Bradley on Boyarsky

* Bill Boyarsky’s April 27 column repeated an allegation, purportedly made to his superiors by Robert Inouye, a former employee of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

The statement to Boyarsky was that contracts were steered by staff to a friend of Mayor Tom Bradley. No supportive evidence or supportive statement was ever produced. It seems to me that such a statement should be reinforced by at least one piece of credible support before publication.

Since I didn’t have any idea what this reference to me was all about, and I couldn’t find any explanation from Inouye, who I called, or from an exhaustive search of court records or the files of the Transportation Commission, I called Boyarsky to find out if he had any relevant evidence to support this blatantly false statement.

I am sensitive to this kind of character assassination by speculation or innuendo. I suffered in silence for more than two years while hundreds of local and federal investigators conducted exhaustive investigations, fueled solely by speculations by the press and others. In the end, all these investigators reported that they did not find any evidence to justify any action whatsoever--a point which I maintained throughout the investigations.

My point then, and now, is that a reporter who learned the basic elements of ethical principles and fairness in any school of journalism owes it to these principles to find some independent evidence or supportive statement before printing an allegation such as appeared in Boyarsky’s column.

TOM BRADLEY

Los Angeles