In the Land of Strife

Malibu is up in arms again, but this time it isn’t due to a slide blocking the free flow of traffic. It’s the City Council blocking the free flow of news.

When I first heard of Malibu’s effort to manacle the press, I couldn’t believe it. This is a city whose famous inhabitants glory in media attention, and they’re trying to muzzle us? What am I missing here?

Then I remembered that Eris, the goddess of strife, is in the running to replace a sweet-smiling dolphin as Malibu’s logo and it suddenly all made sense. The place just loves chaos.

For those who do not keep abreast of politics in the Land of Blond, I bring you this:

Several weeks ago the Malibu City Council voted unanimously to limit the number of people in government who can talk to us newsies. That number includes the mayor, members of the City Council, the city manager, sometimes the city attorney and certain commission heads.

All other city staff members and employees had better keep their big mouths shut or they’ll have their Evian water taken away.

The restrictions are contained in a “Comprehensive Communications Policy” proposed by Councilman Tom Hasse who, when he ran for office last year, promised to improve communications with Malibu’s citizens during emergencies. Nonemergency communications are apparently a horse of a different color.

To its credit, however, the policy does say it’s OK for us to attend “open and public government meetings.” Good idea.

*

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever accused a city council of being home to the intelligentsia. Mostly it is composed of merchants and retirees of limited visions who love to dabble in other people’s business, which is how you get policies such as the above.

Open, intelligent humans with nothing to hide have no need to restrict the free flow of either information or ideas. It’s the job of the city to allow access to that information and our job to get it out to the public.

The effort to control news isn’t new. I had to kick a door off its hinges in Oakland once to break up a secret City Council meeting, and have heard of similar efforts in L.A. and elsewhere to end star chamber sessions.

I was first informed of Malibu’s most recent journey into calamity by community activist Mary Frampton, a former journalist herself, who believes that the public’s business must be readily available and not handed out piecemeal whenever a high city official feels like disseminating it.

When I tried to determine what motivated the new communications policy (actually a noncommunications policy), it was no small irony that neither Hasse nor Mayor Walt Keller returned my telephone calls.

I like to think that Hasse, who once wrote (or tried to, as the publisher says) for the Beverly Hills Courier (irony 2), was out of town but would have honored his own policy by calling me back were he not, say, vacationing in some isolated paradise where telephones were not permitted.

Keller, I understand, is in town, but perhaps he is too busy with an emergency of his own to bother with a journalist’s needs. Maybe the dog ate his copy of the policy and he’s not sure what to say or even if he is allowed to say it.

*

Both local newspapers, the Malibu Times and the Surfside News, have challenged the policy. Publisher Anne Soble, writing in Surfside, said: “The council seems to be taking a page from the propaganda textbooks of the Third Reich. . . . Control the dissemination of information and opposition will crumble.”

She adds that the only reason the policy includes the right of the press to attend public meetings “is there might not be anyone at any of them if the press stayed away.”

I wanted to ask Soble if she felt that members of the council would soon be goose-stepping down PCH and singing a shoreline version of the Horst Wessel song, but, irony No. 3, she also didn’t return my call.

Arnold York, who publishes the Malibu Times, called the communications policy “a set of gag rules” and promised Hasse: “It just won’t work.” Hasse wrote back that his proposal “merely memorializes the current practice” and that York doesn’t know what in the hell he’s talking about.

York, whom I did reach, laughed and said: “Malibu is always fun.”

More specifically, Malibu is always in some kind of turmoil. When nature doesn’t provide it, the people will. I guess that’s what comes of worshiping a woman like Eris.

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at [email protected]