Willamette Week stands by its story

Responding to charges from U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith that a Willamette Week investigation into the lawmaker's possible employment of illegal immigrants at his frozen food factory in Weston was based on unsubstantiated allegations, the publication's editor, Mark Zusman, defended the article.

Smith has accused the Willamette Week, which won the Pulitzer prize in 2005 for an investigative piece on former Oregon Democratic governor Neil Goldschmidt's sexual abuse of a teenage girl in the 1970s, of being a “liberal tabloid whose purpose is to advance a left-wing agenda,” but Zusman said the paper was simply reporting a story that Smith’s constituents would be interested in.

“There is no purpose other than to seek to tell the truth about an important story,” Zusman said in a phone interview with PolitickerOR.com. “It’s not unusual for a food processing plant to hire illegal immigrants as workers. But this is unusual because Smith is a United States senator.”

Zusman confirmed that while the story did not have any single worker admit that they were an illegal immigrant, the Willamette Week’s reporter, Beth Slovic, spent an extraordinary amount of time talking to current and former employees at Smith Frozen Foods, as well as a local tax specialist, church members and a public defender in the area. He said that if he felt they did not have enough evidence, then they would not have run the story.

“I am perfectly comfortable with having anyone read the article and decide for themselves,” Zusman said. “But if it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck, then it’s a duck. We would not have published this story had we not been comfortable with the underlying issue -- that Smith had illegal workers.”