This thread got too hot for City Beat to handle--City Beat erased my comment

UPDATE 8 AM MAY 8, 2014

I see that my comment about Irwin Jacobs and the firing of Voice of San Diego education report Emily Alpert is back on the City Beat website.

MAURA LARKINS' UPDATE 6 AM MAY 8, 2014

We seem to have a bit of a problem with journalistic ethics in San Diego. Voice of San Diego is so beholden to its donors that its behavior doesn't surprise me. But City Beat? What's your excuse?

A thread about the Randy Dotinga/Aaryn Belfer/Dagmar/Aloha brouhaha got to hot for City Beat to handle. I posted the following comment around 7 pm last night. Then I noticed it suddenly became hidden, and in its place was a message, "View 1 more." When I woke up this morning, I discovered that the comment has disappeared completely. What exactly is it that upset City Beat so much?

"Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

"At the time Emily [Alpert of Voice of San Diego] was fired, her investigation of SDCOE had been stopped in its tracks and VOSD had ended its much vaunted policy of allowing reporters to decide what they would write about.

Can you give a reason for Emily being chosen for layoff? Obviously, there were reasons that VOSD chose Emily, Adrian Florido and Sam Hodgson, but those reasons were unknown at the time.

We have more information now. Do you deny the truth of this statement, "Since then, the VOSD donor trio of Buzz Woolley, Irwin Jacobs and Rod Dammeyer have made clear that they passionately desire to have their money bring about the expansion of arbitrary power for school administrators"?

When we see the enormous passion that these three donors have for bringing about specific changes in schools, it ceases to appear merely a coincidence that VOSD's widely-admired education reporter was terminated."

[If you want to see the context in which this comment appeared, look at the bottom of this post, or go to this page in City Best. Ironically, it comes very shortly after I wrote, "And City Beat is also sometimes a bit too quiet about certain issues." I'd say I was clearly right about that.]

It's lucky I had posted a copy of the comment in my own blog. Otherwise, it would be lost forever--which, I'm sure, is exactly what City Beat--and Voice of San Diego--hoped for. Sorry, you fearless purveyors of truth!

In place of the above comment City Beat has published an extra copy of this comment that I posted this morning:

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

When a pet project of Irwin Jacobs (such as Voice of San Diego) has major financial problems, it's because Irwin Jacobs wants it to have major financial problems.

Irwin Jacobs, net worth $1.9 billion. When a pet project of Irwin Jacobs
(such as Voice of San Diego) has major financial problems, it's because
Irwin Jacobs wants it to have major financial problems.
I'm guessing that the reason VOSD suddenly had a financial crisis
and "laid-off" its widely popular education reporter Emily Alpert
has a lot to do with stories like this one. It should be noted that
Jacobs' fellow SD4GS supporter Rod Dammeyer is also a member of VOSD's
donor trio of Jacobs, Dammeyer and Buzz Woolley.
When the voters of San Diego refused to give up control of the schools
they pay for, SD4GS folded and many of its supporters moved to UPforEd,
which is now a "community partner" of Voice of San Diego.


It looks like Emily Alpert (now Emily Alpert Reyes) was "laid-off"
because she wasn't adequately supporting the agenda of Irwin Jacobs
and other donors. The donor trio didn't hurt Emily; she now has a
better job at the Los Angeles Times. It's the students of San Diego
and California that were harmed. Emily was terminated just months
after writing this story about SD4GS,
an organization that sought to get voters to pack the SDUSD school
board with unelected members. It probably didn't help that she
also wrote about me.

I have to agree with Voice of San Diego CEO Scott Lewis' New Years concerns about his own journalistic integrity. See all posts re Scott Lewis. And I think David Rolland might want to ask himself some of the same questions that Scott Lewis has posed.



HERE IS THE ORIGINAL REMARK THAT GOT THIS THREAD STARTED:


Randy Dotinga

Here is the remark that got Randy Dotinga in big trouble: "A feminist who depicts women as bimbos is no feminist." That's an rule? A feminist is not allowed to discuss the sexual behavior of women? But I think Randy was being rhetorical. He was saying he didn't like the way Aaryn Belfer depicted certain women as wiggly and under-dressed. I, too, didn't like it when Aaryn Belfer used the first names of two local reporters in her critique. That was unnecessary and self-indulgent. My first thought upon reading Aaryn Belfer's column on Randy Dotinga:

Let Randy talk. Dammit, let Randy talk. Especially since he's hilarious. I love reading his stuff.

Aaryn Belfer's criticism of Randy for speaking too much in an academic setting bothered me quite a bit. It disturbs me that anyone, anyone at all, should be pressured to be silent in an academic environment when they are trying to make a rational point. I've seen it happen at SDSU. I've seen cliques of women silencing people in two different creative writing classes with two different professors. In one of those classes, the professor was not involved. In the other class, the professor was the leader.

And then journalist Doug Porter of the OB Rag and San Diego Free Press chimed in on behalf of Aaryn, "Thank you for telling The Truth about a mean and horrible person." Really? For defending Aloha and Dagmar he's a mean and horrible person? At least Randy and Aaryn were talking about specific qualities that they saw in the other. Doug was judging the entire person.

Here's my message to Doug:

Wow, Doug. Let him talk. Dammit, Doug, let Randy talk.

And then Doug's defender David Budin went ballistic. David Budin threw out the word "asshole" at Aaryn. If he had just left out that one word, his comment would have been entirely reasonable.

But I'm thinking that was the response Aaryn was trying to elicit. Why else would she have made comments about Randy's weight, among other attempts to demean him? Randy was quite a bit more gentle with Aaryn than Aaryn was with female reporters. Aaryn is free to criticize women in high-profile positions who contribute to the public's view of women. But if she's going to attack them personally, she should expect a little blowback.

Women in television news face a quandary: should they object to pressure from their bosses to dress in a certain way--and risk getting fired? They'd likely be replaced by women who were willing to play the titilate-the-viewers game.

I wish journalists were more devoted to getting the whole truth out in front of the public. But journalists are similar to those women on TV: they have bosses that want to control them. I think both Randy and Aaryn should speak out about more important things--like the stories their bosses aren't covering.


AAARYN BELFER'S MAY 5, 2014 STORY ABOUT RANDY DOTINGA



Nobody puts Baby in a corner
On feminism and who gets to define my brand of it
By Aaryn Belfer
City Beat
May 05, 2014

"Oh, we all know that guy," my friend Heather said to me on the phone. "He's the dude who took a women's-studies course in college and knew it all. He wore a 'Free Tibet' T-shirt and monopolized every conversation."

Heather and I were talking about a non-vagina-having, self-important troll named Randy Dotinga who told me via Twitter that I'm no feminist. This bloviating nitwit, who likes to police me when I criticize other women, apparently suffered apoplectic seizures after reading part of one sentence in my last column. The offending 13 words referencing a pair of local meteorologists and their painted-on clothing had him stomping his feet. It was pretty darned cute.

"A feminist who depicts women as bimbos is no feminist," he fired off, with the back-patting superiority of a third-grade know-it-all.

Of course, I didn't depict any women as bimbos or even use such language. Nor did I "dehumanize women on tv" as he put it, which is impossible since that's totally redundant. Kudos, though, to him for taking up the banner on behalf of the poor, demeaned television ladies among us...



RANDY DOTINGA HUMOROUSLY DEFLECTS THE ATTACK

Here's Randy's mention of the issue in Voice of San Diego's Morning Report (probably the most gracious and humorous response of all):

"Not everyone’s a fan of your Morning Report scribe. That’s the word from a CityBeat columnist who calls me a “dough-faced,” “self-important troll” with “the back-patting superiority of a third-grade know-it-all.” So? What’s your point?



COMMENTS FROM THE CITY BEAT WEBPAGE ON THIS STORY:

Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

The issue in the Randy Dotinga/Aaryn Belfer tizzy is whether certain things should be said. I'm glad the issue is being discussed.

Whether or not things should be said. Isn't this the basic question underlying every decision by media outlets, including Randy Dotinga's Voice of San Diego and Aaryn Belfer's City Beat, as to what's going to be published? Sadly, San Diego seems to be a place where media outlets leave too many things unsaid about serious issues, including the one we're looking at here: free speech.

I believe it's better to err on the side of discussing more issues rather than fewer issues. As Matt Taibbi says, the job of a journalist isn't to be nice. It's to tell the truth. What bothers me more than anything said by Randy or Aaryn is the manner in which Randy's employer, Voice of San Diego, seems to write what it's paid to write. Voice of San Diego seems to be developing an increasingly rigid culture that is largely based on the belief that certain people shouldn't be part of the public discourse. (Irony is everywhere in journalism, isn't it?) And City Beat is also sometimes a bit too quiet about certain issues.



Randy Dotinga · Works at Freelance Writer

"Randy's employer, Voice of San Diego, seems to write what it's paid to write." I'm not sure what you mean.



Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

At the time Emily Alpert was fired from Voice of San Diego, the reasons were mysterious.

Since then, the VOSD donor trio of Buzz Woolley, Irwin Jacobs and Rod Dammeyer have made clear that they passionately desire to have their money bring about the expansion of arbitrary power for school administrators.

It wouldn't do to have an education reporter who knew her way around the school system and wanted to share her knowledge.

VOSD now produces stories about education that appear to be balanced, but in fact only present the opinions of the very powerful: the moguls, the administration, and the teachers union. There is no voice for those who are interested only in students rather than advancing themselves or their personal agendas. I believe that Emily Alpert would have given those people a voice.


Randy Dotinga · Works at Freelance Writer

Maura Larkins To clarify, Emily was laid off along with 2 other staffers when VOSD had major financial problems. I'm not aware of pressure coming from donors regarding her position. Neither are you.



Maura Larkins · Top Commenter · UCLA

At the time Emily was fired, her investigation of SDCOE had been stopped in its tracks and VOSD had ended its much vaunted policy of allowing reporters to decide what they would write about. Can you give a reason for Emily being chosen for layoff? Obviously, there were reasons that VOSD chose Emily, Adrian Florido and Sam Hodgson, but those reasons were unknown at the time.

We have more information now.

Do you deny the truth of this statement, "Since then, the VOSD donor trio of Buzz Woolley, Irwin Jacobs and Rod Dammeyer have made clear that they passionately desire to have their money bring about the expansion of arbitrary power for school administrators"?

When we see the enormous passion that these three donors have for bringing about specific changes in schools, it ceases to appear merely a coincidence that VOSD's widely-admired education reporter was terminated.

The above comment was erased by City Beat! Unbelievable! It just disappeared. Why?



Perhaps the following message on City Beat's website explains it:

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It appears that City Beat editor David Rolland is trying to become Scott Lewis of Voice of San Diego, which is a very sad thing. My conclusion is that Rolland got pressured to remove my comment by someone who supports Voice of San Diego. Perhaps a donor? Perhaps a very recent donor? Like, maybe, a donor who got generous last night? Or was it merely professional courtesy among journalists--working together to keep the public ignorant?


David Rolland

I do agree with most of Rolland's ballot recommendations.

Here are my responses to Rolland's assessment of the State Superintendent of Education race.

Voice of San Diego's Scott Lewis acknowledges that he's been playing it a little too safe; Matt Taibbi shows how it's done

Scott Lewis and Matt Taibbi
Matt Taibbi recently published DIVIDE, a book about our two-tiered justice system. He says, “Journalists should be dark, funny, mean people. It’s appropriate for their ­antag­onistic, adversarial role.”
See also Who is exposing the underbellies of school systems, U-T San Diego or Voice of San Diego?

UPDATE: WHAT DOES SCOTT LEWIS DO WHEN HE'S LETTING IT ALL "PLATEAU"?

Scott Lewis stops investigations. For example, he and Andrew Donohue stopped Emily Alpert's investigation into school attorney Dan Shinoff and Shinoff's pals at San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE). And then Lewis fired Emily Alpert. (I imagine she was happy to be fired because it wasn't much of a job after her freedom to investigate was curtailed.)

But now that so many of Mr. Shinoff's public school clients have been charged with corruption, maybe Scott will restart the investigation?

I wouldn't count on it. VOSD has to pay its bills. And given the fact that VOSD features one of the lawyers from Dan Shinoff's law firm (Omar Passons) among the alternating photos at the top of its web pages, I suspect that someone at Stutz law firm is making it financially worthwhile for VOSD to ignore the backroom shenanigans at SDCOE. Also, VOSD's major donors, Buzz Woolley and Irwin Jacobs, are closely connected the non-teacher-union players in the education establishment. They will probably get their wish that the public never even learn what's on the FBI tape of Dan Shinoff's meeting with a witness in a school case.



Does this photo look familiar? It's Omar Passons' image from the header of a VOSD web page. Mr. Passons is a lawyer at Stutz law firm.

Tending Bar on New Year’s Eve in 1997 Made Me Resolve to Risk More in 2014
By: Scott Lewis
Voice of San Diego
January 1, 2014

...I’ve always felt a drive, an angst and worry. It’s made me always change, always want to keep improving.

Recently, though, something else has been happening.

Perhaps it has come from having kids and a mortgage. Maybe I feel more vulnerable. But I feel it. Like small tremors. They are these urges to want to protect what I’ve gathered. They are flashes of desire to be (gasp!) conservative.

I can’t have that. It’s not me.

[Maura Larkins comment: I think it is you, Scott. And I think you've been playing it safe for a few years now. You've been paid to protect some people and expose others (such as when you stopped the investigation of SDCOE by Emily Alpert and then let her go, but at the same time did a proper investigation of SEDC).

So this year I’m resolving to take more risks. I resolve to resist the urge to let it all plateau – to cruise. I want to keep building, keep dreaming and keep dancing with failure...

[Maura Larkins comment: Sounds like a typical New Year's resolution. It's April now. You've forgotten about it, right?]


Raging Against Hacks With Muckraker Turned Magazine-Maker Matt Taibbi
By Matthew Shaer
New York Magazine
3/9/2014

Matt Taibbi, the ­former enfant terrible of ­political journalism, limps into a cozy diner on ­Chambers Street, in Tribeca a ­Russian-style fur cap pulled over his ears, a half-formed apology for his lateness already on his lips. “I am—I must have—did I keep you waiting?”

Informed he is actually seven ­minutes early, his shoulders slump in relief. “Okay,” the lanky 44-year-old says, with a toothy grin. “Good. You’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a crazy time for me.”

This is Matt Taibbi, circa 2014: ­deferential, polite, very busy. In mid-­February, shortly after the birth of his first child, Taibbi announced he was leaving Rolling Stone, where he has worked for almost a decade, to start a digital magazine for First Look Media, the company owned by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. The last few weeks have been consumed with business matters—hiring editorial staff, signing off on designs. Taibbi won’t discuss the exact format of the new venture, nor its name—that’s still being worked out, too—but he sees it focusing, in part, on the same matters of corporate malfeasance he’s been covering for years.

“What I’m hoping to capture is the simultaneously funny and satirical voice that you got with Spy magazine,” he says. “The whole thing will probably be a little different than what a lot of people expect.”

What people expect, of course, is the ­ribald, loudly antagonistic voice of a writer who is, in his own words, “full of outrage.” The guy who compared Goldman Sachs to a “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The reporter who dropped acid, donned a Viking hat and wraparound ­sunglasses, and had a nice casual chat with the former deputy head of the Office of National Drug Policy, the same policymaker responsible for the “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” advertising campaign. And the person who, as the editor of a Moscow paper, marched into the local offices of the Times and slammed a pie filled with horse semen into the face of a reporter he deemed a “hack.” The ­unfiltered, uncowed Matt Taibbi who once dumped coffee on an interviewer from Vanity Fair and then chased him down the street.

But despite his newfound personal courtesy, none of Taibbi’s anger at the “toothlessness” of the media has dissipated. “I think it’s a lost art in this country—developing that narrative voice where readers connect with you as a human being,” he says, harpooning a stray piece of scrambled egg. “They want to see how you react individually to things. And if you think something is outrageous, and you write about it in a tone without outrage, then that’s just deception, you know?”

Taibbi says his decision to leave Rolling Stone was predicated in part on the need to make a change and “keep from falling into a pattern,” and partly by his desire to “be on Glenn’s side.” Glenn being Glenn Greenwald, who, along with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, is currently editing another First Look property, the national-security-centric The Intercept, which has been live since February. “Glenn’s in this position of being a reporter trying to put out material that came from a whistle-blower, and now they’re both essentially in exile. It’s crazy. If the press corps that existed in the ’60s and ’70s had seen this situation, they’d be rising as one and denouncing the government for it,” Taibbi says.

Like former Washington Post scribe Ezra Klein, who recently moved to a new venture at Vox Media, Taibbi sees hope in the foundational, start-up mode of journalism. “You’ve got this widespread mistrust of media organizations,” he says, “and the feeling, from people on both sides, that the networks are in the tank for one political party or another. I think people are more willing to trust individuals than they are organizations.”

Taibbi grew up on the South Shore of Boston, where he was by his account a “depressive” kid, content to spend the day burrowing into old Russian novels. “I must have read Dead Souls a hundred times,” he says. “I had this fantasy that I was living in 19th-century Russia.” (It was his Russophilia that led him, in 1992, to move there, where he remained until 2002, working first at the Moscow Times, and then at the eXile, a news­paper he helped found with fellow expat Mark Ames.)

Taibbi’s father is the Emmy Award–­winning NBC reporter Mike Taibbi—and along with Gogol and Tolstoy, he also idolized the “middle-class, working-class people” who then populated newsrooms. “They relished their role as jerks who wouldn’t let anything slide. And I was attracted to that,” he says. “I mean, ­journalists should be dark, funny, mean people. It’s appropriate for their ­antag­onistic, adversarial role.”

Contrast that with today, he argues, when for a lot of reporters, “the appeal of the job has more to do with proximity to power. They want to say they had a beer with Hillary Clinton or whatever it is.” Espe­cially offensive to Taibbi: the ­ten­den­cy of his peers to go to great lengths to always give equal weight to opposing arguments. “If there’s one way of looking at things, and there’s another way of looking at things that’s totally ridiculous, you don’t have to give the latter point of view as much ­quarter as some contemporary journalism professors might tell you.”

He stands up. Time to leave—the day is full with appointments, and at home, in Jersey City, his wife, a family doctor, and his son are waiting. But first he wants to take a look at the waitress’s tattoo. She holds her hand ­forward: I FUCKING LOVE YOU, reads a line of blue cursive script. “Very nice,” Taibbi says appreciatively.

Outside, the temperature has dropped to 19 degrees. Taibbi, tucked into a boxy old coat, says it isn’t as cold as it was when he lived in Moscow, and it’s ­pos­itively balmy compared with the climes in ­Mongolia, where he, at age 25, had spent a season playing professional basketball. The team was the Mountain Eagles; Taibbi was a small forward. “I’d met this kid playing street ball in Moscow, and he told me about a pro league in Mongolia called the MBA. So I quit my job and took a train to Ulan Bator. They called me ‘the Mongolian Rodman,’ ” he says. “I would have stayed. I was having a blast. But I caught pneumonia and I had to go back to Moscow.”

Taibbi lopes southward, toward the cloistered streets of the Financial District. I wonder aloud if he feels that the work he did about Wall Street—on subprime mortgages, and the student-loan apparatus, and the “teeming rat’s nest of corruption” that led to the 2008 meltdown—had made a difference.

“I think the first clue I had was when Occupy happened,” he says. “And I could see that a lot of the stuff that I wrote about was in the background. People carrying papier-­mâché squids at some of the protests, which was cool. I think that’s part of what every journalist wants: to have an impact.” Still, that impact has only gone so far. None of the operators Taibbi regards as criminally liable for the crash has been punished; meanwhile, movies like The Wolf of Wall Street are, in his view, idolizing bankers in a way he finds unseemly. “It’s kind of the same way they glamorized the Mafia once upon a time,” he says. “But at least with the Mafia, there was always this lesson that you got at the end, that crime didn’t pay.”

Taibbi pauses at the top of the steps of the Fulton Street subway station. “Big companies like Goldman Sachs have billions to spend on their own publicity. They don’t need us to do that for them. And everyone else in this world does need us to do that for them,” he says, waving good-bye. “I think about that a lot.”

*This article appears in the March 10, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.




COMMENTS from Jan. 1, 2014 VOSD story above

... Scott Lewis administrator
Hi guys, I didn't mean politically conservative. I meant conservative in actions, ie, concerned with conserving what I have, not risking...Just want us to keep our edge, be willing to upset folks from time to time and make wise investments in broader coverage that we think can be sustained in future.

... Doug Porter subscriber
Excellent writing. Bravo to the story line, too! Happy New Year!

[Maura Larkins' comment:
I agree. Very good writing, Scott. As a journalist, I'm sure Mr. Porter genuinely empathizes with your story line. He, too, must feel the pressure to avoid controversy, to avoid truths that are unpleasant to him. But he's recovering from a bout of cancer. He has a lot better excuse than Mr. Lewis for "plateauing".]

Scott Lewis administrator
Happy New Year to you, too, Doug.

It looks like Voice of San Diego might be taking some cards out of the deck before it begins to play

Has Voice of San Diego given up on journalistic ethics? They're starting to make the SDUT look good! I'm beginning to think VOSD is just a mouthpiece for a few people with money and/or influence who wanted some control over which voices are heard in San Diego. But apparently they didn't just want to give some new people a voice. They also want to keep some new voices silent.

Last night I sent two comments to VOSD about the Jackson story in Voice of San Diego:

To VOSD:
You guys are doing something wrong. I don't think your decisions are motivated by race, but the unbalanced racial makeup of the people you choose to attack exposes a problem. I'm not talking about the top elected officials. I am talking about how VOSD chooses which of the other 3 million people in San Diego to attack, protect, or discuss. There's something wrong with your methodology when so many of the people attacked are black women. There is something arbitrary and inequitable about your methods. The law of probability indicates that you are somehow pulling some of the cards out of the deck before the game begins.

You are exposing your methods unintentionally. The same thing happens with people who cheat on their taxes. The IRS spots them by looking for certain numbers that tend to pop up more frequently in the tax filings of people who are cheating. They use statistics to spot the fraud, without even looking at the reasons given for deductions.



VOSD has stepped gingerly around some stories, and stepped heavily into other stories.

The people that get the gentler treatment from VOSD tend to be white, not because VOSD is racist, but because, I suspect, the people whom Buzz Woolley and the rest of the top dogs at VOSD want to protect happen to be white. People high up on the food chain in San Diego schools are treated gently (and the superintendent there is a black man), while people who rank lower take the heat. Also, people down at SEDC get harsh handling.

Obviously, commenter "bigfan" doesn't like Shelia Jackson, and doesn't want to question VOSD's motives for choosing to attack Jackson while staying silent on more important issues in schools.

My point is that I think VOSD chooses stories for the wrong reasons, but not necessarily for racial reasons. But one must suspect that something is wrong when there is such a surfeit of black women being attacked. The laws of probability are being violated. The choices seem arbitrary. It appears that people are attacked if they are not on the protected list.

Let's look at the facts. When Regina Petty at SEDC wouldn't turn over public records, VOSD went after her with a vengeance. We were treated to 13 "Petty Watch" posts. It took two months of "almost constant hounding" to get SEDC to release public records.

But VOSD reported that when it asked for records from the County Office of Education "that would show if the trips were given to the agency rather than the employee, it didn't provide any." VOSD didn't begin an aggressive "Crosier Watch." No constant hounding. The difference in treatment was not due to the fact that the SEDC lawyer was black and Diane Crosier, the lawyer in charge of keeping public records out of public view at the County Office of Education, was white. It's because Petty had no friends at VOSD, and Crosier apparently does. I call it friendship when you meekly accept a "no" answer to a public records request instead of doing all you can to shame Diane Crosier into turning over the records.

I'm not saying VOSD shouldn't cover the Jackson story. I'm saying that we can clearly see that there is a problem when racial patterns emerge so clearly in VOSD stories. I'm saying VOSD needs to start telling the whole truth about schools in San Diego. And it should start with a "Crosier Watch."





At almost 5 p.m. today (July 30, 2011), my comments are not posted. Here's what I just wrote to Scott Lewis and Andrew Donohue.

Scott Lewis, Andrew Donohue:

You allowed a commenter to call me "pathetic" and say she was LMAO (laughing her ass off). Not coincidentally, I believe, she was defending VOSD's choice of subject for investigation.

Then you failed to publish my two comments explaining myself.

You're not even pretending any more, are you?



I'm beginning to think that although VOSD does cover some stories that the SDUT doesn't, it isn't because VOSD is more fair in who it attacks. It's simply that VOSD is politically motivated to attack different people. The main problem I see with both VOSD and SDUT is that they like to go after little stories of small corruption in which the taxpayers lose a small amount of cash to someone with sticky fingers, while at the same time both these newspapers leave unmolested the big guys who undermines society itself by corrupting the system to make the entire operation of government subservient to their wishes.

George Orwell's characters seems to be alive and well as the San Diego Union Tribune redacts its archives

Scott Lewis wrote this story before he learned how very seductive the power of an editor can be: you can cause trouble for people you don't care about, and protect others who are equally or more guilty of wrongdoing. Voice of San Diego has been very careful not to demand public records from San Diego County Office of Education. If Diane Crosier doesn't want to hand them over, VOSD politely accepts her decision.

See more posts regarding Scott Lewis.


U-T Decides to Redact Its Archives
Voice of San Diego
by SCOTT LEWIS
October 30, 2008

Uh oh. Backtrack alert. We've got some historical revision going on.

I pointed out below how the U-T had posted a blog two weeks ago revealing that the paper received SEDC's "unredacted" legal bills, which we've been trying to get for weeks.

We discovered right away when we looked at those same documents that they were, in fact, totally incomplete -- missing, crucially, the number of hours worked -- and Will Carless hounded the agency for the weeks to get the full, unredacted, legal bills.

The agency finally released those today, but the U-T suddenly decided in its post today that the bills it received weeks ago were actually "heavily redacted" and not satisfyingly -- as it had declared only weeks earlier -- "unredacted."

So I did the post today wondering if they were going to decide which was actually true.

Looks like the paper would prefer to pretend it never was confused at all. The U-T has gone into its archives and taken the word "unredacted" out of the sentence explaining what happened.

Here's a screen shot of the Oct. 15 sentence as it has stood for two weeks until just now.




And here's the way it looks now, a couple hours after I put up the below post :




There's no acknowledgement anywhere that the paper changed the substance of its story.

You simply can't do that. Journalists, in order to maintain credibility, have to let readers know if they change anything of substance on their sites. We do it all the time.

But you can't just change reality.

This deserved a correction -- below the post at least.