The story of Theresa Duncan has begun to take shape.

It’s the story of what happens to you after you die. What happens to your reputation when reporters think your corpse is sexy.

Theresa Duncan wrote a blog almost every day of the last two years of her life, a blog in which she left almost no clues to her pending suicide. But it’s being picked over anyway. The big assumption is that her death had something to do with her alleged delusions about being stalked. Apparently, she and her boyfriend, the notable artist Jeremy Blake, shunned some ex-friends who didn’t buy into their fears. According to a follow-up story by the LA Times’ Chris Lee:

Bradford Schlei, head of production for Muse Productions, optioned the rights to George Pelicanos’ “Nick’s Trip” that was to have been Blake’s feature film directing debut. The project stalled just before a deal with Paramount Vantage was being negotiated, however, when Blake accused Schlei’s then girlfriend and the project’s screenwriter of being Scientologists. (Schlei says neither he nor the other two are affiliated with the church.)

“It was complete and utter craziness,” Schlei said. “Theresa sent around e-mails, delusional things. They’d say, ‘You’re a Scientologist, your girlfriend’s a Scientologist, we don’t want to be involved with you.’

“The thing that ended our relationship was when Jeremy said [my girlfriend] was trying to ruin Theresa’s reputation. None of this ever had to do with Jeremy. It was always about Theresa and her film career.” Several other sources confirmed Schlei’s account, recalling that Duncan’s e-mails grew wilder toward the end of her life.

“There was a paranoia thing going on there,” he continued. “If you sat with them for a while, drinking the massive Manhattans they were always drinking, and smoking Shermans, it always got came back to Anna Gaskell.”

(Ms. Gaskell is a former girlfriend of Blake’s who Duncan, and perhaps Blake, saw as a participant in their persecution.)

Kate Coe, in LA Weekly, goes much deeper in her search of Duncan’s seemingly endless foibles. I’ve left all her links in this excerpt:

According to Nichols and other friends who spoke to the Weekly only off record, Duncan began blaming her lack of success on the Church of Scientology, saying that the church was influencing “the studios.” Duncan accused her skeptical friends of stealing hair from her hairbrush to send to the Scientology Center, Nichols says, and confided to Nichols, “I really don’t have any friends.”

Duncan’s paranoia began to hurt her professionally. Renee Tab, her agent, tells the Weekly that Duncan was advised to tone down the paranoid talk but called back later to say she had not given that advice to Duncan, but hoped or wished someone had. And two of Duncan’s acquaintances, who refused to be named, say they were so unsettled by Duncan’s campaigns by e-mail, where she accused them of trying to hurt her or Blake’s careers, that they contacted lawyers. Nichols says of Duncan and Blake, “They didn’t just burn their bridges, they exploded them.”

THE ILL-FATED COUPLE LEFT — some might argue fled — Los Angeles last fall. In New York, Blake took a full-time job at Rockstar Games and prepared for a big fall show at the Corcoran Gallery, where he was to be artist in residence. The stylish couple found the perfect apartment in a converted rectory at St. Mark’s in the Bowery.

By uncanny coincidence, activist Father Frank Morales, a controversial figure who probes conspiracy theories, was the pastor. Morales told the Weekly that “Theresa . . . manifested a penchant for looking at things in a dark way,” adding, “She came to [New York] with some hard feelings, some hurt, but she was a bright light.”

She and Jeremy Blake were photographed at New York social events, and she eagerly joined the St. Mark’s fund-raising community. In March, her short story “Topographers” was published in Bald Ego, the au courant magazine edited by Glenn O’Brien. But Duncan never shook off her fear and suspicion. On her blog on May 20, she wrote that author and USC research scholar Reza Aslan was a “Muslim American seeming Homeland Security agent,” and blamed Scientologists for graffiti and a dead cat in her old Venice neighborhood.

Aslan told the Weekly that whenever he appeared on TV, she contacted him with strange rants. He gave Duncan’s threatening messages to his lawyer because “I wanted someone else to know about this.” Aslan knew her for years, and “she had always said kind of crazy, paranoid things,” but “it just got worse and worse. She accused me of being an undercover CIA officer, of eavesdropping on her, of having her FBI file. The conversation she blogged about — about her FBI file — never came up; the whole conversation was completely fictional.

“She was losing her grip on reality, and Jeremy was so devoted to her that he would go along with it . . . It became impossible to ignore, and so my [girlfriend] and I began to extricate ourselves.”

This last paragraph is the developing conventional wisdom: Theresa went crazy and dragged Jeremy down with her. Jeremy had the “real” art career, but was hobbled by his strange symbiotic relationship with a crazy person. His suicide was, in effect, crazy Theresa’s final grasp at him from the grave.

David Segal of the Washington Post — he’s their music critic and in that role he’s good — takes a step back from this horror-movie cliche, and tries a more psychological approach:

Duncan and Blake didn’t just fall for each other; they grew so close they all but intertwined. “When you called, they were always both on the phone,” said Jason Meadows, an artist and friend. “When you e-mailed, they’d take turns writing back. At some point, I realized it doesn’t matter which of them I’m communicating with. They were that tight.”

One of their shared passions, friends said, was a distressingly paranoid view of the world. The two would describe plots by the government, plots by Scientologists, people tailing them, breaking into their home. All of it sounded so far-fetched that it was easy to think occasionally that they were kidding. They weren’t.

“It was like a Tom Clancy novel,” said Meadows, “except that was very real to them. And if you said, ‘This can’t be true,’ there’d be a lot of anger and you’d be exiled. That happened to me several times and I had to work to regain their friendship.”

Gradually they seemed to slip into some sort of shared psychosis, and they had each other to reinforce delusions that friends were powerless to talk them out of. Many of those friends bailed out, frustrated and bewildered. But for all the tumult, the pair remained focused and Blake, at least, was applying himself to work, said Binstock. Duncan could be prickly and acerbic and sometimes one would say something loopy, friends said, but the couple generally kept it together.

“Obviously there was much more going on than any of us realized, but he never said anything that suggested there was a problem,” said Anne Schwartz Delibert, Blake’s mother, who lives in Takoma Park. “He was devoted to her. He was a loyal caretaker.”

The last comment from Blake’s mother refutes everything that came before it, though, doesn’t it?  His own mother never detected a problem?  How does that fit into a diagnosis of “shared psychosis…a distressingly paranoid view of the world…?”

See, that’s my problem with virtually all of the journalism published since the pair’s death.  There was too much going on in both of their lives for anyone to say, or even suggest, what caused these deaths.  The reporters know this.  So they dig up stuff about both of them — Duncan especially — and put it out there.  It’s salacious. It’s embarrassing.  It’s suggestive, but suggestive of what they won’t say, because they don’t know.   But because it’s a mystery, there is no end to the investigation and revelation of every stupid, unkind, ill-considered or even “paranoid” thing they might have done or said in their combined 75 years on Earth.

Is there anyone whom you couldn’t portray in a extremely negative light by choosing, say, five anecdotes from two lifetimes — three of them reported anonymously?

And neither of them can respond. “There are two sides to every story,” is a truism from kindergarten, but the way events have unfolded, we’re only getting one side of each tale, and the tales are accumulating and solidifying into a reputation, a kind of pseudo-truth that will mestatisize in the vacuum of the real truth.   Which is none of our business anyway.

You can think about this:

At some point, you will die.  Maybe you’ll die before your time, in a sensational fashion.  At whatever point, your life will become a story, but it won’t be your story, it’ll be the story that your survivors will try to piece together.  If you happen to be prominent, or if your death is determined to be sexy, the media will assist with this process, whether they have a right to or not.

Everything you ever said or did that anyone remembers or can document will float to the surface, like old bobbins released from under a rock.  They will all appear to have the same weight — the good, the bad, the funny, the weird, the selfish, the selfless; something you did for ten minutes, something you did for ten years.  All of it floating on the surface, waiting for others to find patterns in it, patterns more revelatory of their own minds than of yours.

Ron Rosenbaum, a good writer with an interesting blog is obviously fascinated by Duncan/Blake, and has begun some kind of investigative study.  Compared with Lee, Coe and Segal, however, Rosenbaum is relatively modest in his claims to understand anything based on these fragments — yet.

Unlike Coe and Lee, Rosenbaum lets his readers comment.  I think this commenter, Mike Payne, is reacting to all the news coverage of his friends, but takes it out on Rosenbaum because he provides an outlet:

Theresa’s blog was read around the world,in her wake she is praised for her dynamic personality and intelligence-one webblog event submits that this is all ARG, a game-Theresa would be flattered,certainly capable of masterminding such a concept.The fact is her real life is as hyperdynamic as it reads.
The people who discount Theresa and Jeremy’s claims-who needs the CIA and CoS (Church of Scientology) with friends like them.You tell people the real shit going down in your life and they degrade you,how many times do I get to read GLenn O’Brien’s disregard of Theresa’s concerns as improbable-he never said this to her face-otherwise his word would for sure not be the last post on Staircase.I bet the emails you ‘ve read would confirm this in terms of how T & J react to feeling betrayed.
I don’t believe she killed herself-I’m sure I’ve lost you all now-I fucking knew her-I was even able to give her the benefit of the doubt,from her note reading she was at peace-it’s not gloom and doom it’s just exactly what she writes-she is at peace so let her rest,her personal reasons are her own damn business to quote her film THE HISTORY OF GLAMOUR-the people who made this most excellent bit of film,were not done living,even if they did make it years ago.

I  add this not to validate the alleged “conspiracy” — I’m in no position to do that — but to illustrate that some people apparently believed them, some people didn’t find them irrational, or if they did, never said anything until their deaths gave them the opportunity.

I’ll close with two comments from another Washington Post writer, an in-house blogger named Joel Achenbach:

Forensic psychoanalysis on the dead is never wise.

An entirely praiseworthy position, which he undercuts with his next word: “But…”

I forgive him, however, because he closes with this even more praiseworthy comment:

I hope no movie studio decides it’s a great romantic story, Shakespearean and ripe for the screen.

It’s just sad.

Amen.

Two of my brothers and I took our mother to Mother’s Day brunch yesterday.  (She actually found the place and made the reservation, which is kind of embarrassing. What’s wrong with us?)

The restaurant offered, among other things, a creme brulee French toast as part of a buffet that also included omelets, lox and bagels, a salmon covered with thin cucumber slices arranged to look like scales, various fruit and vegetable salads and a flowing chocolate fountain into which you could dip ripe, sweet strawberries, banana slices, marshmallows and profiteroles — little bubbles of pastry filled with whipped cream. 

There was a barista, and thanks to her I got my mom her first mocha latte, ever. This barista told me she usually works catering jobs, and for a certain generation of coffee drinkers, she provides their first exposure to espresso beverages.  Apparently, not everyone has been inside a Starbucks.  

Along with my two brothers, my son was there, my father, and one of my brothers brought his girlfriend.  We talked about movies, books, TV, news, the difference between MySpace and Facebook, what my parents’ doctors say, what we each had the omelet chef mix into our omelets.  My son is disgusted that I like feta cheese.   My brother’s girlfriend is very thin, but prefers egg-whites only omelets anyway. We gave my mother gifts and discussed each one as she unwrapped them. 

We talked about everything we usually talk about when we get together as a family.  The only topic we avoided was the fact that I might be going to prison in a few weeks.

I say “might be.”  This is because my surrender date has been postponed until the 9th Circuit Appeals Court rules on my request to be free on bail until the appeal is resolved.  Various procedural issues have stretched out this process.  It would seem automatic that bail would be granted pending an appeal, in the event that the appellant wins.  It would seem to me you would need a very good reason to incarcerate someone whose conviction might later be overturned; a history of violence, or a motive to flee the jurisdiction of the United States.  But the system doesn’t always work that way.

Indictment was bizarre.  To see the awesome might of the most powerful government that ever existed aimed at you is like being chased by a grizzly bear. The trial was a battle, albeit on a tilted battleground.  The period after the trial, as I waited for rulings on the motions to overturn the verdict, was one of anger and the kind of helplessness you feel when you’re yelling and no one can hear you. 

But as bad as all of that was, this period — the waiting — is the worst.  Maybe it’s because of the accumulated weight of all that has come before.  I can’t honestly say I’d prefer for it to be resolved, if the resolution entails my surrender.  I look at my wife and son, my job, my parents and my home, and freak out about leaving them all behind; freak out about the chaos my departure will inflict.  But then I stop myself and think: “I’m not going anywhere.  Not now. Not ever. What’s supposed to happen is what will happen — and I don’t belong in prison.”

Over brunch, one of my brothers whipped out his Blackberry to show me a story in LA Weekly about the premier LA blogger, Kevin Roderick.  Kevin was kind enough to mention me to the writer, and the writer, Ella Taylor (whose film reviews I remember enjoying on KPCC) was kind enough to include the mention.  And I immediately felt a little sheepish.  Despite what Kevin says, I know this blog hasn’t been as interesting lately. 

The waiting is taking a toll on my psychic energy.  To be a great blogger, you have to be passionately interested in what you’re writing about.  You have to constantly be saying ”Hey!” to yourself about something you stumbled across, or a thought that came to you. You have to be zealous about sharing it.  This waiting has made me more apathetic than I’ve been in a long time about things in the news, politics, issues, whatever. 

The presidential debates sound to me like the same yada-yada that all politicians use to rationalize the careless destruction of lives.  I got momentarily stimulated by Elliot Mintz’ yo-yo act with Paris Hilton, but I had to fight a kind of vertigo in order to write those posts.   I had to admit, I join Paris and her entourage in their outrage about the judge’s vindictive showboating.    At the same time, if you spend an hour or two on Prison Talk, and you read post after post of heartbreak, tragedy–and quite often, intractable injustice–you hate yourself for sympathizing with Paris. Or with me.  The worst that can happen to either one of us would equate to a miraculous turnaround for the hundreds of thousands of Americans trapped in the system. Nearly two million people woke up this morning incarcerated somewhere in America.  If only five percent are there wrongly – and do you doubt it’s at least five percent? — that’s 100,000 people.

Politics in this country has gone absolutely jail-happy, and the results of all these wildly popular “throw ‘em in jail” policies get virtually no attention.  Where are you, reporters?  Why aren’t you reading Prison Talk, and running down stories about lives ruined to satisfy the ambitions of politicians, cops, prosecutors and judges?  Why aren’t you looking harder at what happens inside those prisons?   

Just now, it’s hard to write about the kinds of things that initially attracted Kevin and probably others to this blog.  All I can get excited about are the small, good things we are given in the course of our daily lives, if we’re lucky.  A barbecue with friends.  A surprise invitation to see “Porgy and Bess.”  My wife making us scallops.  My son singing a solo in his school musical. Our dog dancing on his hind legs. A blue sky, or a gray one.  A re-release of a long-lost Warren Zevon album.  A Dodger rally.  The way your lungs seem to expand after working out.  Just being with people I love, like I was all day Sunday.

Somehow, through the grace of some evolutionary survival tactic, when we see the walls closing in on us, we’re able to enjoy those small, good things in the most uncomplicated, clear-headed way, without even trying to multi-task. Knowing it could be taken away makes you just want to take a bath in these moments.  If I do end up in prison, I’ll pass some of the time replaying these moments in my mind in detail, and I don’t want to miss any of them.

So if my next few blog entries seem a bit more personal and a bit more trivial, that’s where my head is now.  The news about my bail situation will come when it comes.  Waiting can throw you off the rhythm of your life, and that’s uncomfortable, but at least I’m still at the dance.

For the third time in 10 days, I’m going to mention Jill Stewart, having blogged 11 months without mentioning her once! It’s purely coincidental that the first two mentions came only days before she was appointed local news editor of the LA Weekly. I must have sniffed it out in the ether.

Actually, it was David Zahniser’s recent reporting at the Weekly that reminded me of Jill. His piece on the local government’s questionable handling of Miguel Contreras’ death was the kind of story the Weekly used to spike, but that Jill would’ve run with during her years at New Times LA. And then her name came up in Harold Meyerson’s parting blast at the Weekly, inspired by his disgust at Zahniser’s story. To argue that his beloved progressive LA Weekly was dead, Meyerson made connections among the Contreras story, the Weekly’s new ownership (the former publishers of New Times LA, which bought the Weekly’s parent company and appropriated its name, Village Voice Media), and his recollections of Stewart, who was the alternative to the alternative media during the height of the Weekly’s progressive era.

Like some others, I have been struck by the words used in various reports on Jill Stewart’s hiring — words like “ideological” and “agenda-driven,” which Kevin Roderick used in LA Observed. The syntax of these citations makes it unclear whether Roderick was airing his personal opinion, or taking the temperature of the LA journalistic/political world. There’s no question that’s what a lot of people say about her. You might think I’m being disingenuous, but I am baffled by it, in the same way I was baffled by the negative reaction to Zahniser’s journalism.

What has always made Jill Stewart stand out to me — going back to when I first met her as an LA Times reporter — was her lack of an agenda. Yes, Jill Stewart had a distinct temperament — part populist firebrand, part smirking brat — that comes out in her writing. But there is no political movement or philosophy that she’s so attached to that she would shade her reporting to suit it. That’s more than you can say about her critics.

Los Angeles has many “agenda-driven” reporters and publications. Harold Meyerson’s LA Weekly was openly so, as he acknowledged repeatedly in the few weeks’ trip down Memory Lane. The Daily News has a distinct agenda — to demonstrate how the San Fernando Valley is getting screwed over by the “out-of-touch downtown interests.”

The Los Angeles Times is widely accused of having a standard-issue “liberal” agenda — to the right of the Weekly, but still left-of-center.  But its agenda goes deeper than that.  It’s local news coverage is so inconsistent, and the choices of what it decides to cover and what it decides to ignore arouse suspicions of agendas that are more like personal vendettas.  Over the years, readers have detected a kind of poster-boy favoritism toward certain political figures (Tom Bradley in the 70s, Gloria Molina, Antonio Villraigosa, to name a few), and knives out for others (Tom Bradley in the 80s, Richard Alatorre, Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Hahn), based on criteria that seem to mix the political with the personal.

I remember having an argument with a Times reporter about a situation where political rivals Molina and Alatorre both tried some fishy tactics to steer lucrative contracts to their respective allies. The Times was selective in their outrage, deciding that Alatorre’s hardball was news but Molina’s was not.  They had settled on that storyline before the fracas started, and made it clear to me (we represented a client in the Alatorre mix) that no facts that disrupted that storyline would be published–using the airy, dismissive, “We don’t think it’s news.”

On and on it goes. I’m sure people closer to the entertainment industry see agendas in what Variety and the Hollywood Reporter choose to cover. The Times’ sports columnist Bill Plaschke went on an all-out campaign in 2005 to discredit the former Dodgers’ GM Paul DePodesta, leading directly to his unexpected firing. In Los Angeles, agenda-driven reporting is the rule, not the exception.

So why is Jill Stewart called out?

Her most famous journalistic accomplishment was her work in the 1990s focusing on the Los Angeles Unified School District. Alone among reporters in Los Angeles, Stewart refused to buy into the political consensus that the poor scholastic performance of LAUSD’s students was due to factors beyond the school board’s control. For at least a decade as LA’s schools declined, the conventional wisdom was LAUSD problems were all due to overcrowding and low teacher salaries, and that those problems could not be solved unless Proposition 13 was overturned, allowing the necessary taxes to be raised. The political community clearly hoped that at some point, the awfulness of LAUSD would cause an uprising against the tax-limiting measure — so they didn’t do much about it.

Blaming LAUSD’s problems on Proposition 13 was, at best, an incomplete diagnosis. Stewart shined the light on other factors that were more responsible — like the strict, inpenetrable labor rules that made it almost impossible to fire teachers and principals who weren’t merely incompetent, but who refused to do their jobs. She took on a major sacred cow, bilingual education, and shared with readers the objective studies that demonstrated the failure of this once idealistic concept — as well as the heartbreaking and often absurd anecdotal experiences of parents that made one’s blood boil.

Going just from memory, I recall reading Jill Stewart stories about Hispanic parents who were begging to have their children released from bilingual classes, to no avail. She — alone — reported that the larger the bilingual population, the more money went into LAUSD coffers and individual teachers’ paychecks. This conflict of interest, and the tragic consequences for thousands of students whose parents wanted them to learn in English, was never reported by the LA Times, the LA Weekly or the Daily News until long after Stewart had established the facts — if then.   To “progressives,” any information that undermined bilingual education was racist, and any information that made the education unions look bad was “anti-worker.”  LA’s press corps was afraid to cross these invisible lines — except for Stewart.

Which strikes you as more “agenda-driven?”  Reporting the facts about these things, or suppressing the facts? Would you rather have an education reporter who starts from the premise that the mission of the schools is to provide the best possible education for its students, and focuses on stories of how the system fails to meet this goal? Or a press corps that pretends to do that while sweeping problems under the rug because of the possible political fallout?

I don’t think Jill Stewart’s education reporting was driven by any particular ideology. Her stuff was refreshing because it was simply about what’s working and what’s not working, and if it’s not working, why not … and then to follow the story wherever it took her. She ended up on the wrong side of the education unions and the political defenders of bilingual ed — that was how the cookie crumbled. She didn’t start out from an anti-union position. But the rest of the press corps, and especially the Weekly, started every story from a pro-union, or a leave-the-unions-out-of-this, stance.

The mindset on education in Los Angeles has changed in the past 15 years. The city’s power elite used to be shockingly complacent about the decline in education. After all, they could afford to send their kids to private school, or could afford to live in San Marino, Palos Verdes or Beverly Hills — while working “productively” with the labor leaders who benefited from the status quo.

Stewart’s reporting contributed to a dramatic change in that mindset. Reformers from Dick Riordan to Eli Broad to Antonio Villaraigosa have been inspired — perhaps without even knowing it or wanting to admit it — by what Stewart uncovered. The education unions, while still incredibly powerful, are viewed by the press corps more skeptically. Mayor Villaraigosa’s efforts to assert city control over the school system were portrayed in the media as a “battle” with the education unions — and the unions were not portrayed in these stories favorably. That narrative would have been unimaginable without Stewart’s reporting in the 90s.

They say that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Los Angeles frequently rewrites that cliche: It is the land of the willfully blind. And the one-eyed man is “agenda-driven.”

I don’t envy Jill. When you’re in her position, if you make any mistakes, foes will pounce. I respect Parke Skelton. In one of the letters to LA Observed, he accuses her of sloppy reporting on a story that involved him directly. Naturally, I’m not in a position to know what happened, but he’s generally credible. As it happens, his campaign firm almost exclusively represents progressive candidates. It is understandable he would draw the inference that her alleged mistake was ideological. Just as it is understandable that every time the New York Times or CBS News makes a mistake, conservatives think it’s ideological.

But no one’s perfect, least of all reporters. They take snippets of reality and (sometimes) disguised spin and try to tell a story that will enlighten and divert their readers. If they make a career out of reporting or commenting, they write tens of thousands of words and dozens of stories every year — and will sometimes get things wrong. Jill and her reporters now are on the firing line more than most. They will produce stories that make highly regarded, powerful people unhappy. In retaliation or in an effort to exonerate themselves, the targets will look for errors and occasionally find them.

You might be tempted to join the outraged brigade. It will feel … so right-on … to be in line with the cool people who can hand out jobs, contracts and other emoluments.

If that ever describes you, just stop for a second and think. Where would LAUSD be now, if not for Jill’s daring break with the conventional wisdom? You’ll never get the establishment in Los Angeles to admit it, but she is one of their most valued sources of information. She deserves the benefit of the doubt. And she deserves to be read.

*(Copy-edited, 11/5/06)

Over on LA Observed, you have probably been following a dramatic series of developments involving the LA Weekly: Harold Myerson’s departure as political columnist and cheerleader for the local labor organizations, David Zahniser’s cover story this week about the circumstances surrounding the untimely 2005 death of LA labor chief Miguel Contreras, and the way in which LA’s progressive community, including Myerson himself, views both events through the lens of how the Weekly’s new ownership has betrayed the paper’s past role in progressive movements.

Well, in all your clicking, don’t miss the series of posts in the LA Observed “We Get Email” section concerning this matter. The last note, from Larry Kaplan, makes the most crucial point about Zahniser’s scoop that all the “whither the Weekly” eulogies ignore:

…I think the crux of the story is the way Contreras’ death was handled by the coroner, the cops and the bigwigs who showed up at the hospital that day.

The story should NOT be where Contreras was and what he was doing when he died, and perhaps the critique of the Weekly story is that it did not make that clear enough.

Exactly.

David Zahniser is what this city hasn’t had for a long time: A government watchdog. His City Hall coverage at the Daily Breeze always had two things most of his competitors’ coverage did not — depth and style. In the face of generations of local news editors who alternately viewed LA’s municipal government as a morality play or a boring backwater, Zahniser actually found things out, and could turn them into interesting stories.  He writes stories that serve nobody’s interests but the readers’.

Zahniser’s accomplishments merited attention because, unlike the Times and to a lesser extent the Daily News, nobody in their right mind would strategically leak a story to any reporter for the almost unread Breeze. When I read an exclusive story in the LA Times, I can almost always guess who served it up it to them. That’s the advantage of being a reporter for the biggest daily in town. You don’t have to dig for stories, the stories dig for you. A Times reporter can be very lazy, and still look good to their editors.

Zahniser’s brought his talent to the Weekly, and now has a bigger stage on which to perform. The stakes are higher. As Kaplan points out, he or his editors might have erred in emphasizing the first half of the story, the tawdry death scene, rather than the second half of the story, the fervent efforts by high officials allegedly to cover it up by blocking an autopsy.

Normally, if a 52-year-old man dies in a store like the botanica where Contreras died, that would be considered an unusual death. Leaving aside the fact that the locale was later determined by police to house prostitutes, even the ostensible product, herbal remedies, would raise red flags. Whatever you think of the benefits of herbal medicine, some of the remedies in that category are, in fact, powerful chemical agents that are not regulated as drugs. If for no other reason than to protect public health, an autopsy should have been done. Public officials allegedly put pressure on hospital officials to ensure an autopsy was not done, for the sake of Contreras’ reputation and legacy. Folks, that’s a story.  There is a long history in Los Angeles of political interference in the County Coroner’s performance of his duties; of autopsy findings being buried, changed, leaked or otherwise abused by people in power to guard the private interests of the living and the dead.

The progressive community sees Zahniser’s article as a watershed. The old, progressive LA Weekly would not have published Zahniser’s story, Myerson basically asserts. Occidental College professor Peter Drier articulates the left’s rage in an email sent around the progressive community and published by LA Observed:

The article is irresponsible, gutter, tabloid journalism, with no redeeming value. It is difficult to understand why the paper published this crude story — and put in on the cover, no less — except to sell newspapers and/or to lend support to those who wish to harm LA’s progressive labor movement. Miguel and his family, who are still mourning his death, deserve better than this cheap hit. They will survive this crude piece of gutter journalism. They, and his many friends and allies, know that Miguel’s life as a warrior for justice, was his real legacy and his gift to us.

(snip)

The loss of the LA Weekly as a progressive voice is a tragedy. When we organized the Progressive LA conference at Occidental College in October 1998, the Weekly was one of its cosponsors, featured it on its cover, and published several stories in the September 30, 1998 issue about the past, current, and future of progressive politics in LA: link and link. This reflected the Weekly’s view of itself at the time as a watchdog and as an instrument for change. On politics, culture, and other matters, the LA Weekly has helped give voice to those forces who might otherwise be shut out of the public debate. It has reported on the people and organizations — unions, community groups, environmentalists, women’s rights and gay rights groups, immigrant rights activists, school reformers, fair trade advocates, living wage crusaders, and ordinary folks trying to cope with life in this diverse and sprawling city — who’ve been on the front lines of the struggles for social and economic justice.

(snip)

But how do we hold the new LA Weekly accountable? Outraged by this week’s cover story, some folks floated the idea of organizing a boycott against the Weekly. But how can you organize a boycott against a newspaper that is distributed for free? And how can you put pressure on its advertisers when its ad pages are dominated by penis enlargement ads, breast augmentation ads, and dating services?

The fear, which Myerson articulates too, is that the Weekly will become a muckraking journal that splatters muck on progressives, not just their enemies. Myerson cites Jill Stewart, the iconoclastic writer for the defunct New Times LA (whose owners now control the Weekly) as the kind of journalistic example he fears will take over the Weekly. Stewart enraged many at City Hall because her investigations and commentary evinced deep disillusionment with the left’s hypocrisy. She was tough on leaders like Jackie Goldberg, to whom LA’s left is devoted. And her writing was juicy and irresistable, so her scoops got attention. Back then and today, I’ll admit it — I’m a fan of Jill Stewart. And I’m a fan of David Zahniser (which is not to say he’s similar to Stewart — it was Myerson who made that leap).

Far be it from me to challenge Myerson and Drier on what’s good for the progressive movement — they work in it every day, and I don’t. But my opinion is, they’re wrong about the kind of journalism that helps those “who’ve been on the front lines of social and economic justice.” The news should not be ideological. It should not be afraid to hit hard at hypocrisy and double-dealing on the part of progressive icons.

Going back to the 1920s, there is an unfortunate history of socialist journalism, or journalism by socialists, that turned out to be propaganda, concocted to mask failure, corruption, even atrocities. Today’s progressives should want to take pains to disassociate their movement from such unethical and ultimately self-defeating reportage; to demonstrate that unlike the left-wing of the past, they are not afraid of the truth because their ideas have value quite apart from the flawed mortals who advocate them.

And let’s face it: the good-ol’ LA Weekly that Myerson and Drier could depend on as an ally and publicist was also funded by ads for plastic surgery, tanning salons, massage parlors and escort services. What does that suggest? That most Weekly readers, then as now, skipped over the political content to read the movie and nightclub listings, and were more interested in dancing than demonstrations. The Weekly could be edited by William F. Buckley and probably make the same profit if Buckley were willing to accept such advertising.

The left is not entitled to the news columns of the LA Weekly by divine right. But if the left can help scrupulous reporters like Zahniser find powerful stories to illustrate the need for their brand of politics, their presentation in a more balanced setting will give them greater credibility. In this era of nakedly partisan journalism and blogs, it is too often forgotten that most of us read journalism for stories, not political instruction. We can come to political conclusions on our own.