The Times Faulted for Downplaying Secession

Second of two parts

John Arthur was editor of the San Fernando Valley Edition of the Los Angeles Times from 1993 to 1998, and he’s still unhappy about how difficult it was to interest his editors downtown in covering the Valley’s secession movement.

“Reporting to a boss in distant downtown, I could certainly identify with the complaints and perceptions of people who lived in the Valley about answering to City Hall on the other side of the hill,” says Arthur, now an assistant managing editor at The Times. “We covered secession in the Valley section, but it was very hard to get editors in Los Angeles to put it on their radar ... and put it in the newspaper that was distributed outside the Valley.”

Secession has been discussed intermittently since the 1920s and has been gaining momentum inexorably since 1997. Nevertheless, most top Times editors didn’t seem terribly interested in it until very recently. Indeed, the growing controversy over secession has triggered a related controversy over newspaper coverage of secession.

If editors at the Daily News in the Valley are widely perceived as trying to advance the cause of secession, their counterparts at The Times are widely perceived as having largely neglected it.

Leo Wolinsky, deputy managing editor of The Times, blames the Times’ shortcomings on “a faulty system” that “Balkanized” the paper’s local coverage.

“Because the Valley section--like our other suburban sections--operated pretty autonomously, secession wound up being cast as a Valley story,” he says. “And instead of covering it as a Los Angeles story, we wound up with two journalistic bureaucracies fighting each other.”

Even Valley Edition

Inconsistent on Issue

Despite a number of good secession stories over the years, even the Valley Edition of The Times didn’t cover the issue consistently or comprehensively.

Many editors downtown, meanwhile, saw secession as “a pipedream, something that would never be on the ballot, never happen,” says John Spano, formerly an editor in the Valley, now an assistant city editor downtown.

Many Times staffers say editors downtown badly misjudged the secession movement. They saw the proposed withdrawal from Los Angeles of 1.35 million people and 222 square miles--about a third of the city’s population and almost half its area--as a small outgrowth of anti-busing sentiment in the Valley dating from the 1970s. To those editors, it was a fringe movement unworthy of serious attention.

The tone of Times coverage was sometimes derisive, as when a veterinarian serving on the Local Agency Formation Commission, the entity charged with determining whether to put secession on the ballot, was described in a 1999 story as “a horse doctor.” Secession proponents are still outraged by the tone of many Valley Edition editorials and by the writings of Scott Harris, a Valley Edition columnist in the ‘90s, who called secession advocates “Valleyistas” and likened elements of the secession process to a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.

Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University, says Times journalists have a cultural mind-set that puts them at odds with what he calls “the middle-class rebellion of the Valley.”

That movement, he says, is “led by people not sociologically similar to reporters at The Times and other big news organizations, so there’s not a lot of understanding or natural sympathy for the secession movement there.”

In conversations with Times staff members in recent months, Managing Editor Dean Baquet has warned against covering secession the way the religious right is sometimes covered, with its leaders treated like cartoon characters.

“He wanted us to avoid that--to take the secession movement seriously,” says Sharon Bernstein, a Valley resident who is part of a five-reporter team created this month to increase secession coverage.

Longtime reporters and editors at the paper say there has been far more interest in secession downtown since the arrival in the last two years of Baquet, who came from the New York Times; John Carroll, the editor of the paper, who came from the Baltimore Sun; and Miriam Pawel, assistant managing editor for state and local news, who came from Newsday, in the suburbs of New York City.

Critics of Times coverage say it sometimes still trivializes the secession movement and continues to favor anti-secession forces. They say The Times demonstrated anew its bias last Friday, two days after LAFCO put the issue on the Nov. 5 ballot, by playing on Page One a story about the strategy of secession opponents while playing on Page 28 a story on the strategy of secession supporters. The Daily News dealt with the two campaigns in one Page One story. Even some Times reporters were troubled by how their paper handled the stories.

Times editors deny any bias, and it’s clear that, whatever the perceived shortcomings of the paper’s current coverage, new editors from the other side of the country have brought fresh eyes to the secession issue.

Even some critics say Times coverage of secession has improved, especially in recent weeks and months--if only because there is more of it. Much of that increase is event-driven; LAFCO reports and votes have transformed what was once seen as a longshot into a ballot measure with a very real chance to succeed.

Bernstein says she noticed a significant shift in the attitude of editors downtown when a Times Poll in March showed that Valley voters favored secession, 55% to 36%, and voters in the city as a whole favored it, 46% to 38%. (A majority of the voters both in the Valley and in the city as a whole must approve secession for the measure to pass.)

Critics Say Times Just

Doesn’t Get the Valley

Critics of The Times can tick off any number of secession stories through the years that they think the paper intentionally ignored, distorted or underplayed. They say The Times simply doesn’t understand the Valley and was, for example, late in acknowledging its growing diversity. Just last year, a Times story referred to the Valley as “largely white,” even though Latinos, with 43% of the population, are the largest single ethnic group.

But neither bias nor ignorance is the most common complaint about Times coverage.

Just as the major criticism of Daily News secession coverage is not the alleged bias of any particular story but the overall tone of the paper’s headlines, editorials, story selection and placement, so the major criticism of Times coverage is not bias but neglect and disdain.

Because The Times often sets the agenda for other local media--especially TV and radio--that meant other news outlets tended to give the movement short shrift too.

Many in the Valley say The Times has gradually abandoned it--first by reducing the Valley staff considerably in 1995 and then, last year, by replacing the separate Valley section with a new California section that added regional coverage and reduced the Valley emphasis. The change eliminated the separate Valley editorials, op-ed articles and some local features. Carroll says The Times was not abandoning the Valley, but rather trying to serve its readers better.

Carroll lives in Pasadena, and he says he wasn’t getting much coverage of secession in the paper delivered to his home every day. “When I found out those stories were being zoned out of the rest of the city, except for the Valley, that made no sense to me.”

Carroll said his desire for more such coverage was one reason the paper decided last year to reduce geographically zoned coverage and emphasize a regional approach to Southern California.

“We think Valley readers have interests that go far beyond the Valley, so our section is designed to give them news of the Valley, of the rest of the county, of Southern California and of the rest of the state in one section,” he said. “The section is predicated on their being sophisticated readers, not one-subject readers.”

Critics say The Times has a financial stake in opposing secession. The Times, with a daily circulation of almost 1 million overall, outsells the Daily News by more than 10,000 copies each day in the Daily News’ primary market. If the Valley secedes and the Daily News successfully positions itself as the hometown newspaper of record for the new city--which would be the sixth-largest in the nation--The Times could conceivably lose that edge.

“The Times doesn’t want to be in another situation like they have against the Register in Orange County, where they’re marginalized as an out-of-town paper,” says Richard Close, chairman of Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment (Valley VOTE). “They want to protect their circulation in the San Fernando Valley.”

The Times and the Daily News are rivals, but the situation is much different than in Orange County. The Times is more established in the Valley, which has been part of Los Angeles since 1915, than it ever was in Orange County. Moreover, when The Times began its Orange County Edition in 1968, the Register’s parent company--Freedom Newspapers--spent money to improve the paper. In contrast, the parent company of the Daily News, MediaNews Group of Denver, is known more for cutting costs than improving journalism at its papers.

Indeed, Times Mirror, The Times’ corporate parent until Tribune Co. of Chicago acquired the company two years ago, secretly loaned $50 million to MediaNews to help finance its $130-million purchase of the Daily News in 1998 precisely because it wanted to prevent potentially stronger rivals from taking over the Daily News. (The deal gave The Times an option to buy the Daily News, though the Justice Department would likely block such a transaction on antitrust grounds.)

The Daily News had been cutting its staff before MediaNews took over, and the staff is now considerably smaller than it was in the early to mid-1990s. Times executives do not seem deeply concerned that secession would reverse that trend. Even if they did think that the Daily News, enriched by new advertising dollars in a new city, would substantially improve its journalistic performance, they say, that would not affect Times coverage of secession.

“I don’t know what secession would mean to us financially,” says John Puerner, publisher of The Times. “But our coverage is not influenced in any way by any financial considerations.

“I don’t think our success in the Valley is dependent on the Valley being part of the city,” Puerner says. “If the Valley does secede, we will adjust our coverage and our marketing strategy accordingly to maintain our aggressive leadership there.”

Some media and advertising analysts say that though the Daily News would probably gain new advertising revenue if secession passed, that revenue would probably not come at the expense of The Times.

“Advertisers would then look at the San Fernando Valley as an independent, self-sustaining market, and it not only wouldn’t hurt The Times, it might help The Times because it would create less competition in the remaining L.A. market,” says Jack Myers, editor of an advertising industry newsletter in New York.

Paper Still a Part of

City’s Power Structure

But though The Times may have diminished concerns about the Daily News as a business competitor, The Times continues to be part of the downtown power structure, and many critics say that’s the primary reason the paper opposes secession.

The early publishers of The Times literally helped create Los Angeles, and the paper has been an integral part of the downtown business/political establishment ever since.

The acquisition of The Times by Tribune Co. of Chicago two years ago has diminished those ties somewhat, but the paper still “considers itself the heart and soul of downtown Los Angeles,” says Larry Calemine, executive officer of LAFCO.

David Fleming, chairman of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley and a leader of the City Charter reform movement, says The Times and the city’s leadership continue to have “kind of a love relationship. The Times helps the bureaucracy run the city and it considers itself the voice of the city.”

Indeed, not long after Times inquiries forced disclosure of a controversial $60,000 Daily News contribution to Valley VOTE in 1998, the Daily News reported that The Times’ then-corporate parent, Times Mirror, had paid a $40,000 membership fee in the Los Angeles Business Advisors, a powerful downtown business and civic coalition, for Mark H. Willes, then Times publisher and Times Mirror chief executive.

Willes said the contribution amounted to less than 5% of the group’s funding and had no impact on Times coverage.

Although The Times has editorialized vigorously against secession, Times editors say that is not because of any commercial or political self-interest but because “we feel secession would be destructive of the life of the city, which the Valley is part of,” says Janet Clayton, editor of the editorial pages.

Like their counterparts at the Daily News, Times editors insist their news coverage has been evenhanded.

But some critics say that even with its recent upgraded coverage, The Times still isn’t doing the kind of big-picture secession stories that a newspaper of its size and stature should undertake.

“The Times hasn’t told the narrative of our common experience,” says D.J. Waldie, a Lakewood city official and the author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir” and “Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out.” “It hasn’t provided a narrative or even a cartoon outline, the roughest schematic, of how things actually work here and how anything would change and what it would all mean to the soul of the city.

“As one of the few institutions that influences the entire region, The Times should have done more to tie that region together,” Waldie says, “to provide a sense of loyalty to place that might have counteracted secessionist sentiment.”

Lisa Gritzner, chief of staff for Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, says The Times has covered “the numbers and the nuts and bolts of who would control which services and how much alimony the Valley would pay to the city, but they haven’t done many in-depth stories on what secession would really mean to the average citizen who lives in Silver Lake or San Pedro or Van Nuys.”

Since one of the main arguments of secession supporters is that a new Valley city would be smaller and more responsive than Los Angeles, critics ask why The Times hasn’t seriously examined government efficiency and responsiveness in cities approximately the size of the Valley’s projected 1.3-million population--cities such as Phoenix, San Diego and Dallas.

Still others say that with all the controversy over the financial impact of secession on both the Valley and the rest of Los Angeles, The Times should hire independent analysts and do its own study.

Six years ago, Beth Barrett, a veteran Daily News reporter, spent four months examining whether the Valley gets a fair share of city services and produced a story that took six full pages in the paper and concluded that there was about a 5% gap between what Valley residents paid to the city in taxes and what they received in services.

“Where was the L.A. Times on that?” Barrett asks. “Why weren’t they looking at discrepancies throughout the city?”

Editors say they are considering an independent financial analysis, among many other stories on secession. Carroll cites a story last Sunday, which tried to paint a portrait of what a new Valley city would be like, as an example of the kind of reporting The Times will do over the next several months.

“By the time the citizens are asked to cast a vote on this,” he says, “we will have provided vast information, and I hope it will be lucid information.”

But critics say they still see stories in The Times that “mock the cause and mock the people involved,” in the words of Jeff Brain, president of Valley VOTE.

“The Times’ coverage has gotten more balanced” in recent weeks, Brain says, but he cites as an example of this “mocking attitude” a story last Saturday about confusion over the secession proposal among people in a Sherman Oaks strip mall “in the shadow of the Valley VOTE office.”

The story quoted one person as asking if LAFCO was “a comedy store in Hollywood” and quoted another as saying he would move to Los Angeles rather than live in a city called Camelot, one of five choices on the ballot for the name of the proposed new Valley city.

Critics of The Times have also complained that Steve Lopez columns on secession have ridiculed and patronized the Valley and that a May 19 Times editorial likening secession to a separatist struggle in the latest “Star Wars” movie was typical of the paper’s long-standing “trivialization” of the movement.

Times editors say that is not their intent. They insist they now take secession very seriously.

They have six months before the Nov. 5 election to demonstrate that.