Opinion: Supes of the day -- chicken?
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Inasmuch as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors seems incapable of embarrassment at its own actions, I’ll have to do the blushing by proxy.
My colleague Garrett Therolf is one of the two or three reporters left who regularly covers the five enormously powerful supervisors and county officialdom. As he reported, even those few are too many for the Supes: they’re being banished from the hallways and back rooms where they have been able to buttonhole the county officials and department heads who buzz about there.
The reason for the ban? Those two or three reporters are creating human ‘’traffic jams.’’
The noive. The sheer brass.
The county’s backstage is chock-a-block with, as Garrett wrote, ‘’the lobbyists, union representatives and other advocates’’ to whom the memo did not apply....
The supervisors’ executive officer characterized the ban as a ‘’reminder,’’ and trotted out that lame line that they’re just enforcing a policy that’s existed for years. But she couldn’t come up with any documentation that any such policy ever existed.
Do they teach this kind of disingenuousness, or is the board just born with it? I’d think more highly of the board if it just leveled and said, ‘’Look, we don’t want journalists back there reporting on what’s going on. We don’t want them around. We love the lobbyists, but reporters? No way.’’
Oh, the board wants publicity, all right – on its own terms. Some supervisors are growing their own PR teams and websites. But you can bet not one of them would have told us news like the story Garrett revealed in March: that the board was paying someone nearly $10 an hour to peel the labels off commercial water bottles the board was drinking from, and slap on new customized labels with the county seal.
(Evidently someone worried that the mighty reach of the board might influence some tractable thirsty person who happened to see the board in action – probably on a cable broadcast of its meetings, because TV news almost never covers the Supes -- to buy the exact brand of bottled water he saw the Supes drinking, just the way that people run out to buy Lindsay Lohan’s latest bag. And what a huge coup it would have been, for Arrowhead or Sparkletts to brag that its water keeps the Board of Supervisors from running dry.)
It seemed not to have occurred to the Supes to just pour some water in that ‘’world’s greatest dad’’ (or mom) mug and carry that to the meeting.
So now the Supes are banning reporters from their earlier backstage-reporting techniques. If this were any other industry, like the ground beef biz or Chinese-made painted toys, the consumers could mount the equivalent of a boycott. Unfortunately, when you stop reporting on the Supes, it’s just an opportunity for them to do something else as silly as custom-labeled water, or worse.
Given that lobbyists are still welcome, I think the reporters covering the county beat should register as lobbyists representing a free press. I don’t expect that’s a very crowded field in those back rooms.
-- Patt Morrison