A reporter who kept us honest

This paper and its readers lost an important voice with the death last week of David Shaw, 62. David was an indefatigable reporter for The Times for 36 years; starting in 1974 he was a pioneer in what then seemed like an odd backwater of journalism, reporting on the practices and shortcomings of the media. For the past three years, in addition to writing about food and wine, he wrote the Media Matters column for this section. Here’s a small sample of his voice in that column -- his dogged, skeptical, serious voice:

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Are bloggers entitled to the same constitutional protection as traditional print and broadcast journalists?

Given the explosive growth of the blogosphere, some judge is bound to rule on the question one day soon, and when he does, I hope he says the nation’s estimated 8 million bloggers are not entitled to the same constitutional protection as traditional journalists -- essentially newspaper, magazine, radio and television reporters and editors.

This statement will surely bring me an avalanche of angry e-mail from bloggers and their acolytes, cyber citizens convinced that I’m just a self-serving apologist for the soon-to-be-obsolete media that pay my salary.

It isn’t easy to define what a journalist is -- or isn’t. Forty or 50 years ago, some might have dismissed I.F. Stone as the print equivalent of a blogger, writing and publishing his independent, muckraking I.F. Stone Weekly. But Stone was an experienced journalist, and his Weekly did not traffic in gossip or rumor. He was so highly regarded by his peers that he was widely known as “the conscience of investigative journalism.”

Bloggers require no journalistic experience. All they need is computer access and the desire to blog. There are other, even more important differences between bloggers and mainstream journalists, perhaps the most significant being that bloggers pride themselves on being part of an unmediated medium, giving their readers unfiltered information. And therein lies the problem.

-- March 27, 2005

Surely, the stigma attached to being accused of sexual assault is even worse than the stigma attached to being a victim of sexual assault. So why publish and broadcast his name and not hers? She’s not a minor, and since everyone in her hometown knows who she is, just whom are we protecting her reputation from?

Indeed, it could be argued that by withholding her name, we’re exacerbating, not avoiding, the stigma. I know many women who feel that way.... I’m not saying rape victims should always be named. But in the [Kobe] Bryant case, as in many -- perhaps most -- others, I do think it’s time to liberate rape victims from any residual societal embarrassment by treating them as we treat the adult victims of every other crime. If we disseminate the name of the accused, we should do likewise with the name of the accuser.

-- July 27, 2003

The Predator-as-groper stories just demonstrated anew the age-old Hollywood adage that any news is good news -- that as long as you spell someone’s name right, any coverage helps.

[Arnold] Schwarzenegger’s domination of the coverage was as predictable as it was inevitable. He’s a movie star, a political novelty, a larger-than-life figure; he was running, in effect, against a governor who’s smaller than life, a career politician so resolutely unpopular that he might have lost a race against Osama bin Laden.

Schwarzenegger’s other foes were a lieutenant governor who has all the charisma of a bowl of oatmeal and an assortment of freaks and fringe candidates.

Still, the extent of Schwarzenegger’s domination of the media was staggering....

Between Schwarzenegger’s announcement and election day, his name appeared in far more stories published in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News and New York Times than did the names of any of the other candidates to replace Gov. Gray Davis, according to a study by researchers working under Bruce Fuller, co-director of policy analysis for California Education, a think tank at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley....

Nothing seemed to stain his image or stem his advance. Instead of being hurt because his experience was in movies, not politics, he was helped by it. His on-screen persona made him so familiar that some newscasters even called him “Arnold” in their on-air stories, thus playing directly into his campaign effort to depict himself as a regular guy, the nonpolitician, the overgrown boy next door.

By its very existence, early media coverage legitimized Schwarzenegger’s candidacy and, over time, made him seem a likely winner. People like to side with a winner -- especially against a loser like Davis. It makes them feel smart. So voter sentiment began to show a shift in his favor. That turned the polls around, and ultimately, it all became self-perpetuating -- and self-fulfilling.

-- Oct. 12, 2003

Newcomers to Los Angeles often grumble that we have no seasons. They’re wrong. We do have seasons. They’re just subtle. They don’t generally include the snow, slush, freezing cold and life-sapping humidity that many folks in the East and Midwest seem to require as proof that Mother Nature actually exists.

But the weather in Los Angeles is consistent -- at times, monotonously so. Indeed, I can remember one summer early in my newspaper career when the managing editor grew so weary of publishing virtually the same weather forecast every day that he decided to write the daily weather story himself for the next day’s paper.

That story said, in its entirety:

“Hebrews 13:8.”

I scurried to my Bible to look up the verse. It says: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.”

But if Los Angeles weather is so consistent, why are the predictions provided by the news media so often so wrong -- and at such wild variances from each other?

On July 1, for example, USA Today said the high in Los Angeles would be 78 degrees. The Los Angeles Times said 81. CNN.com said 95. So did Accuweather.com.

The actual downtown high? 88.

A couple of weeks later, the forecast published in The Times said the downtown high would be 85. It was 78. Hmm. Out of curiosity, I decided to chart the entire month of July.

Only once that month -- on July 3 -- was the forecast downtown high exactly right. But on 11 of the 31 days -- more than 35% of the time -- the forecast was off by 5 degrees or more.

My monthlong spot check confirmed what I’ve been muttering to my wife for years -- “We can’t rely on weather forecasts in The Times.”

-- Aug. 17, 2003