LA Times Self-Destructs

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The Los Angeles Times has always been a leftist paper, but in the run-up to the California recall election they have utterly abandoned all pretense of impartiality, throwing everything they have into an unprecedented smear campaign against Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the LA Daily News, Jill Stewart has a great story that illustrates how dishonest and one-sided their campaign really is: Why wasn’t Davis investigated too?

Since at least 1997, the Times has been sitting on information that Gov. Gray Davis is an “office batterer” who has attacked female members of his staff, thrown objects at subservients and launched into red-faced fits, screaming the f-word until staffers cower.

I published a lengthy article on Davis and his bizarre dual personality at the now-defunct New Times Los Angeles on Nov. 27, 1997, as well as several articles with similar information later on.

The Times was onto the story, too, and we crossed paths. My article, headlined “Closet Wacko Vs. Mega Fibber,” detailed how Davis flew into a rage one day because female staffers had rearranged framed artwork on the walls of his office.

He so violently shoved his loyal, 62-year-old secretary out of a doorway that she suffered a breakdown and refused to ever work in the same room with him. She worked at home, in an arrangement with state officials, then worked in a separate area where she was promised Davis would not go. She finally transferred to another job, desperate to avoid him.

He left a message on her phone machine. Not an apology. Just a request that she resume work, with the comment, “You know how I am.”

Another woman, a policy analyst, had the unhappy chore in the mid-1990s of informing Davis that a fund-raising source had dried up. When she told Davis, she recounted, Davis began screaming the f-word at the top of his lungs.

The woman stood to demand that he stop speaking that way, and, she says, Davis grabbed her by her shoulders and “shook me until my teeth rattled. I was so stunned I said, ‘Good God, Gray! Stop and look at what you are doing. Think what you are doing to me!”’

And the blatant bias has not gone unnoticed by LA Times readers, who are canceling subscriptions and angrily complaining to the paper in large numbers: L.A. Times Faces Anger for Schwarzenegger Coverage.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Los Angeles Times has had about 1,000 readers cancel subscriptions and been “flooded” with angry letters, calls and e-mail protesting its coverage of Arnold Schwarzenegger (news)’s alleged sexual harassment of women, it reported on Sunday.

The newspaper has detailed allegations by a total of 15 women in three front-page stories since Thursday against Schwarzenegger, touching off a controversy that has consumed the final days of Tuesday’s recall election in which the actor and former Mr. Universe remains the front-runner.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has apologized in a general way for his behavior toward women, while denying the most recent allegations carried by the newspaper in stories on Saturday and Sunday.

He has also accused the Los Angeles Times of working with embattled incumbent Gov. Gray Davis in a concerted campaign of “puke politics” aimed at derailing his candidacy.

The newspaper has had about 1,000 readers cancel subscriptions and received some 400 phone calls critical of its coverage, “many angry, some profane,” as of Saturday, it reported in a story carried inside Sunday’s newspaper.

Readers have complained the newspaper singled out Schwarzenegger for critical coverage because of a liberal bias or ran its stories too close to Tuesday’s vote, it said.

One reader, Bill Agee, said the newspapers stories were dropped “like stink bombs at the last moment to ruin the momentum (Schwarzenegger’s) got.”

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