Daily News Becomes a Herald of Secession

First of two parts.

Mayor James K. Hahn says it would be “a disaster of biblical proportions” and “the greatest change in urban architecture in the history of the United States.” Other local political and civic leaders call it the most important question the city of Los Angeles has ever faced.

But the proposed secession of the San Fernando Valley, which would split up the nation’s second-largest city, attracted relatively little attention from most of the local news media until very recently. The national news media have virtually ignored it.

Why? Secession isn’t sexy or sensational. It hasn’t provided great pictures or charismatic leaders. Although it’s been bruited about for decades, secession has long seemed unlikely to all but its hardiest supporters. Even in the Valley, it hasn’t generated the big rallies that accompanied the anti-busing and Proposition 13 movements.

“This is a divorce with accountants--dueling revenue neutrality arguments--and it’s hard to cover that kind of story in eight-second sound bites,” says Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the Local Agency Formation Commission, which voted this month to put secession on the Nov. 5 ballot.

But one news organization has given secession heavy, prominent coverage for years--the Daily News, a 177,000-circulation newspaper headquartered in Woodland Hills.

The Daily News, founded as the Van Nuys Call in 1911, became the Valley News and Green Sheet in 1953 and was a free community shopper for much of its existence. It began daily publication in 1979, changed its name to the Daily News in 1981 and converted to fully paid circulation a year later. Whatever its name or format, though, its primary focus has always been the Valley, so it’s not surprising that it took the Valley secession movement seriously at a time when other local media--and local political leaders--either ignored it or ridiculed it.

The media’s benign neglect of secession is beginning to change, thanks to LAFCO’s vote and recent polls showing strong support for secession in the Valley and throughout the city. In April, after LAFCO ruled that a Valley city would be financially viable, the New York Times put secession on its front page. National Public Radio and local television stations have invited guests to discuss secession. The Los Angeles Times--widely criticized by secession supporters and opponents alike for having been insufficiently attentive to the story for many years--organized a five-reporter team this month to cover secession full time.

But the Daily News has long been “more thorough, more complete, more attentive to the story than The Times has,” says City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, an outspoken opponent of secession.

The paper is widely perceived, even by its critics, as having provided the best, most aggressive and comprehensive coverage of secession. It is also seen, however, as having pursued a pro-secession agenda in its news columns as well as on its editorial pages, and as having a potential financial stake in the outcome of the secession vote.

Even when secession has been relatively quiescent, the Daily News has given it big play, and since Jan. 1, 2001, the paper has had 80 Valley secession stories on its front page; The Times has had nine--six of them in the last six weeks. Daily News secession stories have carried headlines with highly charged words: “Hahn ploy foiled,” “L.A. can’t gouge Valley,” “Let the nasty political games begin” and “LAFCO laughs at L.A.”

The Daily News has also kept up a steady drumbeat of Page 1 headlines blasting various Los Angeles city, county and school agencies: “Another LAUSD mess,” “Elevators fail, council rails at City Hall,” “DWP slush funds probed,” “Building boondoggle” and “Abused kids ignored.”

The implicit message of these attacks on City Hall and other government agencies is, “This is why we should secede,” says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior scholar in the School of Policy, Planning and Development at USC. “They seem to view everything through the prism of secession.”

The Daily News has long been a muckraking newspaper, though, and it has exposed government inefficiency and corruption even at times when secession was not an active issue. The paper takes a quasi-tabloid approach to much of the news--secession included--and its headlines tend to be bigger and livelier than those of The Times on a wide range of subjects.

“That’s part of bringing an energy and an urgency to this newspaper that I found lacking here when I arrived,” says David J. Butler, editor of the Daily News since 1997.

Former Reporters Criticize Newspaper

But on secession, the paper has many critics, among them a number of former Daily News reporters and editors.

Mark Katches, a reporter at the paper from 1992 to 1996 and now an investigative editor at the Orange County Register, says the Daily News “stirred things up and did good, enterprising watchdog journalism,” but about the time he left, the paper had “crossed over the line.” Secession went from “being a story to a cause to a crusade. It became personal--us versus them, the Valley versus Los Angeles.”

When the Los Angeles City Council approved a massive downtown redevelopment plan early this month, the Daily News headlines on three consecutive days were: “Tax grab for L.A. projects,” “Downtown project may ‘starve’ city,” and “$1.7 Billion tax drain.”

The Daily News clearly sees itself as the voice of the people--in particular, the people who live in the Valley, which its executives regard as a disenfranchised, disrespected part of the city. Editorially, the Daily News shares the views of secession supporters that Valley residents have long paid far more in taxes than they’ve received in city services and that City Hall in downtown Los Angeles has long been too remote and too unresponsive to Valley needs.

But the Daily News has another incentive to support secession.

If secession is approved, the paper could try to position itself as the newspaper of record for the new city--the sixth-largest city in the country--and it could reap significant financial benefits.

“The Daily News obviously has a very strong financial interest in creating a new city in which they would become THE newspaper,” says David Fleming, chairman of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley and a leader of the City Charter reform movement. “The value of that franchise goes up considerably if the Valley is a separate city.”

Daily News circulation has dropped 16.5% from its 1993 high, according to figures the paper has given the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Larry Beasley, an executive with the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times, says that when he was publisher of the Daily News from 1994 to 1998, “we felt strongly that our circulation base would rapidly increase” if the Valley seceded. “We thought we could profit in terms of circulation, which would translate into more advertising.”

William Dean Singleton, president and chief executive of Media NewsGroup, which owns the Daily News, says the impact on national advertising revenue in particular would be positive, and several media advertising analysts agree that the national identity of the paper would improve if it were serving a large, independent city.

Top executives of the Daily News say possible financial gain has played no role in their news or editorial coverage of secession. Indeed, they insist that so far, the paper has editorially endorsed only the right of the people to vote on secession and has not yet decided whether to support secession. They also deny that the paper has been biased in its news coverage of the issue.

“We’ve tried to be fair and balanced while being aggressive and assertive,” Butler says.

But the Daily News leadership feels so deeply about what its editors call “the right of self-determination” for people in the Valley that in 1998, under a previous publisher, Ike Massey, the paper gave $60,000 to Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment (Valley VOTE), the organization that led the campaign to put secession on the ballot.

The contribution amounted to almost one-third of the organization’s funding at that time, and many Daily News staffers objected, saying it would damage the paper’s credibility.

One editor compared the news of the contribution to discovering that her spouse had cheated on her.

Butler says that though he would have recommended against the contribution had Massey asked him--”which he didn’t”--he understood Massey’s reasoning.

City airport officials had prohibited Valley VOTE volunteers from circulating petitions at the Van Nuys air show when they were trying to gather the signatures required to authorize a study of the financial viability of a new city, a prerequisite to any citywide vote. The city gave Valley VOTE $50,000 in compensation, and the Daily News contribution, Butler says, was also intended to help Valley VOTE compensate for that interference by enabling it to hire more people to circulate the petitions before an impending deadline. (The petitioners wound up with more than enough signatures--202,000 of them.)

But giving voters the right to decide the issue is the beginning of the process, not the end, Butler says.

“We have maintained diligently our position that there was a process that needed to be followed and that as that process developed, we would make a decision ... whether this paper endorses secession or not,” he says.

Daily News editorials have not said, in so many words, that the paper favors secession. But secession supporters and opponents alike agree that any reasonable reading of those editorials leads to that inevitable conclusion, and Singleton says flatly that the Daily News editorial page is “adamantly in favor” of secession.

Even past and present secession supporters say the paper’s editorial page support influences its news coverage.

“They’re more like cheerleaders than objective news reporters,” says Bob Scott, a Los Angeles planning commissioner who also serves on the executive board of Valley VOTE. “That’s fine for the editorial page but not for the front page.”

Fleming says, “There’s no question the Daily News coverage has been biased.”

Larry Calemine, a leader in an earlier Valley secession drive and now executive officer of LAFCO, says the Daily News is “completely in favor” of secession and has “slanted” its coverage accordingly.

Scott, Fleming and Calemine are certainly not unhappy with Daily News secession coverage, and they are even more critical of The Times, saying its coverage has been biased against secession. Many secession proponents agree.

Times editors and reporters say they’ve covered secession fairly, but at both papers, the strident--at times harsh--language of their editorials has helped color the perceptions of their critics. Over the years, Daily News editorials have used such words as “lunacy” “absurd,” “pathetic,” “ripped off,” “phony,” “tyranny” and “oppression” in discussing the issues and players involved in secession.

The Times--which had a separate editorial page in its Valley edition until last year--used such words and phrases as “ludicrous,” preposterous,” “whine,” “destructive crusade,” “army of mercenaries” and “zealots pursuing this folly” in Valley Edition editorials on secession.

Editors at both papers defend their language as precisely the sort of forceful, persuasive prose that editorials should have. But given the tone of many editorials on the subject, “I can understand why people have trouble seeing through that to the news coverage,” says Jim Newton, deputy metropolitan editor for government and politics at The Times. “We in the news business don’t realize that people outside the business may not see the separation that we know exists. They think we’re more monolithic than we really are, and I’m sure that affects people’s views of the news coverage.”

Because the Daily New has a “very strong pro-secession message” and The Times has a “very strong anti-secession message” in their respective editorials, “both papers are perceived by many as being partisans in the debate,” says Ken Bernstein, director of preservation issues for the Los Angeles Conservancy and chairman of the Civic Forum, an organization devoted to providing “balanced substantive information on secession issues.”

The potential for “a blurring of the lines between the advocacy of the editorial page and what should have been the objective coverage of the news pages” has been an especially serious problem at the Daily News, says Mark Barnhill, a reporter and editor at the paper from 1986 to 1997.

At most newspapers, the editor of the editorial pages reports to the editor or publisher of the paper, but at the Daily News, there is no editorial page editor. Ron Kaye, the managing editor, has direct supervision of the editorial pages and the news pages.

Butler says that he supervises Kaye, edits all the editorials and writes many of the Page 1 headlines. “Everyone knows that Ron Kaye is not going to do one ... thing that Dave Butler doesn’t approve of,” Butler said.

But Butler has been at the paper just five years. Kaye has been there for 17 years, having worked previously at the Herald Examiner, Associated Press and the National Enquirer. Though Butler is clearly the boss, Kaye is widely regarded as the driving force behind the paper’s secession coverage, on the news pages and the editorial pages.

“There would be no secession movement if there were no Ron Kaye,” says Doug Dowie, who was business editor, then managing editor, when he worked at the Daily News from 1985 to 1990.

Mark Lacter, an editor at the Daily News from 1986 to 1996 and now editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal, says Kaye “has lots of opinions and at some point in the process, those opinions are played out on the front page.... A disinterested observer would have a tough time making the case that the Daily News has done a fair and straightforward job of covering the secession issue.”

Reporters and editors who have worked with and for Kaye praise his intelligence, imagination, aggressiveness and leadership. They say he is an excellent editor, extraordinarily adept at finding holes in a story, sharpening its focus and giving it an attention-getting bite.

They also say that neither he nor Butler nor any of their subordinates has ever explicitly told them to write stories that favored secession or downplayed anti-secession arguments.

But they say Kaye cares so passionately about secession--and is so hostile toward the downtown Los Angeles power structure--that his views have long filtered through to the staff. At times, they say, the beginnings of their stories have been changed and/or headlines have been put on their stories that they thought went beyond what they had written.

Charges of Crossing

Over the Line

“He violates the fine line between giving a story an edge, an angle, and editorializing--crossing over the line to put opinion in it,” says John Corrigan, a Times editor who worked at the Daily News from 1981 to 1996 as a reporter, editorial writer and editor.

Most critics of the Daily News, including the most ardent opponents of secession, praise the paper’s reporters, especially Harrison Sheppard, who covers secession full time.

Their stories, they say, are generally fair and comprehensive. Sheppard is widely seen, even by secession opponents, as having provided more intelligent and comprehensive coverage of the issue than any other reporter.

But the headlines and placement for his and others’ stories--on secession as well as other issues--are often sensationalized and slanted, they contend, and several say that Sheppard and other Daily News reporters have sometimes complained that the first few paragraphs of their stories have been “juiced up” to make them more critical of the downtown power structure or to favor pro-secession arguments.

Sheppard declined to be interviewed for this story or to comment on those allegations, but Beth Barrett, a 16-year Daily News veteran and acknowledged “Ron Kaye fan,” calls Kaye “a genius, a fabulous editor ... the most intellectually honest editor I know.... He only tweaks stories to make them better.”

Barrett says she’s never heard Kaye say he supports secession, “and I wouldn’t put my money on how he’d vote at the ballot box.... He just loves a good story and he sees this as a good story, so he latched onto it.”

Still, Katches--the former Daily News reporter now at the Orange County Register--said he decided to quit in 1996, after an editor rewrote the first paragraph of one of his stories to reflect Kaye’s view of, and preoccupation with, secession.

Katches says his story, a straightforward account of partisan political wrangling threatening the legislation that ultimately eliminated the city’s power to veto secession, was rewritten so that it began, “Rejecting the right of San Fernando Valley residents to decide their own political future....”

That day’s story actually “had nothing to do with Valley rights,” Katches says. “It was politics. The editor injected tone into my story and distorted what the real story was that day.” Katches says this was part of a pattern that included a Daily News policy that the legislation not be called a “secession” or “city reorganization” bill but a “right to self-determination” bill.

“It was the last straw,” he says. “I was furious. I went home that night, started tuning my resume and in two months, I was gone.”

Butler said he and Kaye would not discuss criticisms of any specific stories or headlines, but they denied distorting or slanting any coverage. Kaye says the paper’s only “crusade” has been “to let people control their political destiny,” and he says that was the focal point throughout on the 1996 legislative battle.

He says he can’t recall any reporter “coming up and saying ‘I’m going to quit’ over his editing. Nor, he says, has any reporter “ever asked to have his byline taken off” a story because of his editing.

But other former Daily News reporters recounted similar experiences with their stories, and several say they left the paper about that time for similar reasons.

They said the Daily News was a more editor-driven paper than any other they had worked for or known about--and, on secession, Kaye was (and, under Butler’s supervision, remains) the editor who does the driving.

(Next: Secession and The Times)