Opinion: Judicial candidates and newspapers

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A staple of election season is the newspaper story or editorial that laments that no one knows anything about judicial candidates. So it’s gratifying to see that some of those stories this year advised voters not to mark their ballots for candidate Bill Johnson.

How do they know about Johnson? How do they know that he wrote a 1985 book under the name James O. Pace, called Amendment to the Constitution, calling for all non-white people to be stripped of U.S. citizenship and deported? How do they know that he led an organization to drum up support for the amendment? How do they know that he ran for Congress in Wyoming as a Republican and Arizona as a Democrat, all while keeping his Los Angeles law practice?

They know because the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, a small Los Angeles daily newspaper that covers courts, judges and the legal community, reported on Johnson earlier this year. That report led to a Times editorial and several opinion blog posts, a story on KTTV Fox Channel 11, a story in the Jewish Journal, endorsements for Johnson’s opponent in the Daily News and other papers belonging to the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, a reference to Johnson’s past in a Daily Breeze story, and a story in the Pasadena Weekly. Final election results aren’t in, but it seems that at least the word got out, thanks to the MetNews.

To be fair to the Pasadena Weekly, writer Kevin Uhrich had personal experience with Johnson in the Pace days, and he recounted it in his recent story. But the word about Johnson is out in large part because MetNews editor Roger Grace does something that no one at any other publication in the state does -- he digs deep into judicial races and subjects candidates to the kind of scrutiny that other papers complain never is used. I worked with Grace for 11 years at the MetNews and it was a treat to watch him in action at judicial election time.

As far as the complaint that no one knows anything about judicial candidates, I have to say: Not true. MetNews readers know, as do readers of the Los Angeles Times endorsements.

I like to think we at the Times editorial page do a much better job of evaluating judicial candidates, because of what I learned at the MetNews, than we might otherwise. Whether or not that is the case, the Johnson episode shows that a small, independent newspaper still can make a big difference.