April 15, 2005

At Length

Trout Fishing in Pedro
By James Preston Allen, Publisher

     There are probably a quarter million people each year who come to San Pedro looking to catch some “big fish.” Most of them pack up their poles and bait, then take a boat from 22nd Street Landing or Ports O’ Call. Then there are the ones still fishing off the Cabrillo Pier for PCB-laced toxic croakers. But recently the LA Weekly has sent one of their star investigative reporters, Christine Pelisek, to the Harbor Area fishing for what could best be considered “political trout.” Yes, this is the campaign season here in Los Angeles and in the course of the last five days I have interviewed both Mayor Hahn and his opponent City Councilman Antonio Villagraigosa. This mayoral election has gone from PR-gate, to pot-hole wars, to snooze-gate with less than 25 percent of the electorate waking up to vote in the primary election.
     So the LA Weekly has decided to investigate something really scandalous—the private life of Mayor Hahn’s wife! They must really be desperate to come up with something—anything—because nothing else seems to stick to this Mayor. Yes, Hahn and his wife are separated. Yes, they share custody of their two children, and yes, she is involved in the art scene in San Pedro. But in my 25 years as publisher of this newspaper (and I have met nearly everyone who is anyone vaguely important who has come to Pedro), I have never met anyone like the Mayor’s wife who fundamentally shuns the political spotlight and who insists on being a private citizen.
     Pelisek, in pursuit of this scandalous story, has contacted nearly every art gallery, arts organization and even the bartender at The Whale & Ale to get the down-low on Mrs. Hahn’s personal doings, social life, as well as the names of the artists she hangs out with. It would be great if Pelisek and the LA Weekly were actually attempting to write something critical on the growing art scene here in Pedro-by-the-Sea that would recognize that there is life south of the 405 freeway. This clearly is not their intent.
     What Pelisek is looking for, unfortunately, is something more along the lines of what she wrote on January 9 for the Weekly that ran with the sub headline—“Teenage love and murder in Redlands, California.” Tabloid journalism at its best! This is San Pedro, and the love, sex, murder headlines only come around on rare occasions when it matters. There are some really good stories to cover, but most of it goes over the heads of the once-proud Weekly’s titillating tabloid sex-scandal type of coverage.
     Ever on the trail of a hot story, though, the Weekly’s reporter followed Mrs. Hahn and a friend to a local bar where the art-types hang out last Saturday night—a band was playing. Pelisek is reported to have engaged the two in some bush-wacking Q and A that ended when the reporter asked an impertinent question.
     Now the response must have taken some restraint, for in my experience of bar-hopping in Pedro, that sort of questioning would have been an open invitation to five bare knuckles and a date with the floor. And even more than just being a wild accusation, you’d expect a reporter from the sex-lined pages of the LA Weekly to be what—more sophisticated?
     The problem that the LA types have who venture down here is that this place is too real for them. Hollywood can come and shoot their movies here because we respect the fact that they pay union scale­—so we tolerate them clogging up the streets with the “fantasy machine”—but don’t ask us to ogle your starlets with any wild abandon. We like our heroes real, like Bukowski or Harry Bridges, and our politicians not so high and mighty. So when Mayor Hahn goes shopping he gets to stand in line just like the longie guy in front of him. He gets called Jim, that’s Pedro style—nothing special.
     What really pisses me off about the LA Weekly sending down their “investigative” reporter to dig up the “Mrs. Hahn Story” is that there are plenty of real life and death news stories that do need to be told to the rest of the City about the role that this port plays in the life, economics and future of Southern California. Far be it from Pelisek or her editors to understand the complexities of diesel air pollution, inter-modal container gridlock, externalized health care costs that subsidize the multinational shipping corporations or even the plight of the average child suffering from pollution-related asthma who lives down wind from the harbor. What they are fishing for is some kind of scandal that doesn’t exist. The Weekly needs to wake up and smell the diesel fumes and listen to the rumble of trucks on the 110 freeway to get real with their reporting.
     Although most of you wouldn’t believe it, there are ethical standards that apply to reporters and some of us still try to adhere to them. One of them has to do with determining the difference between a “public person”—like a movie star, a politician or the guy who just murdered three people while robbing a bank—and a “private person.” To explain this, the Associated Press Style Book explains that, “When a person becomes involved in a news event, voluntarily or involuntarily, he [or she] forfeits the right to privacy.” However, the AP Libel Manual continues later to explain, “…ruthless exploitation of the woes or other personal affairs of private individuals who have done nothing noteworthy and have not by design or misadventure been involved in an event which tosses them into an arena subject to public gaze” is essentially wrong. Can anyone tell me what the Mayor’s wife has done lately to “toss her into the arena of the public’s gaze?”
     The ethical question for Pelisek is whether just being the wife of the Mayor of Los Angeles is an automatic forfeiture of privacy? In this case the answer is obviously no. There was no messy divorce, no allegations of domestic violence nor anything other that two mature adults trying to figure out their private lives with the door closed.
     When I asked the news editor of the LA Weekly if there was an ethical problem with writing this story (which he would neither confirm or deny that they were writing) his answer was simply, “What?” Is that what ethics or what problem? I think this editor needs to read the AP Libel Manual section on “The Right of Privacy” and hopefully the next time he sends a reporter down to Pedro on a “fishing trip” he will actually have them use the right kind of pole. In the meantime, Pelisek is still fishing for trout and wondering why she hasn’t gotten any bites.