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.

Susan Luzzaro refuses to apologize for lapses in journalistic ethics; reveals that her daughter is on the CVE bargaining team

San Diego Reader reporter Susan Luzzaro seems to
have turned her back on journalistic ethics

See all posts re Common Core in SDER blog.

When I called out San Diego Reader reporter Susan Luzzaro on April 15, 2014 for her biased reporting about Common Core testing in Chula Vista Elementary School District, I thought that she had compromised her journalistic ethics. It turns out, I didn't know the half of it.

I was shocked to read the following in an April 19, 2014 article by Ms. Luzzaro:

"...Chula Vista Elementary’s public relations officer, Anthony Millican, followed up by intimating it was unethical for me, as an author, not to have disclosed in the April 10 testing article that my daughter is a member of the Chula Vista Educator’s bargaining team. Millican also stated in an April 18 email, “You should have got our side of the issue in the first place”...(emphasis added).

Say what??? Susan Luzzaro's daughter is a member of the CVE (Chula Vista Educators) bargaining team?!?

I had no idea! What is going on, Susan Luzzaro??? How could you have concealed that information from your readers when you were attacking CVESD?

(I checked the latest "bargaining update" on the CVESD website, and found that Vanessa Luzzaro-Braito, who seems to have suddenly changed her name to Vanessa Braito, is listed as a member of the CVE team. I'm going to make a wild guess that the reason for the name change is to conceal the fact that she is Susan Luzzaro's daughter. While I'm at it, I think I'll make another wild guess: I bet Vanessa Luzzaro-Braito does not like Common Core. Do I have any takers on that bet?)

NO APOLOGY

I notice that Ms. Luzzaro expresses no remorse about her ethical lapse. Instead, she seems to be offended that Mr. Millican would "intimate" that her behavior was unethical. Ms. Luzzaro seems to believe that it's okay for her to behave as she does, but it's not okay for others to talk about it.

If she really believes that there's nothing wrong with her actions, then why is she upset that people are discussing them?

Ms. Luzzaro's attitude, and certainly the attitude of the San Diego Reader, seems to be expressed in the contemptuous headline of Susan's latest story: "Hey, Chula Vista Elementary School District, test this".

NO EFFORT TO CORRECT BIAS IN APRIL 10, 2014 ARTICLE

Ms. Luzzzaro has made no effort as of April 22, 2014 to balance the reporting in her April 10, 2014 story, "Standardized tests shunned by South Bay parents." After reading the story, one might be forgiven for believing that ALL parents at CVESD oppose the testing. Ms. Luzzaro does not appear to have made any effort to talk to parents who approve of Common Core and the associated testing.

WHY IS THE TEACHERS UNION ATTACKING COMMON CORE?

Susan Luzzaro is clearly trying to shift responsibility away from teachers who are having problems teaching basic concepts as required by Common Core. These teachers want to go back to methods that rely largely on rote memorization. See "Teachers who don't know how to teach are complaining about Common Core in Chula Vista Elementary School District."


Photo published by Reader on April 19, 2014.

Instead of retracting the false implication in her April 10, 2014
story that kids may be held back if they do poorly on a standardized
test, Ms. Luzzaro and the Reader reinforce the false impression with
a photo of a child being hoisted up by her mother, holding a sign that
says, “I am not a test score.” The photo dishonestly implies that the
district will change its treatment of the child based on a test score.
Shame on Susan Luzzaro and the Reader—and the parent who created that sign!

ANOTHER CASE OF COMPROMISED ETHICS AT THE READER?

All this is causing me to wonder if Dorian Hargrove's "mistake" in this story about Stutz Artiano Shinoff & Holtz v. Larkins was really a mistake. In his story about me, Mr. Hargrove said that I had written a statement about Stutz law firm that was, in fact, written by an anonymous commenter on my blog. I let Mr. Hargrove know about the error right away. When I asked him to correct it, he refused to do so, saying, "It happens."

At the San Diego Reader, such happenings are apparently not considered grounds for an apology or retraction.

NOTE #1:

I will be presenting my oral arguments in Stutz v. Larkins in the Court of Appeal on May 16, 2014 at 9 a.m.. I won in August 2011 in this separate appeal in this same case. This bizarre free speech case has dragged on for over six years. Click HERE to see all posts regarding this lawsuit.

NOTE #2:

I have severely criticized CVESD on numerous occasions, but I support Core and the associated testing because it is in the best interest of students.

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.

KUSI reports campaign allegations as fact; is Prop D so incendiary that it causes KUSI to compromise its journalistic integrity?

How Political Spin Became Fact on KUSI
Keegan Kyle
Voice of San Diego
August 31, 2010

Here's a lesson from the budding campaign over Proposition D that shows how quickly political spin can become accepted fact.

Last week, journalists received an e-mail blast from opponents of Proposition D, the sales tax measure on November's ballot. The opponents announced a meeting with "over 300 business and community leaders" for the "launch of (a) grassroots effort." They took a stab at Proposition D supporters, too.

[Excerpt from email:] Proponents of Prop D will have $1 million or more from labor unions and special interests to spend in their campaign ... We cannot match that special interest money. Fortunately, our "No on Prop D" campaign has the support of the grassroots in San Diego -- a broad spectrum of hardworking small business owners, neighborhood activists and community leaders.

KUSI covered the meeting live and reported the campaign's claims to its audiences as fact. Here's one excerpt from the exchange between anchor and news reporter (emphasis is ours):

Anchor: I understand the Prop. D campaign has quite a bit of money behind it to see it through.

Reporter: They do. They have about a million dollars for those supporting Proposition D, for their campaigns. Some of that is funded by some of the unions around San Diego city and county as well. The campaign here, the No on Prop. D campaign, does not have that kind of money. This is a purely grassroot effort. This is a fundraiser tonight so they're actually trying to get some people to donate to their campaign, but what they're to do is get as much support behind this as they can. They've already got a substantial portion of the business community supporting the No on Prop D campaign.

Anchor: Sounds like they're putting up a pretty good fight, though. Alright, Tom, thank you.

In those four highlighted sections, the reporter presented the same talking points about unions, special interests, business and grassroots efforts that came from the anti-Prop. D press release. He claimed the pro-Prop. D campaign had $1 million, which actually went a step further from the press release, which only forecasted that sum...

Two bricks for Leslie Devaney and the San Diego Union Tribune for hypocrisy and secrecy

I'm concerned that attorney Leslie Devaney's demands for openness at Tri-City Healthcare are actually an attempt to STOP OR SABOTAGE THE FORENSIC AUDIT. Which does the public need more: an effective audit of financial shenanigans, or a long fight at a board meeting at which the final outcome was predetermined since the majority had all the votes they needed no matter who showed up? I think that the shortness of the meeting was merely an effort to protect the psyches of the board members, who apparently don't have much of a taste for being yelled at. I think they need to toughen up and summon up some courage. They're way too afraid of Leslie Devaney and Ray Artiano and the bigshots who hired them. The board needs to do some homework, to make sure it really understands the situation, and then stand up and go to bat for what it believes in. Too many board members across the spectrum of public entities simply do what their lawyers tell them to do.

This blog has awarded a big brick to attorney Leslie Devaney for hypocrisy and secrecy. Since 2001 Leslie Devaney's law firm Stutz Artiano Shinoff & Holtz has been paid $100,000s of tax dollars by Chula Vista Elementary School District to cover up crimes and other violations of law.

Yet Devaney has the temerity to denounce the new Tri-City Healthcare board majority for lack of openness. Why is she doing this? Apparently to stop the board's investigation into possible criminal activity by her clients Art Gonzalez and seven of his fellow administrators.

But it gets worse. At the same time that Devaney is denouncing board members for putting administrators on leave during a forensic audit, she and her partners at Stutz law firm are suing this blogger (Maura Larkins) for defamation, and REFUSING TO PRODUCE DOCUMENTS RELATED TO THE CRIMINAL ACTIONS AT CVESD.

How do I know these documents exist? Because I have over half the pages from the 87-page set of Bate-stamped documents--the ones that were cherry-picked by CVESD because they were less incriminating. The documents were collected by Daniel Shinoff at Chula Vista Elementary School District during the fall of 2001, and Bate-stamped with the number “1” (not “01” or “001”) through 87, inclusive.

In order to make it impossible for Stutz law firm to claim that they couldn't identify the documents, I sent them copies of many of the documents from the set. Still, Stutz says it can't find the documents, and blames a paralegal.

Here's where the story gets humorous: Stutz is suing me for saying that "Daniel Shinoff keeps documents locked up in his office."

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And here's a brick to the San Diego Union Tribune for hypocrisy and secrecy on behalf of Stutz law firm, for publishing tirades against CVESD for transferring the "Castle Park Five" while at the same time keeping secret the $100,000s of tax dollars the district had paid to defend many of those same teachers.

Don Sevrens and the SDUT help Bertha Lopez hide wrongdoing

On August 30, 2008 the San Diego Union Tribune published a sorry excuse for an editorial in its south county edition that includes the following statement:

"We have criticized from time to time Bertha Lopez, a busy individual, for failing to respond to media and public inquiries. We have never criticized her integrity."

This editorial appears to me to be the work of Don Sevrens, who regularly manages to avoid logical consistency in his opinions. In fact, Don Sevrens and the SDUT have been kept well-informed about Bertha Lopez' wrongdoing, but they have kept her secrets for many years. Even when writing about the "Castle Park Five," Sevrens and the SDUT kept quiet about the concurrent court case that involved wrongdoing by Bertha Lopez and the rest of the CVESD board as well as several members of the group of five teachers transferred out of Castle Park Elementary.