A Journalist Who’s Also a Candidate

Believe it or not, journalists have ethical standards.

I know, you think we spend our time invading peoples’ privacy and wrecking their lives. You think a reporter is an insensitive snooper, a grubby wretch prying hot quotes from bereaved widows and harassing police chiefs.

Although I’ve committed some of these offenses, I can assure you we have a few rules: There are ethical boundaries beyond which I would not go. One of them, certainly, is running for office in a campaign I’m covering.

Which brings me to a fellow member of the Civic Center press corps, Leonard Shapiro, publisher, editor, political correspondent and investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Observer, a monthly published in Granada Hills. As part of his duties, he has been writing about the campaign for the Los Angeles City Council 12th District, in the San Fernando Valley.

Shapiro is also a candidate. And he’s shameless about his bias. Page 1 of the current Observer has a headline, “Will Principled Candidates Be Able To Compete In Big Money Campaign Run By Professionals?” In the story, Shapiro identifies himself as one of the principled candidates.

I visited Shapiro Wednesday afternoon in the pleasant Granada Hills home he shares with his wife, Marlene, intent on asking the candidate-publisher-reporter just how he justified this ethical lapse. I was, of course, maintaining proper perspective. My ethical standards aren’t overly strict. In my early days, you didn’t come back until you had filched the snapshot of the deceased when the widow wasn’t looking.

A short, energetic, 71-year-old, the raspy-voiced Shapiro is a nonstop talker. These traits serve him well as a member of the Civic Center Gadflies, an informal group of four or five men and women who obsessively examine the workings of city and county government in search of waste and corruption.

At the public comment periods at the end of the Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles City Council meetings, the Gadflies blast elected officials and bureaucrats as crooks, phonies--or worse. The Gadflies are among the more entertaining--and sometimes enlightening--performers at the telecast council meetings.

Few have escaped Shapiro’s lash, including myself. My wife, Nancy, and I once wrote a muckraking book called “Backroom Politics,” attacking corruption in local government. It was 324 pages of pure outrage and Shapiro loved it.

But the rules of my business--ethics, if you will--require me to put aside my outrage when writing news stories for The Times. Shapiro accused me of selling out. “That was a great book,” he said. “What happened to you?”

Soon after becoming a Gadfly in 1980, Shapiro began publishing his findings, and opinions, in the Observer, which has 2,100 subscribers who pay $15 a year ($10 for seniors, students and the unemployed).

The venture came naturally. He wrote a local column when he was in the fuel oil business in Upstate New York. In Miami Beach, he published a weekly paper.

Shapiro moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s and ran a health and beauty aid distribution company until he had a heart attack and sold out at a good profit. With time on his hands, he began visiting the Hall of Administration and joined up with the Gadflies. “We talked about putting out a paper,” he said. “Nobody did anything. So I thought I would do it for six months or a year.”

He said he felt the Hall of Administration press corps “would see I am doing good things” and follow up on his stories. “But you ignored me,” he chided.

So what else could Shapiro do? He kept publishing.

“I’d rather be out on the golf course,” he said. “I’ve got to dig up the material, write it, fold the paper, mail it. Why the hell am I doing this?”

I’m not the only one troubled by Shapiro’s journalistic excesses. Sheriff Sherman Block took note when Shapiro applied for a Sheriff’s Department press pass.

“Sheriff Block called me into his office and said he was ready to OK it, but said ‘I can’t issue it as long you insist on speaking at the Board of Supervisors’ meetings,” Shapiro said. “I told him you better not sign the pass because I’m going to speak to them.”

But nothing much can be done about Leonard.

As I said, journalism doesn’t have many rules. And there’s no enforcing body to make sure the few existing standards are obeyed. Reporters aren’t like lawyers, who can be disciplined by the State Bar.

So, Shapiro goes free, a journalist without a press pass, but having a greater prize, the privilege of publishing his own newspaper. Let’s hope that’s the end of it. I’m afraid that if he wins the election, he’ll put through a law requiring all of us reporters to make speeches to the City Council.