Newspapers and Their Reporters

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There is no such thing as investigative reporting regarding any City/County department unless one offical, such as the Mayor or Supervisor, decides to criticize a department or another city official as Villaraigosa did with the Delgadillo in order to divert press attention from his love life.

The town's newspapers, from the Times to the Daily News to the various Breezes ALWAYS take the side of the official explanations. They may mention "animal activist" groups claim... But they almost never do any investigative reporting. They just report what each side says and you'll find the official government side has about three times as much copy as the "activist" complaints. The reporter never investigates for him or herself. They may interview a few other sources--rarely--to fill out a story, but when it comes to LAAS or County, they never request public records to investigate allegations for themselves. If they do, they are not telling us about it.

One of the few exceptions to this rule is CityBeat when it comes to LAAS. They began nailing Boks within months after he started. I wish I knew then what I know now.


The other newspapers owe their access to city hall's good graces, which disappears if a reporter criticizes a city or county operation without the Mayor or Supervisor taking the lead. AND, the mayor and supervisor will without fail stand behind the "findings" of their pretend investigations, led by their own staffers, replete with altered records.

They will not endanger their city contacts, even when they know they are lying, because they are media whores. As someone I knew in Santa Monica government said, staffers lie from top to bottom as easily as they breathe air, not because they have to, so much as it is part of the culture. It is a culture of lying just as in LA and County.

There is no such thing as reporter integrity in this town when it comes to city hall or the county, and there certainly is no investigative reporting.


The same holds true with TV news. One reporter wanted to air a story of his findings of animal neglect and overcrowding in LA's shelters. ABC management cancelled the project.

The closest you get to investiagtive reporting re LA animal issues are the blogs and some of the animal newspapers.. We may get it wrong sometimes, but that is because no one in government is sharing information. City hall and the BOS are black boxes. The only information to come out are half truths, spins and lies. Once in a while you have a whistleblower that makes change happen by providing evidence of incompetence or downright fraud.

Jim Bickhart often says get your facts straight or no one will belive you. But Jim, who is going to give us the stright facts? You; Boks chief apologist?

Look at the Mason case. He was skewered by Dana Bartholomew as well as City TV and the LAAS website. Dana claims to have written a "short" followup, but no one mentions that Mason was arrested, his cats and cages seized, 65% of the cats killed based on fraudulent evidence, and no charges ever were brought against him because there was no case. No one has told the truth about Mason. True, as a viewer claims, I never saw Dana's alleged followup either.


Again, the Blogger spellchecker is not working.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I never saw a followup on Mason by Dana Bartholomew. Do you have a copy? It's not listed in the Daily News archives.

Anonymous said...

Dana never did a follow up on Mason. He didn't care that his initial story was libelous, defamatory and totally untrue.

Ed Muzika said...

This is what Dana told me:

"I wrote a short follow after the city decided not to press charges."

No one I know of ever saw that follow.

Anonymous said...

The reason why no one writes about you terrorists' issues is no one cares. Normal people in the real world have real problems and are not concerned with your concocted conspiracies, phony statistics and pathological hatred of "The Dogcatcher." Also, (late news bulletin for the clueless) terrorism is out.

None of you goofballs have any idea why that dog died in the county pound, but you intuitively know Mayeda personally froze it.

Drop the terrorism and get a life.

Anonymous said...

Oh look, "Joe"'s back. And wow, what a shock he calls us "terrorists" for utilizing our First Amendment rights to free speech.

Gosh, I certainly do feel bad about myself because he says I hate the Dogcatcher. And I've certainly begun to question my love and caring for animals in the face of his scorn. And given where I bet "Joe" works, his assertion that WE create phony statistics is genuinely funny...

In fact, I'm questioning my whole reason for living because I'm getting called a hater by a hater.

Seriously, "Joe" (or Troy, or Boks, or Antonovich, or shameless sack of a flunky of one of the above and their ilk) isn't there a nice game of tiddly-winks you could be playing? Or some inhalant you could be huffing? It would certainly be a better use of your time, because you're not accomplishing anything here.

Scorn doesn't make people re-think their better impulses. The best it can do, and I hope it IS doing this for some readers here, is make you more accurately assess the level at which the opposition really operates. It's not a case of "there are two sides to every story," it's a case of people trying to achieve good things being ankle-bit by vermin in the gutter.

Nothing personal, "Joe"...

Anonymous said...

Daily News of Los Angeles (CA)

AROUND THE VALLEY

January 17, 2008
Tag: 0801170009


Section: News
Edition: Valley
rop
Page: A4
VAN NUYS
No criminal charges for animal neglect
A Northridge man arrested last fall on suspicion of felony animal neglect for harboring up to 70 cats will not face criminal charges, the City Attorney's Office announced Wednesday.

Ron Mason, whose Napa Street home was raided by the Animal Cruelty Task Force on Oct. 11, was cleared Wednesday before a Van Nuys Courthouse judge.
``We do not have any intention of filing charges,'' said Bob Ferber, supervising attorney for the city's Animal Protection Unit.
``In a nutshell, in that house he complied with all the building code violations. It's all cleaned up. And there's an agreement that he will keep only three cats and work with animal control.''
Mason maintains he was always innocent of any allegations of animal neglect.
``It was a bad bust,'' Mason, 59, said. ``They didn't read me my rights. There were no sick or ailing animals like they said there were.''

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the Mason story. Sure doesn't rise to the level of what Dana Bartholomew promised, which was to "write a story" once the case was decided one way or the other. This isn't a followup, and it doesn't address the myriad of civil rights violations Boks perpetrated against Ron Mason, including lying about him on an offical city website. This is just CYA on the part of the Daily News, and completely lame at that. Dana and his bosses better hope Mason doesn't get a lawyer.

The one thing I hope WE take away from this is that this whole incident was a blatant attempt by Boks to curry favor and rehab his irretrievably lost reputation with the rescue community. He deliberately went after a white man (not what he thinks WE will perceive as a victim), he overtly states that Ron was breeding cats, which he knew was false because he had all Ron's spay/neuter paperwork. He charges a felony (and don't give me "the City Attorney brings the charges -- look at the videotape and see what Boswell says), even though since LAAS has had a relationship with Ron for years, if he HAD been perpetrating felony abuse they would have been negligent in not getting him sooner.

He kills a bunch of cats he knew weren't sick, including the original six kittens who were the bogus premise for the bust.

And when the City Attorney won't go along with this baseles pile of garbage "case," he continues to twist the knife in Ron to the bitter end, in violation of his agreement with Ed M., and for NO other reason than to vent his spite because oops! it turned out Ron wasn't the friendless patsy Boks thought he was.

Let's remember just who we're dealing with. Let's remember that he's no better than Mayeda, he just has a smaller playing field. But he kills cats for spite.

Anonymous said...

I just Googled Danny Ubario to see what info was available and found this: http://www.ashleyandhobie.com/board/viewtopic.php?p=15314&sid=e7fa462a5328fcf27bdfefd58890df12

In a post on the message board on Nov. 30, Cathy Nguyen says she saw a card on Zephyr's cage that day saying treatment had been "Discontinued" on Nov. 23rd. This contradicts Mayeda's claim, in an official report to the Board of Supervisors, that Zephyr had only "missed a couple (sic) doses of antibiotic" and her subsequent claim in the same report that "On November 27, 2007, euthanasia was recommended by the shelter veterinarian because Zephyr was not responding to treatment."

What treatment? Treatment had been discontinued on the 23rd, and was still, according to Cathy Nguyen's post on Nov. 30th, discontinued.

Amazing how dogs don't respond to treatmnet they're not actually getting.

Anonymous said...

Interesting regarding Chick and Delgidillo.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chick20-2008aug20,0,902414.story