Op-Ed: Seattle Press Are Concocting a False Narrative to Undermine Mayor Wilson

Whether a doomed recall effort or a delayed press conference, mainstream news outlets like KOMO and KIRO keep giving oxygen to dead stories in an effort to smear Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson. Don’t fall for the spin.

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I am losing my mind consuming the local news coverage of the Seattle Center shooting and its aftermath.

I want to be clear right at the top, that I believe the job of the media, of journalism, is to hold those in power accountable. And if local broadcast and legacy media want to focus on holding our progressive city leaders to account, on legitimate concerns – crucially, in a way balanced with how they cover business-focused “moderate” politicians – I will welcome them with open arms.

But KIRO and KOMO’s coverage of Mayor Katie Wilson’s office in general, and after the Bite of Seattle shooting in particular, is something they need to be held accountable for.

On Monday, KIRO's newly installed news director, Jennifer Dahl, sat on a panel at Scenius Social billed as a conversation about art and Seattle's creative community. Twice, she turned the conversation toward Mayor Wilson and the communication failure after the Seattle Center shooting, a failure the mayor has already admitted.

Dahl warned that it could "happen again," invoking a mass shooting in Oregon.

Nothing sharpens a narrative quite like fear.

And I’m loath to admit it, but the failure was real.

However, Wilson has apologized. She asked the city's independent Inspector General to reconstruct what happened, figure out why it happened, and recommend how to prevent it from happening again.

I know that is something we rarely see from political leaders, so I can understand why a lay person may not know how to identify it. But professional journalists should know: that’s what accountability looks like.

Accountability is not turning one mistake into an albatross and hanging it around a woman's neck until Election Day.

Three people died at Seattle Center. A two-year-old was wounded. Families are grieving. Workers who tried to save lives are carrying images I imagine they would give anything to forget.

And somehow the great political question emerging from all of this has become: Why wasn't the mayor standing behind a microphone sooner?

Think about how strange that is.
Mayor Katie Wilson announced Andre Sayles as interim police chief on July 31, and is facing pressure to release a gun violence prevention plan and answer for the City's flat-footed response to the Bite of Seattle shooting. (Seattle Channel)

Had the press conference happened exactly on time, three people would still be dead. The failure was in communicating about the response, not the response itself. Those are different things. Turning them into the same thing is not journalism happening naturally. It is an editorial choice. Then Dahl suggested the city should "turn on the Flock cameras."

Except, Seattle doesn't have Flock cameras. It has CCTV operated by the vendor Axon. Further, I am confused as to what Dahl imagines surveillance cameras could have done, as there were police officers standing roughly four paces from the shooters at Bite of Seattle.

How could a camera have stopped what armed police officers standing feet away could not?

This is how consent gets manufactured. Not through some smoky-room conspiracy where editors decide what you're allowed to believe. It's much more ordinary than that.

They decide what matters. Three people are killed, and yet the delayed press conference becomes the story. A delay of a few hours, confusion, questions about who was in charge, repeated again and again, until a single detail hardens into a verdict: City Hall is dysfunctional.

After that, the story begins feeding itself. A disagreement between SPD and the mayor becomes more evidence. A few councilmembers sharply criticize her and now there are "growing questions about her leadership." Then somebody commissions a poll asking voters whether they're worried about her leadership, and suddenly the media is reporting a public perception it helped manufacture.

Every individual fact can be true while the story constructed from them is bullshit.

Because a mayor arriving late to a podium is television.

The slow, boring, desperately important work of preventing the next shooting, youth programs, housing, coordination, intervention, mental health care, and the unglamorous labor of keeping people alive, isn't.