Hit Piece Reflects Back Poorly on State Dems

Journalists love to report the news, but as a nearly universal rule, hate to be part of it. We depend on our credibility and independence, which is more difficult to maintain when we are, for whatever reason, part of the news story. Sometimes such involvement is impossible to avoid, as when The Chronicle wrote a story about our new book on the Flood of 2007. I made sure, however, that the story and photo package was no bigger (in fact, it ran smaller) than a story last year about the new local history book, “The Land Called Lewis.”

So, with as hard as we try to be fair when our own newspaper is involved, imagine our surprise and dismay to see that the state Democratic party used material from The Chronicle and chronline.com in a hit piece against gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad, posted to YouTube Thursday afternoon, is in many ways a typical political smear ad, with the spooky music and the gritty black-and-white photos of the candidate being attacked.

We were unhappy that our video was used without our permission for a political hit piece and dismayed that the quotes were taken out of context. I personally was even more angry that the Democrats fabricated a Chronicle front page from whole cloth, taking the front page from Feb 23, erasing the real top story (about a conviction in a gruesome murder case) and creating a fake headline based on Rossi’s Jan. 31 editorial, which ran on page 6.

I mean, that’s the kind of slipshod behavior that got Michael Moore in such trouble with his film Fahrenheit 9-11, when he created a composite front page to drum up outrage over the Bush-Gore election fiasco.

We pulled together a real front-page story today disclosing that the Democrats had created the ad without our cooperation or permission, and quoting the Democratic press agent and a representative of Dino Rossi’s campaign. The Democratic party claims fair use of our copyrighted video; they didn’t have much to say on the record about faking our front page. I’ll go on the record saying it’s not a great way to establish credibility as you try to denigrate a political foe.

For the record, I would say the same thing if it were Republicans using our material to pull a hatchet job on Gregoire or any other Democrat. Taking quotes out of context by stealing video from a news source without permission, then creating a "front page" from whole cloth is not something a newspaper can abide, no matter who is doing the snatching and who is the intended victim. 

I suppose I’m flattered the Democrats (who on a local level keep a suspicious eye on the paper and its editorial board with their “Chronicle Watch”) found enough credibility in our newspaper to try to hijack our good name. It's not surprising that political parties can't be trusted to tell the truth about their opponents. It's just disappointing when the journalistic endeavor of trying to tell the truth as fairly as possible through news stories and video is appropriated by political hacks hoping to score a few points.