Photo/Dennis Myers
After a Utah criminal prosecution accused him of nothing, commentators on the right have implied U.S. Sen. Harry Reid is being protected by the Obama administration.
Good news/bad news Joblessness in Nevada is up to second in the nation, at 7.7 percent. Only Rhode Island has a higher percentage of unemployed. That actually represents a gain by Nevada, in the sense that joblessness in the state in June fell by .02 percent since May and 2.3 percent since the same month of 2013. The national figure is 6.3. Congress has been deadlocked on an extension of jobless pay for long-term unemployed for months. U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada last week told a Capitol Hill newspaper, “Well, there’s a chance,” about the possibility of attaching the extension to an emergency spending measure.
Larry Wissbeck 1939-2104 Larry Wissbeck, a western broadcasting legend who reported from the Pacific Northwest, Pacific Coast, and Nevada, died July 17 in Colorado. Wissbeck was raised in central Nevada, in the now-abandoned mining camp of Nevada Scheelite and Fallon. He recalled watching a 1950s atomic test flash from Scheelite. He worked as a reporter, field producer, commentator, photographer and in other roles at the Fallon Eagle Standard, KTVN and KOLO television stations in Reno, KGW television in Portland, KRON television in San Francisco, and also served as chief deputy secretary of state of Nevada and town board member and mayor pro tem of Paonia, Colorado. At KRON and KTVN, he was a member of what some now characterize as the strongest news teams of those operations’ histories. In Nevada, he is particularly well known for the reports he filed from KTVN’s Northern Nevada WISSBECK AT KOLO Bureau. He traveled the state in a small Courier pickup with a camper on the back, bringing colorful human-interest stories back to Reno from places like Tuscarora or Baker. He once returned to Nevada Scheelite to report on its abandoned state. The term “Northern Nevada” was defined flexibly, as Wissbeck reported from Laughlin to the Oregon border. Ed Pearce, who as a news director hired him at two different stations and gave him the Northern Nevada Bureau, once noted that Wissbeck did well in the human interest reports because he fit right in when he showed up in small county settings. He was instantly at home in a dance hall in McDermitt or a bar in Tonopah. He also handled hard news, including a long-running series of investigative pieces on the bankruptcy of a Reno investment firm and bombings of the U.S. Capitol in 1983 and Harvey’s Hotel Casino at Lake Tahoe in 1980. His diverse skills showed up when, as one of a two-person bureau covering the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco for KTVN in 1984, he repaired equipment himself when it failed. He owned and lived at Hardscrabble Farm on the bank of the Truckee River in Lockwood where he lived. Peggy Phillip, who began her television career at KTVN, and her family were tenants on the farm for a time. She went on to become a distinguished television news director at stations in Kansas City, Baltimore, Syracuse and Memphis and is now a managing editor in Miami. She said she learned a lot from Wissbeck. “Larry seemed to have all the answers from storytelling to Nevada history, animal husbandry to art,” she said after hearing of his death. “I was fascinated with his knowledge and loved to listen to his tales of TV news coverage in San Francisco and Portland. ... I sometimes felt like a sponge around him, trying to absorb all the great qualities that made him such a complex human being.” Additional information will be found on our Newsview blog.
—Dennis Myers
8 | RN&R |
JULY 24, 2014
Media target Utah criminal case used against Reid U.S. Sen. Harry Reid’s name is figuring in a developing courtroom battle in Utah. On July 15, former Utah attorneys by general John Swallow and Mark Dennis Myers Shurtleff were arrested and charged with crimes like destruction of evidence and acceptance of bribes. Swallow was further accused of receiving $23,000 from Richard Rawle, who he introduced to federally indicted businessman Jeremy Johnson as someone who could assist in getting Reid to help with a Federal Trade Commission investigation into
“This case should not be something that we should be prosecuting.” Simarjit Gill salt Lake district attorney Johnson’s marketing company. “I talked with John Swallow, and he said you might have some connections to Reid that might be helpful to us,” Johnson wrote in an email to Rawle cited in the indictment. Rawle is now deceased. In a statement in January released by his office, Reid said, “The allegations of bribery by Mr. Johnson, a man with a background of fraud, deception and corruption, are absurd and utterly false.” A Reid aide reiterated that posture last week.
The court filings describe Reid as essentially a passive figure in the case—as a target of wrongdoing, not a wrongdoer. He was so portrayed in most mainstream news coverage. But he could still be damaged, because some opinion entities and an occasional mainstream source—in reports filled with emotionally loaded terms and suggestive language—projected the available information far beyond its actual meaning. For example, an Associated Press story on the case included the line, “Reid has not been implicated in the investigation.” But a Washington Times story that tried hard to build a case against Reid did not include a similar description of the indictments. The indictments followed months in which the case was shuttled around in the Beehive State. While the crimes being prosecuted are state offenses, local district attorneys did not initially act, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) took itself off the case in September, and the current Utah attorney general also declined the case. So the Utah Legislature mounted an investigation. It was not explained why the lawmakers didn’t leave the case to the local district attorneys—who ultimately were forced to act—but partisans were quick to suggest that the Obama administration refused the case to protect Reid. The issue has become prominent enough that the National
Law Journal did a story on that aspect of the case. There was wide comment on alleged inertia on the part of the DOJ in joining the case. In a state whose officials normally object to federal authority, local prosecutors have been critical of the failure of the U.S. Department of Justice to step into the case. “I’d be less than honest with you if I didn’t say to you that I have actually been very disappointed with what the DOJ did or didn’t do,” said Salt Lake County District Attorney Simarjit Gill, a Democrat. “Really, this case should not be something that we should be prosecuting as local prosecutors.” The charges were announced by Gill and Davis County District Attorney Troy Rawlings at the Salt Lake City office of the FBI, which itself drew comment since no federal prosecution is underway. One report suggested the FBI was trying to give its imprimatur to the case in spite of the DOJ’s stance. A considerable amount of media coverage tries to link Reid negatively to the case. Not surprisingly, a lot of that kind of coverage was produced by conservative opinion sites, such as NewsBusters (“ABC Investigates Bribery Case Ensnaring Harry Reid...”) and Washington Free Beacon (“Harry Reid Tied to Corruption Investigation”).
Contrasts Reid’s role, if any, has received considerably more attention in national and D.C. media entities than where the case is happening—Utah. In a lengthy Salt Lake Tribune story describing the case, Reid’s name received a single mention in paragraph 19 of the story, a paragraph dealing with the one count of the indictment that mentions him. In an ABC News story, by contrast, Reid is referenced in the first sentence—and nine more times throughout the story. The Unification Church’s Washington Times newspaper allowed its editor John Solomon— long faulted by press critics for his factually challenged stories on Reid (“Solomon-like reporting,” RN&R, Nov. 23, 2006)—to cover the Utah story. The Columbia Journalism Review has reported that journalists working for Solomon say “he often pressured them to mold the truth to his vision of the story” and that in one story accusing Reid of serving
