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Los Angeles is in the midst of a political shake-up. A Berkeley–LA Times poll last week showed an increasingly tight race between Karen Bass, the sitting mayor, and her challenger Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialist member of the city council, who is leading by eleven points. A third of voters are still undecided—and that’s the story that made national deadlines.
Less noticed, and hence worthy of a laurel this week, is LAist’s standout campaign finance investigation of both Bass and Raman, who is giving to their campaigns, and what they might seek in return. In “Donors pour millions more into LA mayor’s race, narrowing gap between Bass and Raman,” reporters Nick Gerda and Maloy Moore connected filings from donors to city decisions, such as a hedge fund founder giving millions to a committee backing Raman and Airbnb injecting more than four million dollars to committees backing Bass and other candidates. LAist also notes that Bass supported a proposal to relax short-term rental rules that would be favorable to Airbnb. The story further lists interest groups using dollars to work against candidates, such as the city’s police union spending against Raman.
The contributions establish no overt wrongdoing, but they are important for two reasons: they help explain Raman’s recent surge, and they make the financial relationships between donors and elected officials transparent. (A similar feedback loop was unveiled in this Spectrum News/NY1 story on the Queens Surrogate’s Court, and how elected judges use their appointments to award lucrative estate fees to politically connected counsel, perpetuating the infamous Queens political machine.)
“The people in politics are aware of who the spenders are. The public deserves to know that as well,” Gerda told me. Gerda is the watchdog correspondent and local accountability reporter for LAist, a nonprofit publication that also houses the city’s largest NPR station. “It’s illuminating for voters to have really clear info,” he said. “Who are the big spenders? What are their big interests? Who are they supporting and opposing? Oftentimes you do see alignment. Whether there’s cause and effect, I don’t know.”
The journalism to celebrate here is how local reporters are using public records to help voters understand the relationship between money, politics, and power. “It’s certainly not something that most people who are working normal jobs have time to do,” Gerda said, of tracing donation links. The findings can help stoke outrage, engagement, and, one hopes, turnout. What a difference from more than a decade ago, when I was managing editor of the Times, and we assigned columnist Steve Lopez to go out and find a voter, any voter, in LA’s election. He found one.
I have a pet peeve when it comes to the language we use to cover sexual assault, and the media failed us this week. A big dart to the reflex that turns a woman reporting a sexual assault into an “alleged victim,” as many outlets did: NPR, Reuters, even Town & Country. In coverage of the Cornell fraternity lawsuit, these outlets used that phrase instead of simply calling her “the woman,” “the accuser,” or “the former student” and attributed the assault allegation to her lawsuit.
Similarly, the term “alleged rape” implies disbelief in a way that “the charge” or simply “the allegation” wouldn’t. Journalists can protect the presumption of innocence without casting immediate doubt on the accuser or undermining her humanity. Both the Centers for Disease Control and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center caution journalists against overreliance on the word “allegedly” as a crutch because it implies doubt.
In 1993, Helen Benedict—a professor at the Columbia Journalism School who has written extensively on sexual assault—published Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, which makes a powerful case for preserving humanity in our coverage. “Reporters and editors must be more responsible for their vocabulary,” she writes. We also need to be mindful of the harm that irresponsible coverage can cause well after a crime has been committed: “Many of the rape victims I have interviewed for my previous work have said the attack itself was only the first in a string of assaults upon them,” Benedict writes, “people’s reactions to their victimization and their treatment by the press and the courts being the others.” (But kudos to the student journalists of the Cornell Daily Sun, who stayed on this story and published the names of the men identified as defendants in the civil complaint filed this month.)
Five-dollar obituaries won’t sustain a newspaper’s business model. But they can show serious respect for the people who make up a community.
Last month, the Baltimore Beat announced an innovative obituary idea that both generates revenue and values audiences. The news outlet, which serves Black residents in a city that is just under 60 percent African American, offers three options: An online-only obituary for five bucks. A hundred-and-fifty-word printed death notice for ninety-nine dollars, with information about the service for the deceased. And a premium print obituary, which at three hundred dollars can run up to two hundred and fifty words, with a photo.
“When someone dies, the last thing a family should worry about is whether they can afford to say their name in public,” Lisa Snowden, the chief executive and cofounder of Baltimore Beat, said. “We want every Baltimore family to have a place to put their loved one’s story, and we want that place to belong to the community, not to an advertiser.”
Of course, the staff time reporting and editing these notices costs way more than five bucks. But it is a laudable public service model—and an important message to the community.
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