask the Mayor,” a show where the mayor responded to viewer questions, by refusing to appear on it, and no subsequent mayor has revived the show.

Harrell has also reportedly groused about the channel’s coverage, along with the fact that its camera operators can’t always drop what they’re doing to cover his events; however, he’s the first mayor to propose eliminating 100 percent of its original programming and its two-person web team.

The mayor’s office insists that its decision to eliminate the Seattle Channel’s programming is a matter of simple budget math, not a response to its coverage. “We looked at other comparable cities with an active government-access television channel and the proposed 2025 Seattle Channel budget of $1.7 M is more in line with those cities.” Craighead said.

Harrell’s budget assumes that council meetings and his own press events will go up online without the two people who currently make that happen, which Han calls unrealistic. “Our web team is fantastic, and they’re also the ones that do the live stream and put the show on all these different platforms,” Han said. “When the mayor says we’re still going to be able to put all this stuff out and do livestreams and all that, I think he’s mistaken.”

Gibson, the former Seattle Channel general manager, said he doesn’t “really get the calculus” that led Harrell to propose eliminating everything that makes Seattle Channel unique among municipal TV stations. “It just doesn’t seem like that much to pay for that kind of transparency into government activities.”

City council members Sara Nelson and Dan Strauss have both publicly expressed their support for Seattle Channel since the mayor released his budget, and Nelson told a constituent she plans to introduce a budget amendment that would restore at least some funding this week. Neither Nelson nor council spokesperson Brad Harwood responded to PubliCola’s questions about the Seattle Channel or Nelson’s amendment.

Editor’s note: After we posted this story, Nelson put out a press release saying she was “working to preserve funding for the city’s Seattle Channel.” The announcement did not include any other details.

Media, public safety, race

Top Fire Official Helped Concoct Hoax Against Department, Targeting “Woke” Policies Like Vaccine Mandate

 

The former deputy fire chief and another firefighter created a fake “proud Latino” from South Park. Messages also show department staff trading vaccine conspiracy theories, using homophobic slurs, and providing packaged, “paint by numbers” stories to right-wing media.

By Erica C. Barnett

A Seattle Fire Department deputy chief, Tom Walsh, and a longtime firefighter, identified in Signal messages as Paul Patterson, concocted a ruse to deceive fire chief Harold Scoggins into changing the language the department uses to describe staffing shortages in an attempt to prove the department was too “woke,” then shopped the story to right-wing media. KTTH commentator Jason Rantz picked up the story and ran with it last year.

The messages were obtained through a citizen records request and are available on Muckrock.

Walsh and Patterson were among many SFD personnel who were furious over the COVID vaccine mandate that went into effect in 2021. Signal messages between Walsh and a half-dozen other fire department employees show the men endorsing conspiracy theories, making racially insensitive comments (such as suggesting that Scoggins can never be fired because he’s Black), and using the f-slur for gay men.

The story Walsh and Patterson peddled to Rantz involved a fabricated South Park resident, “Armando Paredes de Castillo,” a “proud Latino currently living in the South Park neighborhood”  who was offended by the term “brownout,” which fire departments use to describe short-staffing. Both Patterson and Walsh are white.

Patterson and Walsh spent weeks working on a letter to Scoggins, which they also released to Rantz, expressing outrage about the term and calling it racist against Latinos; the goal was to get Scoggins to direct staffers to stop using the term, which would supposedly demonstrate that the department was too “woke” and focused on the wrong things. The Signal messages suggest that Patterson was the primary author of the “Armando” emails, with assistance and editing from Walsh.

Neither Walsh nor Patterson responded to questions sent earlier this week.

Patterson went by the handle “L11Tillerman” in Walsh’s Signal account but was identified by name in several exchanges, including one from Walsh that read “Paul Patterson: The Harriett Tubman of SFD.” (In a message to a city IT staffer, Walsh referred to himself as a “modern-day Harriett Tubman,” apparently referring to his “path back” into the department despite being unvaccinated. The deputy fire chief and the IT staffer also discussed Bitcoin, “one-way tickets to South America,” and places they might move now that living in the US was untenable.)

“Armando” began writing to Scoggins in the spring of 2022, complaining in April, for instance, that “brownout” was a “discriminatory term” that was offensive to Latinos like himself. In a conversation with Patterson about an email from “Armando” in May, Walsh joked that the email was making him “tingle in my bathroom parts.”

On June 13, Scoggins distributed a memo saying they would stop using the term after “Concerns were raised that the term ‘brown out’ has negative connotations for communities of color. This change has been made to reaffirm SFD’s commitment and mission to serve all communities with dignity and respect.” In an exchange with Patterson that day, Walsh wrote, “And Armando’s memo just came out,” to which Patterson responded with an image (or GIF) of dancing monkeys. “Exactly,” Walsh responded.

Rantz reported on the memo the following day, touting it as an “EXCLUSIVE.” In his post, Rantz called Scoggins’ response “a wholly contrived issue that the chief is using to signal his wokeness. It’s as if he was under pressure to show his commitment to ‘equity’ but couldn’t think of any that are woke enough, so he made up an issue for the pats on the back he’ll no doubt receive.”

Rantz remained in contact with “Armando.” In August, Rantz filed a followup based on more info he’d received from “Armando,” reporting that “internal emails obtained by the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH show how the department kowtowed to the increasingly aggressive demands of one random Seattleite.”

In November, Rantz returned to the story yet again, this time with an email exchange with Patterson. (In a message to Walsh in October, Patterson wrote, “Jason asked for an interview, I declined but said I would give him a [sic] that was quotable. Feel free to edit or give your input”).

Walsh and Patterson debated how to talk to Rantz over Signal, and ultimately decided to deliver him anonymous quotes over email; in his piece, Rantz wrote that “Armando” “said he is an internal Seattle Fire source that wishes to stay anonymous.”

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Despite being fine with quoting a source who was anonymous even to him, Rantz’ followup excoriated Scoggins for failing to “vet” Castillo to determine that he was who he said he was—a Latino resident of South Park. (The city does not track down and verify the identity of every person who writes to them, which would cause obvious privacy and workload issues.) Patterson forwarded the story to Walsh, writing, “He didn’t hit a home run, but…”

The following February, after a lengthy back-and-forth on Signal to fine-tune the wording, “Armando” sent a followup to Scoggins and Harrell mocking the fire chief for falling for their “brownout” hoax. The point of the prank, they wrote, was to bring attention to Scoggins’ efforts to “divide us on vaccination, religion and race.”

Besides the vaccine mandate and the “brownout” language change, the letter complained about Mayor Bruce Harrell’s reaction when a firefighter wrote the mayor to complain about the mayor’s pro-choice statement when Roe v. Wade was overturned, which the firefighter called “virtue signaling, politically motivated nonsense.” Harrell’s office sent the email to the fire department’s HR department, which told the firefighter he should only communicate with the mayor through his chain of command.

The letter began, “I am the troll that single handily played into your woke ideology and manipulated you into the BROWN OUT cancel culture BS!”

You have shifted the paradigm and culture within the Seattle Fire Department from being a tight nit inclusive family to a poorly run business that has been run with tyranny & bias!

I highlighted the gaping tear in the fabric of common sense by arbitrarily saying I found the term “BROWN OUT” offensive. We are living in ridiculous time where anyone can “identify” as whatever they want and then throw a flag that the rest of society has to bend and lean into their irrational behavior and insist we reinvent language to accommodate made up feelings.

The purpose of this dog and pony show was to bring attention to couple of things that you have done that have ripped a gaping hole in the fabric of the Seattle Fire Department!

It went on for another 2,500 words in this vein.

Rantz wasn’t the only local right-wing commentator who ran with a packaged story from Walsh and Patterson. In February 2023, the pair shopped around a letter from a group of firefighters who claimed Scoggins had engaged in “presumed criminal activity” during the 2020 protests by, among other things, loaning stretchers to volunteer medics in the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).

After failing to get traction with Rantz and considering both Brandi Kruse (a former FOX13 reporter who, according to Patterson, “owed [Walsh] one from the Chaz”) and local right-wing provocateur Katie Daviscourt, the two men decided to go with Post Millennial writer (and failed Seattle City Council candidate) Ari Hoffman.

In their texts, Walsh and Patterson described the story as a “paint by numbers” piece. In a separate email with another firefighter, Steve Collins, around the same time, Walsh wrote, “Hoffman’s not gonna have to do any work. I’ve done it for him.’

Hoffman ran with the story on March 15, posting it under the headline, “EXCLUSIVE: Seattle fire chief faces backlash after coordinating with BLM, Antifa rioters during CHAZ occupation.”

The Signal messages included in the records request include Signal messages from deputy fire chief Walsh from 2021 through 2023. Many of the conversations are about the vaccine mandate, and refer to right-wing conspiracy theories that have been thoroughly debunked.

In many of the texts, Walsh and other fire department employees complain that the department has been taken over by “woke” vaccine proponents. “These fucking people are ruining my beloved fire department,” Walsh wrote in November 2021. The following March, Walsh wrote that he had “zero fucks left to give”; two days later, he wrote, “The city was monstrously good in the way they prosecuted the mandate. Fuckers. Evil, but good,” then made a joke about Seattle restaurants requiring “a proof of Ukraine support card before they’ll serve you.”

Despite writing that he would likely lose his job over the mandate, Walsh remained in his position until June, when he retired after 27 years at SFD. As of last year, he was still complaining about the vaccine mandate, writing, “Cocksuckers. Every last one of them” in an exchange with Collins on September 7, 2023.

In a separate exchange with Walsh, Collins said he was being disciplined for calling someone a “f-g” on Facebook after the other person was “whooping up the mandate;” Collins complained that the person sent the exchange to HR. “Of COURSE he did,” Walsh wrote. “Seattle is such a ‘run and tell mom’ town.”

Walsh also speculated, in a conversation with a fire lieutenant, about whether someone was a “tranny” or a “chick.”

As of July 31, Patterson was still listed as an active firefighter in Seattle’s online wage database and in the city’s internal employee directory. Collins left the department in 2021 after refusing to get the vaccine, and we were unable to locate contact information for him; however, he was quoted in the Free Beacon, a right-wing website, in 2023, complaining that “woke tests are making it harder for the macho guys to get hired” at SFD.

The Seattle Fire Department responded to our questions with the following statement: “The Seattle Fire Department is unable to provide comment due to an ongoing investigation and pending litigation.”

Media, Politics

Listen: PubliCola on KUOW (a Three-fer!)

By Erica C. Barnett

I was in the KUOW studios three times over the past week or so, including two appearances on Seattle Now (“Casual Friday” edition) with Patricia Murphy and one on Friday’s Week In Review, hosted by Bill Radke.

This week’s Casual Friday was something of a special occasion, because the other guest was Sandeep Kaushik, my co-host (along with David Hyde) on “Seattle Nice.” Sandeep, Trish and I had a great time talking about national news, including the Republican National Convention, MAGA’s influence in Washington, and (inevitably) the Trump assassination attempt, before returning to local news (AKA the stuff people in Seattle can actually do something about.)

In the past week, a Stranger writer was suspended for making a dumb joke on social media, an iconic monument to peace was cut off—literally—at the ankles, and ballots landed in mailboxes across the city, complete with “I Voted” stickers and an opportunity to choose between recently appointed Seattle Councilmember Tanya Woo and her highly motivated progressive challenger, Alexis Mercedes Rinck.

If you ever wanted a clean, cuss-free version of Seattle Nice, that’s pretty much what you’re in for here, including at least one moment where each of us struggles to think of a radio-friendly synonym for “bullshit.”

On “Week in Review,” Seattle Channel host Brian Callanan, Washington Policy Center senior researcher Paul Guppy, Radke and I debated whether ballot initiatives that repeal taxes—like a proposal to allow workers to opt out of a tax that funds long-term care insurance—should be required to include fiscal notes estimating how much such measures will cost the state.

I didn’t know much about this debate before this week, and I was surprised to learn that Republicans and libertarians oppose this kind of cost transparency—after all, isn’t it (in their view) a good thing whenever we reduce government spending?

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Continuing in that macroeconomic vein, we also talked about why some union leaders seem to be courting Trump (it was protectionism all along!) and an effort from the restaurant lobby to wiggle out of their obligation to start paying full minimum wage in Seattle, something they agreed to phase over 10 years when the $15 minimum passed a decade ago.

Also on the docket: A new fine for street racers, SPD interim chief Sue Rahr’s decision to fire infamous cop Daniel Auderer, and Sound Transit is finally getting rid of those inscrutable station pictographs.

Finally, if you missed last week’s Casual Friday, Jodi-Ann Burey and I were on talking about lake swimming, the Biden waiting game, and Seattle’s hot weather—all still topical!

Media

Former Police Chief Adrian Diaz Threatened PubliCola Over Post Describing His Coming-Out Interview

We need your help offsetting the cost of defending ourselves against the former police chief’s lawsuit threat.

By Erica C. Barnett

Former Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz, who was removed from his position earlier this year, threatened to sue PubliCola, and me personally, unless we removed a post describing the interview he did with conservative talk show host Jason Rantz.

In that interview, Diaz came out as gay and called the allegations in a complaint filed by several women, which included sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, “absurd.” (Since Diaz’ interview, four of the women have filed a lawsuit against the city and SPD.)

In his threat against PubliCola, Diaz claimed we had defamed him by suggesting that he considered being gay a defense against claims that he harassed or made sexual overtures to women. Many other observers, including KIRO radio, the Seattle Times, and the South Seattle Emerald, had a similar interpretation of Diaz’ interview, but as far as we were able to ascertain by speaking with other outlets, PubliCola was the only publication the former chief singled out for an explicit lawsuit threat.

Because our post was not libelous, we did not remove it; instead, we hired our own lawyers to fight back, which is what we would expect from any media outlet threatened by a baseless libel lawsuit.

We’re very glad to say that the matter is finally resolved, thanks to the capable work of our attorneys, who went above and beyond in responding to Diaz’ legal threats. However, high-quality representation is extremely expensive, and we were forced to spend many thousands of dollars on attorneys’ fees. That money came directly out of PubliCola’s budget, which funds our day to day operations as a small, independent, free publication.

Would you help us out by contributing what you can to offset the cost of our legal representation? (Other options, including Venmo, check, and subscription options, on our Support page). If 50 people can give $200 each, we’ll be well on our way to recouping our legal fees, which we expect to come in somewhere in the low five figures. If ten of you can give $1,000, we can knock out our legal bills this week.

This isn’t just about PubliCola, although I can’t overstate how much we need and appreciate your help defraying these major expenses. If public officials can silence journalists by threatening them with baseless lawsuits, it isn’t just one publication that’s vulnerable—it’s any journalist who makes powerful public figures mad by reporting on them, providing analysis, and holding them accountable.

The lawsuit threat was the first communication PubliCola received from Diaz. SPD’s communications office never requested changes to the post or respond to it any way.

In their initial letter, Diaz’ lawyers claimed that my post “contains multiple false and defamatory statements and you should retract it immediately—not just because it opens you and Publicola [sic] up to a libel lawsuit, but because it’s what any responsible journalist would do.” The letter, which arrived just before noon on a Thursday, gave PubliCola until 3pm the following to take the post down or get sued.

“We hope that won’t be necessary, and that you have the integrity to retract the post without further prompting. Please let us know when you and Publicola [sic] will delete the post,” the attorneys, Mark Thomson and Andy Phillips, with the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch, wrote.

The word “integrity” was followed by a footnote referencing a college journalism textbook.

PubliCola stands by our post about Rantz’s Diaz interview, and we do not admit any liability, factual errors, or anything else in our agreement with Diaz. The post remains online with minor edits, made after an iterative process with Diaz’ attorneys, that do not change our original reporting or analysis of the interview.

In some cases, these edits provide clarity Diaz felt was lacking (for example, adding the name of Diaz’ local attorney, Ted Buck, to the article, since Diaz believed one reference could be interpreted as referring to Diaz himself); in others, we are attempting to avoid the considerable expense that would be involved in fighting a lawsuit by the former police chief—a powerful, highly connected man with ambitions to become the police chief in Austin, Texas. The changes are edits agreed upon during legal negotiations, not corrections.

For example, the post now says that Diaz “suggested that his being gay undermines the claims of the women who have accused him of with sexual harassment, discrimination, and creating a hostile work environment.” We also removed a parenthetical sentence unrelated to the subject of the story, which briefly summarized a KUOW story that Diaz and Rantz discussed during their conversation.

Diaz’ attorneys noted that Diaz told Rantz, “just because you’re a gay man doesn’t mean you can’t be a misogynist,” which we agreed to add to the post along with some context from the interview:

In the interview, Rantz asked Diaz, “in retrospect, had you come out earlier, would that have saved your job?” Diaz responded, “You know, it’s a good question. I think it addresses a lot of the concerns of what people had. I mean, it doesn’t—you know, just because you’re a gay man doesn’t mean that you can’t be a misogynist…”

To prove libel, Diaz would have to prove that PubliCola made a false assertion of fact; that this falsehood caused Diaz demonstrable harm; and that we did so knowing that the factual claim was false and made it anyway with “reckless disregard” for the truth.” None of these claims apply to our post.

Moreover, Washington state has additional protections against “bullying by lawsuit.” In 2021, Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law that “fast-tracks review of dubious lawsuits,” according to the Seattle Times, providing unique protections against SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuits, whose aim is to “intimidate people into silence.”

If you agree that public officials shouldn’t use their power and resources to try to silence journalists, please contribute to help us offset the legal fees we incurred defending against Diaz’ threats against us. (Additional options here). If you’d like to learn more about those threats, read on.

Continue reading “Former Police Chief Adrian Diaz Threatened PubliCola Over Post Describing His Coming-Out Interview” →