While the LA Daily News has deteriorated ever since a minor central coast figure named Carolina Garcia (who previously had to deal with about one murder story a year, and soft zoning squabbles in Clint Eastwoods Carmel) took editorial helm in 2008, flackage on behalf of LAs skanky political structure has been especially egregiously awful since Ron Hasse took control earlier last year, and the news department has turned into an annex of our various local political machines. Ive noted earlier how the paper seems only too glad to promote the Northeast Valley as a homeless magnet, and also how Dakota Smith, perched in City Hall, suddenly became so glad to promote the Mayors sinister staffing ambitions to hire more exempt staffers, especially after I wrote a piece about why this might not be in the interest of LA nor of any hired workers but of Garcettis and various Councilmembers own ambitions. But also, a local blogger named Near Chaos (hes anonymous, libertarian, and I dont know him, but hes really grown a larger readership in the past year) recently caught a new round of the papers relentless, City Hall-styled sugar-coating in its coverage of a protest at an African-American church. The Daily News ran a newstand banner head A prayer for unity amid the protests and mentioned some tepid protesting chants, but ignored Twitter posts that at other churches protesters were much less controlled, actually shouting F*ck the Police in some instances. Because we all see the same same stuff on Twitter, when I heard about the tenor and vehemence of the protests at the Leimert Park church and other churches last Sunday, I thought the headline unusual enough that when I saw it, I took a photo of it. (It not only does a disservice to the the tenor of the events, but of representing the tenor of the protests themselves). But you might also be amazed in the video of another church event that has surfaced - a video that appears to confirm the kind of things that dozens of people were reporting on Twitter - that this is the way the Daily News is covering things now. The Daily News suggests that the protesters were easily contained by the church, but throughout the community the reports were that it was simply not so. I dont know that I blame the journalists, but I see this as rewriting news to suit its publishers hope for maintaining good vibes from the Mayors office. Video follows. (To its credit, the DN does cite one protesters horrifying quote: “I think police should be obliterated, the whole system” an eighteen year old fumes after being kicked out of the church at last.) But more broadly, if you wonder why the long-suffering Daily News is now just printing flack for the Mayors office, heres my guess: its publisher is unrepentantly from what we would call the other side of the firewall. Ron Hasses whole career has been devoted to selling newspapers through marketing, not through scooping out actual news. A circulation, business operations, and marketing expert, Hasse simply has no historic nose for news at all. We see the results nearly daily now: a newspaper whose hard news side has lost all its teeth, all of them.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 17:20:36 +0000
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