Month: October 2003

The bias in the LA Times’ groper stories (backed-up mainly by anonymous sources), and its simultaneous spiking of stories on Davis’ physical assaults on former employees, have prompted Times readers to cancel their subscriptions en masse. This from the horse’s mouth:

As of Saturday evening, about 1,000 readers had cancelled their subscriptions to protest the handling of the Schwarzenegger story. In addition, the newspaper had received as many as 400 phone calls critical of its coverage — many angry, some profane.

The New York Times lost subscribers under the Raines reign, and this is exactly what should happen when papers become de facto tools of puke politics.

Link via Ben Domenich.

Jill’s original story on Davis’ abuse of his office staff is on the Winds of Change blog. Here’s one lurid tale:

On the day in question, State Controller Davis was raging over an employee’s rearranging of framed artwork on his Los Angeles office walls. He stormed, red-faced, out of his office and violently shoved the woman, who we shall call K., out of his way. According to employees who were present, K. ran out clutching her purse, suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized at Cedars Sinai for a severe nervous dermatological reaction, and never returned to work again.

According to one close friend, K. refused to sue Davis, despite the advice of several friends, after a prominent Los Angeles attorney told her that Davis would ruin her. According to one state official. K. was allowed to continue her work under Davis from her home “because she refused to work in Davis’s presence.”

Why doesn’t the LA Times want you to know this?

Jeff Jarvis has the inside dope on rushing Rush:

What joy: Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat hypocrite, too. The National Enquirer broke the story: Rush’s ex-cleaning lady said she was his contact to a black-market drug ring from which Rush allegedly bought thousands — thousands — of prescription painkillers: OxyContin, Lorcet, and hydrocodone.

My prediction: teary apologies, a trip to Betty Ford, and a slow fade-out to oblivion.

The estimable Mickey Kaus predicted Tuesday that the long-anticipated LA Times hit piece on Arnold would have to run Wednesday to have any effect (Shoe-Drop Day tomorrow?):

Tomorrow would be about the logical last day for the Los Angeles Times to drop its bomb on Arnold Schwarzenegger. If editor John Carroll waits any longer it will look like a late hit designed to stampede the electorate.

And sure enough, Kaus has his finger on the pulse of the Times, as we see from the breath-takingly bizarre string of allegations of decades-old groping incidents reported by the always-reliable anonymous complainers:

Four of the six women told their stories on condition that they not be named. Three work in Hollywood and said they were worried that, if they were identified, their careers would be in jeopardy for speaking out against Schwarzenegger, the onetime bodybuilding champion and box-office star who is now the front-runner in the Oct. 7 gubernatorial recall election.

The other unnamed woman said she feared public ridicule and possible damage to her husband’s business.

In the four cases in which the women would not let their names be published, friends or relatives said that the women had told them about the incidents long before Schwarzenegger’s run for governor.

None of the six women who gave their accounts to The Times filed any legal action against him.

Is this a new journalistic low for the Times or what? It’s bad enough they’re so desperate to keep Davis in office they fudge a poll by overloading it with members of groups favorable to Davis, but when you offer a platform to anonymous sources to complain about thirty-year-old tit-squeezing incidents you’ve sunk to a level considerably lower in the credibility department than your average rad-fem blog.

Do they really think anybody is going to be fooled by this?

UPDATE: Arnold apologizes for mistreating women, at the same time that he denies these particular charges. The man clearly has some good advisers on the sexual stuff, probably on the Kennedy side. This was probably the right way to play it, and you’d expect it to be well-played given how long the rumors have been circulating. It strikes me that this story hurts the LA Times more than it hurts Arnie.

Doc Searls mentions that Reynolds and Volokh say Novak’s not protected from being compelled to reveal his sources:

Yet two alpha bloggers (constitutional blawgers, no less), Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh, both say Novak is in fact unprotected on the matter.

…which is obvious, but Doc’s fellow professional journalist Ed Cone is upset that Glenn’s not all over the Plame outing:

Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds are just a couple of guys messing around on the web. They are amateurs writing what pleases them. They have no responsibility to their readers to cover the uncovering of Valerie Plame:

That’s all true, and at the same time it is total bullshit. These guys aren’t lawyers for nothing.

To skip the CIA story is to declare it unimportant. It’s a lie to their audiences. Yet Reynolds is devoting limited energy to the matter, Volokh even less.

And Reynolds is defending himself for not sharing Ed’s obsession with a story that’s still emerging:

I don’t have much trouble resisting people’s efforts to bully me into advancing their agendas. What worries me more, in a way, are the friendly emails from people saying that they get all their news from InstaPundit.

Don’t do that! It’s “InstaPundit,” not “InstaNews Service.” And this is, as Eugene properly notes, an amateur activity. I don’t even get to blog all the stuff that interests me — I’ve really fallen behind on space, guns, and even nanotechnology lately– much less stuff that’s important, but that doesn’t interest me.

It appears that Ed Cone is mostly ticked-off with Reynolds for his pointing out that journalists don’t have immunity from the laws that govern withholding evidence and the like, saying “if we’re no different, why don’t you cover what I cover?”

I’m sure that hit counter envy doesn’t have anything to do with it. At all. But the larger issue is that we have a highly partisan guy – Ed – who’s supposed to be impartial, complaining about a highly partisan guy – Glenn – who’s actually more impartial in the present circumstance, even though he’s an amateur journalist.

Blogs are weird things, wherein 90% of the people make the other 10% look bad, to lift a phrase.