Is NinaGate Now DarcyGate?

Nevada' Deputy Attorney General Robert Giunta today dropped the state's lawsuit against the auto repair shop TireWorks, which was the subject of some scathing reports by KTNV's Darcy Spears. This was the case in which Spears' colleague and anchor Nina Radetich was caught on a recording recommending her boyfriend's damage-control public-relations expertise in advance of Spears' reports.

It turns out, Nina may have been something of a red herring. Giunta's statement was surprisingly blunt and a serious indictment of a suspect form of journalism in which reporters and authorities collaborate:

"The complaints against Tire Works represented only a tiny fraction of the automotive complaints received by the State and represented a miniscule number of cases relative to the total number of customers that Tire Works has served. The Consumer Affairs Division's decision to permit the news media to accompany them on the compliance checks was the reason the case was so exaggerated and received so much publicity. The net effect was that the allegations were made to appear much larger than they were."

The Consumer Affairs Division no longer exists because the Legislature killed it the last time they were scrounging around for budgetary nickels. What they had done was take a car to three different TireWorks locations and received three different repair estimates, then sued over deception. They also sold the car before TireWorks could re-examine it as evidence in the suit against them.

The case became famous because of Radetich's outrageous actions, for which there is no question she should no longer be a working journalist. But Giunta makes an important point that is more important because anchorette influence peddling is not nearly as common as what Spears did here.

TireWorks, he's saying, was simply unlucky to have been the target when the Consumer Affairs Division allowed Spears along for the ride. This, of course, is the problem with all "journalism" of this ilk, made glamorous by Chris Hansen of MSNBC. It's portrayed disproportionately just because a journalist has been given access.

Yet in retrospect, this wasn't Spears as investigative journalist. It was Spears as stenographer. She didn't do any investigatin', she just made a really, really big deal out what the investigators said they had found when she was on hand. Investigators file charges and lawsuits every day that don't lead the news; this one did because Spears had video. She didn't get anything because she's a crack reporter, she got it because, I'm betting, someone at this agency decided that a little sensationalism could bolster the case for the Legislature to not put them out of business. Any which way, it's clear now that authorities were ginning up the drama to get on the teevee.

Unsurprisingly, KTNV General Manager Jim Prather defended his staff even as they exhibit shoddy journalistic practices. No, in order to lose one's job over there, you have to be a well-liked 25-year veteran who gets a minor traffic citation that is later dropped.

[Hat tip to Mike Spadoni for the alert on this.]

Bizarre Attack, Destroyed For Sport

You may recall that a few months ago, the Vegas media world was in an uproar over some truly spectacular corruption committed by inexplicably still-employed KTNV anchor Nina Radetich. The anchor had tipped off an auto repair shop that her station was about to air some negative reports and suggested the owner call Nina's own boyfriend, a damage-control PR specialist.

This was as cut-and-dried a case of journalistic ethical corruption as can be conceived. There were taped phone conversations and the TV station essentially copped to the whole thing, with Radetich never once suggesting the basics of the story as broken by Abigail Goldman of the Las Vegas Sun were inaccurate.

That was well over two months ago. At the time, I jumped into the mix even though I typically do not comment on journalism ethics -- my game is accuracy, fairness, word usage and New Media ineffectiveness, mainly -- this one was so over the top and so many people at KTNV were writing to me in a steam that I did.

So how strange is it that now, all these months later, some dude named Mike Zahara, a political activist who has a history with the local Democratic Party but who seems to play it down the moderate middle on his blog, would decide to take a shot at me. This is a guy who has, in the past, written to me to tell me I was a hero of his. And now this:

The shooting continues unabated! Normally, I would be enjoying this, but I generally like these people and their work and I don’t see a value in its continuation.

The most recent battles began with Nina Radetich and her stuff. Not handled as well as it could have been and her media brothers and sisters had a field day piling on her, culminating with Jon Ralston using his Face-to-Face show and guest Steve Freiss to keep punching away at her affront to ‘journalistic ethics’…while conveniently forgetting to inform that Freiss has no background in ethics education or scholarship and that his husband is employed by fierce rival KVBC across town.

Neither fact was ever disclosed by Ralston or Friess.

I've left the bold-faced parts intact from Zahara's weird passage, the LEAD ITEM of a heading that reads, "Local Media’s Intercine Warfare Continues."


Here's the screenshot so, when he takes it down and pretends he never wrote it, you can see the evidence:


So let's thoroughly discredit Mr. Zahara just for sport, shall we?

POINT: The shooting continues unabated! Normally, I would be enjoying this, but I generally like these people and their work and I don’t see a value in its continuation.

COUNTERPOINT: I haven't written a word about Radetich since mid-September. The shooting has, indeed, abated.

POINT: Not handled as well as it could have been and her media brothers and sisters had a field day piling on her

COUNTERPOINT: Actually, it was handled phenomenally well. The Las Vegas Sun broke the story and followed it up and forced a great deal of discomfort for Radetich and KTNV. Nobody belabored the matter; it was in the news for about one week, maybe 10 days. But there were audio tapes and brought up a very serious problem. Media corruption is at least as significant an issue as governmental corruption but much trickier for the media to cover. In most cities, alternative weeklies keep check but here both are owned by the two competing major media conglomerates. So, given that, I'd say the Radetich matter was handled pitch-perfect. Had the press not reported on this, we'd be accused of covering up for our own. It was undeniably a real news story and was handled with plenty of respect. In fact, I was the one who, in my last post on the matter, asked whether maybe Radetich, whose conduct was unforgivable and indefensible, might nonetheless have been set up. That's called being fair to both sides.

POINT: ...culminating with Jon Ralston using his Face-to-Face show and guest Steve Freiss to keep punching away at her affront to ‘journalistic ethics’…while conveniently forgetting to inform that Freiss has no background in ethics education or scholarship...

COUNTERPOINT: No scholarship, eh? I have a bachelor's in journalism from Northwestern University, widely viewed as the finest undergraduate program in the nation and a program that requires several ethics classes. I've also attended more than one Poynter Institute seminars on ethics, one of which is listed on the resume that is so buried on my website at SteveFriess.Com/Resume. Plus, I've been a practicing journalist for 15 years and have been confronted with and had newsroom discussions about innumerable ethical dilemmas. Meanwhile, Mr. Zahara, who seems to believe that being capable of credibly analyzing the media requires some sort of advanced degree in it, has none of his own but felt competent to write a blog post called "Local Media’s Intercine Warfare Continues" in which he beats the crap out of this city's most respected newspeople, including Jon Ralston and George Knapp. The guy who has not a lick of actual experience as a reporter thinks he can comment on the propriety of what journalists do. And guess what? I agree with him on that. You don't need a degree or "scholarship" to form reasonable opinions about the media, including about me and my work. A little bit of actual information, however, is helpful.

POINT: ...and that his husband is employed by fierce rival KVBC across town. Neither fact was ever disclosed by Ralston or Friess.

COUNTERPOINT: In the 30th second of the first segment of my appearance with Ralston, Jon states in introducing me: "He has particular insight into the TV industry as he's married to an executive producer of Channel 3." I'm also quite sure that during my comments, I referenced things I knew about Nina's departure from Channel 3 and acknowledged how I knew this, but I don't see the point in spending any more time on this given how thoroughly I've demonstrated that Zahara has no fucking clue what he's talking about.

And just one more thing, Mr. Zahara: It's Friess, not Freiss. At NU, I would've been failed for screwing up a pivotal name in a piece. I left that for last here, though, because as egregious as that mistake is and as much as it lays bare your inability to fact-check even the most elementary parts of what you write, it's actually the very least of your worries.

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!

How To Get Nina Radetich Fired

Both newspapers did a terrific job today of holding corrupt KTNV anchor Nina Radetich and her ridiculous, standards-less boss, Jim Prather, accountable for the fact that she's off the hook for forewarning a local auto shop chain of a coming investigative story and offering her boyfriend's PR services to mitigate the bad publicity. Her sycophant, Prather, has decided to keep Radetich despite that fact that his own credibility is destroyed by doing so, his newsroom is in a total outrage and his ratings have DROPPED since he hired this very expensive and perplexingly favored anchor.

The Las Vegas Sun ran an editorial but the power punch was from Review-Journal's media columnist Steve Bornfeld, who not only gave it to Radetich and Prather but also documented, as we have here, the strange pattern of hirings/firings at KTNV. Bornfeld also wrote that Nina read a prepared statement to her colleagues apologizing for the controversy but not the betrayal. So there's no contrition, phony (Joe Wilson) or genuine (Kanye West) here. Yeesh.

One thing Bornfeld wrote really got me thinking:

But Channel 13's modus operandi on these matters also seems based on what the cameras see, not what the facts say, as if visual documentation of an offense makes it real for viewers, therefore a more fireable act.

Futrell's disheveled mug shot hit the press in July '08 -- fired. Last February, Rikki Cheese, picked up on a DUI charge, sidestepped a public mug shot -- employed. In August '08, reporter Jeff Gradney shopped for a male sex partner on Craigslist for a threesome with his girlfriend, accompanied by a photo of them enjoying a carnal romp -- fired. Radetich commits an out-of-camera-range offense -- employed.

OK. So that's the solution: The tapes of Radetich must be released. It's not video, but it does engage the senses. That's the only way to keep KTNV from sweeping it under the rug and the public forgetting all about it. Newspaper articles are fine, but let's HEAR Nina sell out her colleagues. Get it on YouTube and all over the place.

I'm heading to KLAS' studio to appear on Jon Ralston's "Face to Face" on this shortly. He's got the woman who created the tapes -- not sure if she's going public or will be in shadows -- and I'm going to lobby for that. Ralston just told me on the phone, by the way: "Whatever you think, if you heard the tapes you'd know it's so much worse."

Watch his show later today.

Revisiting the Rob Blair Case

Since it's been in discussion and occasional "The Strip" co-host Amy found this for me, I thought I'd post it. It's weatherman Rob Blair in a taped weekend weather cut-in, which means it's the short clip you see sometimes on CNN or during a national broadcast. It also means that editors recorded, watched, cut and transmitted it knowing its content.



I know it's debatable what he said and the sound quality here isn't great. But in these cases, reasonable people ought to give the poor kid the benefit of the doubt. The alternative -- that he's a blatant, crazy racist who was waiting to drop slurs along with a warming trend -- is simply nonsensical.

Yet any which way, in the twisted journalistic universe of KTNV General Manager Jim Prather, that qualifies for a summary firing and the total jeopardy of a young career but he'll stand "100 percent" behind a seasoned, experienced lead anchor who he acknowledged had leaked a story to sources and then offered to help them to mitigate the damage? Huh?

Also, it's Day Five of this. Where the hell is Nina Radeitch's public apology to her newsroom and the news-viewing public? Blair apologized immediately. And Ron Futrell, as we've said, didn't even get a chance to prove his innocence. But Nina? She's golden. And nobody has any idea why.

P.S. Blair seems to have recovered well. He's now a weatherman in Chico, Calif.

KTNV veep to RJ: "Nina Stays"!?!?!

Wow.

The Review-Journal's Steve Bornfeld reported last night that KTNV's VP and GM Jim Prather has declared Nina Radetich absolved of having betrayed her colleagues' trust and attempting to help her boyfriend profit personally from the same.

“We’re standing by her 100 percent,” Prather told Bornfeld. “She regrets having made that mistake and I think we have all learned from this incident. Nina has worked very hard for more than a decade to do stories and provide news coverage of Las Vegas and I don’t think we should lose sight of the work she’s done. We are working hard to do investigative journalism for the city and the community and that’s not going to stop.”

That is an exceptional level of lame. As I wrote yesterday, Ron Futrell worked there for 25 years and was cut loose on a traffic citation that was later dropped. Young Rob Blair's career was nearly short-circuited by a verbal flub in a pretaped -- meaning nobody else who saw it before it rolled thought it was much, either -- weather report for which he apologized.

Has Nina apologized? Not to her newsroom and not to the public. But thanks, Mr. Prather, for liberating us not to have to speculate on what part of the Las Vegas Sun's blockbuster is was accurate. You've confirmed all of it in that remark when even a little piece of it would have been fatal.

Now the question must become: How does Jim Prather still have a job? The level of journalistic corruption at this station is clearly breathtaking and nobody in their right mind is going to risk confiding in KTNV reporters when there are three other news divisions, two daily newspapers and countless Internet outlets. But he doesn't care because, what? He's social friends with this particular anchor? That's what his own reputation is worth?

From a purely financial standpoint, I'm trying to conceive how Prather justifies his decisions to his corporate master, Journal Broadcast Group, which has but three "values" tenets on its website. Here they are:

• We will hire and keep the best people and reward top performers
• We will work hard, move fast, and achieve our goals
• We will act ethically

They're funning us, right? How, as Mayor Koch used to say, they doin'? He spent huge amounts of their dough recruiting Radetich -- paying her through her the year she was contractually obligated to KVBC to not work on-air in this market -- and has absolutely, positively nothing to show for it except, now, this enormous scandal. The ratings have actually fallen. These are already lean times.

I'm all for standing by a troubled employee when their personal life interferes with their professional duties and a little patience can make things better. But that's not what Prather did for Futrell or Blair. He has defined the parameters of his employment standards and it is this: Alleged, later absolved hit-and-run? Unforgivable. Admitted journalistic betrayal and profiteering? Teachable moment. Huh?!?

So tell us, Mr. Prather, what have you or Nina or your staff learned that they didn't already know? You and/or Nina needed reminding that journalists don't leak stories to sources or help them to mitigate the damage of those stories? Really? How did either of you get this far without that choice bit of intel?

This is a teachable moment alright. We've all learned a lot about how seriously KTNV takes its "values."

[P.S. to the LVRJ.Com: Also lame, although not nearly as much, is not linking to the Sun's story from your blog. They beat you. Live with it. You receive tons of incoming traffic from other media sites yet your policy is not to point your readers to the source material you're writing about? Sheesh.]

How Does This Woman Still Have A Job?

[UPDATE: Prather says Nina stays. Amazing.]

That, to your right, is Nina Radetich. She's a local TV anchor for the ABC affiliate here, KTNV, Channel 13, and she has been one of the best-paid media personalities in the city for a few years now. In fact, she was seen as such a "get" that when she was lured away from KVBC (where my partner is executive producer but was not when Nina was still there), KTNV actually paid her a salary for a year not to work because she had a one-year non-compete clause. Little good it did their ratings (they've fallen since her arrival, in fact) as anyone with half a brain could have told them, but hey, ya roll the dice.

On Saturday, the Las Vegas Sun blew the lid off a fairly shocking -- even for Vegas -- scandal in which, according to audio recordings of phone conversations, she not only told the owner of an auto repair chain that a damaging undercover report was coming soon but that her own boyfriend could help do public-relations damage control! Her boyfriend is Jack Finn, formerly a spokesman for Sen. John Ensign and former Gov. Kenny Guinn and presently a special projects manager at NV Energy. Now he's doing damage-control spin for Nina in the story by defending her journalism which is cool for him since Nina is heard on the tape saying how much Jack loves that kinda work!

Abigail Goldman of the Las Vegas Sun broke this story in a banner across the top of the paper on Saturday. Read it; it's brutal and damning. Goldman had heard audio recordings and provided a transcript to Radetich's boss, KTNV veep and GM Jim Prather. Goldman paraphrased Prather as regarding the matter a "lapse of judgment" and assured the public that their probes into Tire Works, the auto chain, would be unimpeded. Somehow I'm thinking Darcy Spears, the investigative reporter whose work was leaked, doesn't feel that way.

As of right now, Radetich remains in the employ of Channel 13, although she did not come into work today and her scheduled anchor duties tonight will be performed by Tiffani Sargent. Tomorrow's have been reassigned, too, to Jessica Lovell. And then she's on a previously planned vacation from Wednesday to Friday anyhow.

That's so nice and deliberative of her bosses. They weren't nearly as pleasant or patient or reasonable when 25-year veteran Ron Futrell got a hit-and-run citation last year. He was canned before the sun set the next day even though he hurt nobody, impacted nothing in the way of coverage and -- even better! -- the charges were ultimately dropped. That's loyalty to a guy who gave them the best years of his life, huh?

Or how about poor Rob Blair, who lost his job at KTNV as a weatherman in 2005 after he stumbled the word "Martin Luther King Jr" in a way that some thought sounded like "Martin Luther Coon Jr." (I still don't think he did this, but I couldn't find a YouTube clip for you to judge for yourself.) Blair's remarks weren't even live; several people in the newsroom saw them before they aired but only Blair lost his job. He even went on the air to apologize and still, he was auf'd so fast Nina Radetich wouldn't even have been able to leak it to anyone!

Blair hightailed outta town after that, but Futtrell stuck around, having spent his adult life here and all. He's now one of us New Media folk. But getting a raw deal from a boss like Prather, who clearly plays favorites at the expense of news judgment, makes Futtrell a bit of a hero at the station and he's got lots of friends over there still.

He says his former colleagues are understandably nervous about what it does to their news-gathering abilities and reputations if Nina remains in place. None would speak publicly today but Ron's views are undoubtedly shared by many there.

"If she walks in the building, there's going to be an attitude of, 'We better not tell Nina,' " Futtrell said. "The first thing to think of is keep it from Nina if you have an expose. And what if you're somebody from the outside and you want to give Channel 13 a big investigative story. You trust the reporter, but are they going to be able to keep it from one of their anchors? It throws everything out of kilter."

What's so weird here is how greedy or vain Radetich had to be to throw her career away like this. She's unmarried, has no kids and makes well over $200,000. Her boyfriend is surely well compensated at the power utility. What possible motive could she have for betraying her newsroom brethren? To paraphrase Peggy Olson's remark to Don Draper last night on Madmen, she had everything her colleagues want -- and so much of it.

There is no way she can continue to work at that station or in this business at all, at least not without a period of time away. It would make no sense. Even if she apologized now, you have to figure the staff there is checking with their sources to see if this is an isolated case. Could it possibly be? Really? Does that seem likely?

And even if/when Radetich is fired, how does Prather look his employees in the eye and tell them that he treats them all with the same fairness and respect? How does he explain that Radetich got more than four days -- Prather obviously knew about this on Friday for him to give his ridiculous response to Goldman and keep Nina on the payroll -- but Futrell is fired within mere hours for something so much less germane to the actual job?

The longer this carries on, the harder it gets to explain not only how Radetich remains employed over there but how Prather does, too.