TV Tonight on Frontline: Inside the Closet of Jim West
posted by on November 14 at 12:09 PM
Talk about timing: Smack dab in the middle of this season of shameful gay Republican sex revelations, PBS’s venerable Frontline devotes an hour to Jim West, the disgraced former mayor of Spokane who was sullying his Republican office by trawling for young men online back before sullying your Republican office by trawling for young men online was cool.
According to the PBS website, A Hidden Life will track both Jim West’s creepy double-dealings and the Spokane Spokesman-Review’s controversial method of exposing West’s lies. Those interested (and who isn’t?) should tune in to Seattle’s KCTS tonight at 10 pm. (For a sneak preview, go here.)
Geez. Talk about beating a dead...oh, nevermind.
yay, Frontline!
Frontline is the Grape Nuts of television. So tasty.
such old news
slow new days at frontline
and what is the dead guy supposed to reply
wonder who the closted homos are at fronline productions, deeply fearful if they come all the way out they will lose their jobs
jack: i imagine you know this, but frontline doesn't really have "news days." they do investigative pieces, and thanks to Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, and whoever's next, an in-depth piece about what went down with Jim West is timely in a way frontline's producers' never could've dreamed...
David: speaking of TV, did you ever get around to watching "Heroes"?
Re: "Heroes": Nope, and I forgot again last night! However, I saw a teaser commercial that made it seem like a whole bunch of long-awaited shit is going to go down in next week's episode, so maybe i'll try then...
I hope so, because these "Heroes" have the most boring powers imaginable.
Maybe last night's ep was a fluke, but S-N-O-O-Z-E.
Poor Jim West. If he hadn't pissed off Betsy Cowles during arbitration of the Riverpark Square scandal The Spokesman Review would never have gone after him. You an now watch 'A Hidden Life' online:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hiddenlife/view/
Wow - what a bunch of cockbiters at the Spokesman Review. If West had been soliciting 18 year old girls and offering them internships, he never would have been taken down.
Sorry, Soupytwist, but if someone is a hypocrite on that level -- arguing for legal restrictions on people who have a sexual orientation they secretly share -- they DESERVE to be taken down. Soliciting 18-year-old-girls would only be a valid analogy if he were also arguing for raising the age of consent to 21 or something.
Wow. Saw the Frontline episode last night -- if you missed it set your pvr for 3am Sat. (http://www.kcts.org/SeriesSchedule.asp?N1=FRON&ch=DT). It was a nuanced, well-researched and fascinating piece. There were interviews with almost all of the principal figures including some absolutely riveting footage of Jim West. My only complaint was a bit less discussion than I thought appropriate of journalistic ethics w/r/t the Spokesman-Review's use of a private investigator to entrap West. I'm not sure exactly where I stand on the issue, but I would've liked more analysis in the piece.
That being said, it was a powerful documentary that took the West story beyond the context of Spokane into a wider discussion of homosexuality in middle America. Well worth watching...
Yeah, top-notch show (per usual for Frontline).
Someone in the show referred to West as narcissistic. I agree completely. It was all about self-image for him. Pretty wrenching watching the guy try to "carry on" in his office near the end. Talk about inability to do the right thing as a public servant (in his case, he should have resigned because he could not serve the people he was elected to represent once he became disgraced).
Scary thing is, that exact kind of narcissism is common among politicians. He was sociopathic, and that has absolutely nothing to do with his orientation.
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