The Last Words On Nina (This Week)

As the week concludes, the scandal engulfing KTNV over anchor Nina Radetich's betrayal of her colleagues and her journalistic creed is showing no signs of letting up. CityLife's Andrew Kiraly chimed in, too. Read that if you're not up-to-speed on what Nina did since I'm tired of rewriting the basics.

But I'm already bored with flogging Nina. I've got other questions. Like: What if she, too, is a victim?

The owner of the auto repair shop, Roshie Weightman, apparently may file a federal lawsuit against the ABC affiliate and/or Radetich on Monday. This is, frankly, a bizarre idea but it does start to fill out the rest of the scandal.

As unforgivable as Nina's conduct was, I'm struggling to think up what law she broke, let alone what federal law she broke. She may have tried to drum up some business for her PR flak boyfriend Jack Finn by suggesting Finn do the damage control, but she didn't suggest to Weightman that she could be, say, bribed to keep the stories off the air or even to alter them. Even if so, that would be a local infraction, not a federal one. Another notion is that Weightman's suit could allege a civil rights infringement but, again, what's civil rights got to do with this?

So why file a federal lawsuit? From what I'm hearing, it's something of a pre-emptive move because it is now clear from the way Weightman talked about it on Jon Ralston's show yesterday that she recorded the conversation without Nina Radetich's prior consent. The law in Nevada requires two-party consent for phone recordings, but federal statutes supercede that under certain circumstances.

Anyhow, I was on Ralston's show yesterday, too. You can click on the image below to get to play my segment and, from there, see the other three parts, too.


So while Nina's gotten a deserved lambasting all week, let's not forget that Weightman's operation has been under investigation by not just KTNV but also by the Nevada state Consumer Affairs Division, which filed a lawsuit against Tire Works alleging fraudulent practices. On Ralston's show, she claimed her shop has been cleared of everything, but that lawsuit is still pending according to this Las Vegas Sun report from Wednesday. So she's no angel either, even as she plays the victim in her conversation with Ralston and elsewhere.

Also deserving of some scrutiny: The Las Vegas Sun. Someone turned a recording over the Sun's Abigail Goldman, who wrote in her initial scoop: "The source who provided the recording to the Sun assured the newspaper that it was obtained legally."

Now how could that be, really? Did they hear Nina on the recording stating she was OK with being recorded on the phone? (Radetich declined comment for the story, so Goldman couldn't ask her directly, obviously.) Did the Sun ask its own in-house attorneys whether there was a reasonable legal path for these tapes to have been created legally?

Again, the argument developing from Weightman's camp is that she can flout Nevada law because they had a potential federal case. Does that notion, too, not deserve media skepticism? I mean, how cool! What a neat legal trick! Do we all, then, have permission to surreptitiously record conversations because something might possibly, however unlikely, turn out to be something? And then do we get to sit on that potential evidence for six months and play the incriminating parts for the media at an opportune moment even before a judge has heard it and has determined whether the situation warranted such a disregard for local law? Isn't it odd that Weightman, if she feels federally violated, didn't first file the federal case and then enter the recordings as evidence? Because clearly the only one who can actually determine whether these recordings were made legally is a judge, right?

This brings me to the Nina-as-victim part. Nobody seems able to say why this is coming out now when the conversations happened in March. Could it be that Weightman was threatening Radetich with exposure or legal action? Why would you not deploy such explosive recordings, say, at the same time as the station is airing damaging reports about you? Isn't that weird, too?

I wonder how much these questions were discussed at the Sun. Goldman declined to comment Friday and I was unable to reach Mike Kelley, the Sun's managing editor because my brain didn't wander down this bunny trail until after 6 p.m.

Why does it matter? Because journalists generally don't exploit information and materials offered to them that are obtained illegally as that encourages other sources to break the law to produce evidence. We'd end up giving incentive to people who would plant bugs on one another, hack into one another's computers, break into other people's filing cabinets and so on. The court would never allow such evidence to be heard, but if the media were willing to distribute it then an aggrieved party could -- anonymously, even, as in this case -- try someone in the court of public opinion. Even most of the paparazzi usually abide by the law in pursuit of their version of scoop.

There are certain heroic and important cases when the value of the information is so important to the public's well-being or exposing wrongdoing at the highest levels of power that it is done, but the Sun made a specific point in its piece to say that they were satisfied that the tapes were created legally.

It also matters because it begins to become clear what's really going on here. Weightman is using the media to deflect from the fact that she is the target of a corruption probe of her own. And the next act of this, a federal lawsuit, is aimed at both keeping the attention on Radetich's journalistic sins and inoculating herself against a charge that she may have violated Nevada's recordings law!

That's brilliant! See that, Nina? Weightman didn't need your boyfriend's help after all!