IE Weekly Writer Reacts

Boy, that David Silva over at the Inland Empire Weekly really doesn't like us, does he?

The Inland Empire Weekly writer has a response to our comments about his cover story in his paper's August 7-13 issue titled, "Anonymity Sucks: What Really Happened With The Claremont Cookie Monster."

In this week's IE Weekly, Silva has a lengthy clarification on page 5 entitled, "Claremont Blog Still Howling Like a Wounded Dog." The web version is accompanied by a graphic we really like showing a keyboard and a monitor dressed up with a Groucho Marx nose, eyebrows, moustache, and funny glasses. In the piece, Silva brings it right to us:

....My article wasn’t really about “the fight” between Taylor and the Scouts—wouldn’t you agree, Buzz? The notion of Taylor being engaged in a fight with Girl Scouts is your construct, not mine. No, my article was about how the L.A. Times missed the real story behind the Scout issue. And that the real story was how you, Claremont Buzz of the Claremont Insider, seized upon a brief, minor dispute between your arch-nemesis and a group of young girls and shamelessly exploited it to serve your own ends. Isn’t that closer to the truth, Buzz?

Well, we suppose. We must be really dense. We're certainly not professionals, as Silva happily points out. We really don't know how we could have been so stupid as to get the idea that the article was about Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor and a local Girl Scout troop - unless it was from Silva's original email to us:

Wednesday, July 30, 2008 11:11 AM
Subject: Request for interview
From:"David Silva"
To: Claremont Buzz

Dear Claremont Buzz:

I'm a writer with the Inland Empire Weekly newspaper, working on an article on the recent controversy over then-Claremont Deputy Mayor Ellen Taylor's encounter in March with a troop of local Girl Scouts. Would you be available for an interview, via email exchange, on this subject?

The Inland Empire Weekly, a subsidiary of Southland Publishing Co., is an alternative newspaper based in Corona. This article is scheduled to run as a cover news story in the Weekly.

I look forward to hearing from you,


David Silva
Editorial Contributor
Inland Empire Weekly

So, being the dense amateurs we are, we took Silva's email at face value and assumed he really wanted to know about what he said was the subject of his article. We wrote back, telling him to fire away.

Silva sent back six compound questions, one on Ellen Taylor, two generally on the solicitation ordinance, one on the the issue of our anonymity, one on our handling of the girl scout incident, and another on the general subject of our opinion of restrictions on cookie sales. We answered by focusing on what he had told us was his interest.

At no point in either of the emails from Silva did he refer to the Los Angeles Times, the article, its accuracy, or its author David Pierson.

Ever helpful, and because we believe context is important, we also suggested he contextualize the girl scout encounter--his stated topic--by examining some past incidents in town, including the very public, divisive, and well-documented Claremont municipal election of 2005, which involved a number of Taylor supporters, as well as a couple incidents involving Taylor and her neighbors.

But, since Silva's story wasn't really what he told us, there was no need for him to try to understand the Girl Scout incident, to place it in context, or to be objective about it. So, he just discarded most of our responses to his questions. Silva instead focused on the reporting mistakes LA Times writer Pierson made (already covered by us on July 19) and railed more than a bit against against the Insider.

He concludes his clarification by berating us for taking the long way--in two separate posts--to make what he conceded to be a valid point. We'll take a lesson from a pro and conclude the same way.

Silva seems to have started out with an a priori opinion about anonymity and certain bloggers, and he stuck closely to it. Our only question is, why not save the 2,541 words in the first article and the 960 words in follow-up and just run the very last sentence of his latest piece? That seems to be have been Silva's point in the first place: "Your blog is still crap, though."

IE Weekly Commentary

Not to pick nits, but the Inland Empire Weekly article by David Silva about the fight between Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor and a local Girl Scout troop had a number of errors, as we pointed out a couple days ago. We didn't want to pile on, but we noticed a rather important one.

Silva criticized LA Times writer David Pierson, who himself had written an article about the Girl Scout incident that ran on 7/19/08. The Girl Scout incident got mixed up with a new door-to-door solicitation ordinance that the Claremont City Council happened to be approving around the same time the Cookie Monster furor was raging. Some of the Girl Scout parents objected to be singled out in the ordinance and thought the city was aiming it at them as some sort of payback on Taylor's behalf. (As we wrote back on July 1st, we didn't think this was the case.)

Silva indicated in his piece that he had read through the ordinance and had no idea where Pierson got the idea that the city had mentioned the Girl Scouts at all:

Pierson then helpfully brought up the council’s recent passage of a solicitation ordinance, under which commercial door-to-door solicitors must first get a permit from the city and undergo criminal background checks. While acknowledging the ordinance had nothing to do with the March 14 Scout incident—it had been in the works for years following two rapes by magazine salesmen—he wrote that its proximity to that event (the law was introduced April 22) caused some people to feel that it was aimed at the Scouts. Fair enough. But why would Pierson help further that false belief by stating, “the ordinance specifically cited Girl Scouts, among others, as nonprofit organizations that would need to apply for a permit if they go door-to-door”?

It does? We’ve got a copy of that ordinance, all 19 pages of it, and nowhere are the Girl Scouts mentioned. Not specifically. Not even obliquely. Which raises the question: Just where did Pierson get the idea that it did? We certainly hope not from the Insider, which ran several “reader comments” suggesting a link between the Scout incident and the solicitation ordinance.

Like Silva, we got to wondering where this idea came from in the first place, so we went to the city website's solicitation ordinance page. We've posted an image of the page on the left just in case the city should change the language after this is published.

As you can see, under the heading "Definitions," the helpful page states:

Charitable

* 501(c)(3) Organizations - Boy & Girl Scouts, youth athletic clubs, etc. [Emphasis added -ed.]
* School clubs - public or private schools

So, although Silva is correct that the ordinance itself does not use the term "Girl Scouts," the official city webpage explaining the ordinance clearly uses those words in its definitions. So that's where the mix-up must have come. Silva, in his zeal to skewer the Times, the Girl Scouts, and the Insider and to buttress Taylor's and Councilmember Sam Pedroza's defense of Taylor's behavior, ignored some important, easily accessible evidence.

The article also failed to explain if Silva bothered to ask the parents of the Girl Scouts how they got the impression that the ordinance was aimed at their kids. So much for objectivity and balance.

* * *

We thought it odd that Silva would include the "aside" on page 14 about the elderly woman driving over the planter of the Wells Fargo parking lot on Sunday morning, July 20, during the Farmer's Market. We guess that was near enough Mayor Taylor's office--right across the street--to illustrate the danger of the corner. We suspect the public policy issues are very different for elderly women drivers than for girl scouts on sidewalks. Maybe 64-year old women should be prohibited from driving, but then that might take "Wrong Way" off the streets.

The picture right shows the tire marks on the edge of the planter and on the sidewalk where the car went over. It's left fender caught on a tree off the picture to the right, and caused the car to pivot to it's left and head down the sidewalk to the east (right in the picture) as you can see. (Click on the picture to enlarge)

For our money, though, the traffic situation Sunday morning with the Farmer's Market in full swing compared with a Friday afternoon in March would fall into the category of "not comparable".

* * *

We also had several readers contact us with complaints that Silva took a couple potshots at Claremont City Councilmember Corey Calaycay using more than a little of the innuendo and rumor-mongering that he accused the Insider of employing. Silva, who included a photo of Calaycay in his print article, apparently never bothered to interview Calaycay. An odd omission for someone writing about journalistic ethics.

* * *

Then there was this reader who had his own complaints about Silva's style and grammar:

Subject: i'm writing as bad as i can

Maaaaaan, David Silva is so far beyond awful -- I had to fight to make it beyond the first three error-ridden paragraphs:

"America’s second-largest newspaper..." Not even close -- by circulation, the LAT runs *well* behind USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the NYT. Did he just pull that factoid out of his ass?

"According to staff writer David Pierson, the incident began when Taylor demanded the Scouts, who had set up a cookie sale at a street corner a few feet from Taylor’s husband’s law office at Indian Hill Boulevard and Second Street, to move elsewhere." "Demanded the Scouts...to move." Somewhere a second-grader is wincing at that grammar.

And so on, until I arrived at, "But there were a few problems with the article, the most minor of which being it contained numerous factual errors."

"of which being it"

If you can figure out where this dude went to school, I'll demand at my child never of which being to of go there.