Reporters Applauded for Coverage of Video Camera Issue in Redondo

Redondo Beach owes The Times and the Easy Reader and their reporters, Dean Murphy and George Wiley, a great big thank you. If not for your extensive coverage of situations involving local government the residents of the South Bay would be living in a vacuum.

You have reaffirmed my belief that, in America, one person can make a difference. At the Aug. 19 meeting I was one person with a video camera when the Redondo Beach City Council passed a ban on all video cameras in the council chambers. Times reporter Murphy and Easy Reader reporter Wiley then used what is truly America’s greatest moving force--the power of the press.

In one week’s time one person had grown to over 100--many with cameras, including TV channels 5 and 13. Thanks to your news coverage the council yielded to public pressure and the ban was lifted. Now Redondo Beach will have cable television coverage of council meetings. Between The Times, the Easy Reader and cable TV our residents will be aware of what is taking place in our community.

Our councilmen are sitting up there to represent us. If you don’t like the way they are doing it, speak up. There will be others who think like you do. You will not be alone. I wasn’t.

How the council could excuse their actions by claiming the press and myself plus all others present at the council meeting misunderstood and overreacted is beyond comprehension. They must think we have the IQ of a turnip. I raised seven teen-agers, six of them boys. That qualifies me as an expert on “double talk” and “passing the buck.” It didn’t work then and it isn’t working now.

The discrepancy seems to be in what Councilmen Snow and Chapman “wanted to say,” “what they thought they said,” “what they wish they would have said,” and “what they actually said.” What they actually said is on my videotape of Aug. 19. What they wish they would have said is on my video of Aug. 26.

ANN BAKER Redondo Beach