Eric and all, here's a first-hand account of the LA Times bias in their "investigation" of the groping story.
jillstewart.net (excerpt starting from just below the halfway mark)
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"Toward the end, a kind of hysteria gripped the newsroom. I witnessed a deep-seated, irrational need to get something on this guy [Schwarzenegger]. By Wednesday before it was published, I counted not fewer than 24 reporters dispatched on Arnold, and this entire enterprise was directed by John Carroll himself."
"Carroll launched the project with the words: 'I want a full scrub of Arnold.' This was fully and completely and daily driven by Carroll. He's as good as his word on being balanced and trying to make this paper more balanced, he really is. But not when it came to Schwarzenegger. Carroll changed completely. It was visceral, and he made it clear he wanted something bad on Schwarzenegger and he didn't care what it was."
"The air of unreality among people here was so extreme that when they did the office pool, of something like 113 people who put in a dollar to bet on the outcome of the recall and on who would be chosen governor, only 31 bet 'yes' on recall and 'yes' Schwarzenegger to win. All you had to do was read a poll to know how wrong that was, but inside this place only about 25 percent of the people could see the recall coming."
"People inside here are far more detached from the new media reality. They are generally unaware that the Times is reviled by large numbers of Southern Californians."
"What I know for a fact is that they could have published the story much, much earlier. First of all, they had the Wendy Leigh story, the highly detailed story from a British writer, with highly detailed groping allegations, from which they got the Anna Richardson anecdote. She was named in the L.A. Times. They had enough stories from his past, very early on, to have the story in the bag many weeks before they did."
"Second, they fucked around with the Mark Arax story on steroids use by Schwarzenegger. Joel Sappell edited that, and it went on Page One, instead of trying to get the groping story in the paper fast. The steroids piece had been meant to be something much more than a portrait of his rough behavior in his bodybuilding days. It was a disappointment that much, much worse things about Schwarzenegger weren't found. They certainly tried. They should've finished up the big attack story on groping instead of slowing down to wrap up the steroids piece. It pushed the big attack story right into the final days of the campaign. It was incredibly, incredibly irresponsible for John Carroll to do that."
"It all happened amidst a poisonous atmosphere here against Schwarzenegger---a blatant political undertone that was everywhere in the newsroom. These are people who have been in the building a long time and have formed a culture together. It's easy for all of us to start thinking very much alike."
"The reporters probed everything they could think of about Schwarzenegger: his health, his businesses, his charities. They couldn't find out anything horrible about his charities, but they tried very, very hard. His business empire made him look good---so the business empire story was buried in the paper. It ended up on something like, I don't know, Page A36. And as these issues got abandoned because they produced no dirt on Arnold, as desired by Carroll, the team going after him got more and more focused on sex and steroids."
"It was awful to watch Carroll. It became a Capt. Ahab and Moby Dick thing where they felt an increasing need to nail those points that could most hurt Schwarzenegger. At times, it made me physically uncomfortable to be in the newsroom."
"There was a building roster of people assigned as this frenzy grew. By the week the story ran, a roster of more than 24 reporters had been fanned out over all aspects of Arnold in a flat-out effort to turn him upside down, and Carroll was openly visible in the newsroom in a way I have never seen before. That was really incredible to see. He was out of his office and in the newsroom, and this was his show, not Dean [Baquet's] show. And when reporters saw that he [Carroll] just needed to nail it and get whatever information toward that goal, it turned into a frenzy. People were running across the newsroom, people were racing out to knock on strangers' doors."
"The things that you have reported about Gray Davis attacking and throwing things at staff members are not the only things Gray Davis did that are well known within the Times. Not at all. There was more personal behavior to look into on Gray Davis that would have hurt his candidacy, if the Times had pursued it. They knew, and they didn't pursue it. As you said on FOX or CNN, Carroll very obviously did not create a team to dig into Davis' background. Mass hypnosis is the way it felt to me, when responsible people begin to suspend their responsible judgement like that. I don't really believe it was a conscious decision to help the Democrats over the Republicans. It didn't feel like partisan politics to me at all. I don't think it was that conscious. These are not bad people. An unthinking mass response, completely unthinking, is the only explanation I have."
"If you want to hang onto your job, you can't have an open discussion about this. If an editor really did make a speech at the A1 meeting [where stories are picked for the front page] that the Los Angeles Times was going to be hurt far more by this attack than Arnold Schwarzenegger, I really pray that is true, that somebody spoke out. I cannot confirm that. When they see Jill Stewart on a TV screen here, there is open, blatant antagonism. There is absolutely no self-examination going on at the Times."
"The mainstream press critics like those published on Romenesko are asleep as to what has happened here. They are defending the L.A. Times in every way. There should be no defense by media critics of what happened here. One woman did not sleep for two nights after a Times reporter showed up at her door, with the thinnest evidence, demanding to know if her child was Arnold's love child. It never panned out, it was untrue. Why has the L.A. Times become a tabloid, knocking relentlessly on people's doors for tabloid gossip? And would John Carroll have run a front page Love Child story if it had been true? Could we sink any lower?"
"At the end, the tabloidy bias leaked out all over the front page, even infecting the headline writers. You probably saw the story where Schwarzenegger announces his plans for his administration, and we headlined it something like, 'Actor Behaves As if He's Won.' That front page was pure tabloid."
"The paper used methods as if they were trying to crack a criminal enterprise. That is fundamentally what happened here. They took the rules of criminal investigation and overlaid them onto a political campaign, as if we had an organized crime figure running for office. One of the lead reporters is a good, seasoned Pulitzer journalist, who had not covered California, and it was his first week or so at the Times. He had taken a two-year hiatus in Alaska before arriving here. He really walked into this, and it's not his fault, and it's a shame. He got caught in an ugly dynamic that people above him created."
"I was deeply ashamed of the final days, after our first attack story ran. After that, we ran daily, unverified claims of groping against Schwarzenegger. Some people here insist that we couldn't run the first attack piece on Schwarzenegger any sooner than five days before the election because the groping claims took so long to verify. How were those groping claims of all those women at the end checked out in a few hours and pushed into the paper by next morning? What happened here, from day one, was deeply aberrant. Yes, our political coverage is skewed, like most papers, and so what? It's a fact of life. This was aberrant. It was outside of bounds. It was intense and real. To get something on him was the goal. No question, and no other goal." |
