Planet of the Glendorans, Part I of III: The Media

A piece of campaign propaganda by Glendora city council candidate John Harrold
What seems like eons ago, I disagreed with the SGV Trib's decision to keep the arrest of two teenage girls in Glendora for vandalizing campaign signs under wraps until after the election. Again, why not just tell the story while making the obvious partisan motives of the girls and their supporters clear? The city editor of the SGV Trib, for reasons I still don't understand, still disagrees—but as he and Centinel mentioned, Allison Hewitt did write an in-depth article (now offline) on the whole event replete with several juicy tidbits from Glendor-a-ma's not-so-distant past.

Maybe I read too much into it, but it sure seemed to me that the SGV Trib headline, "Recall recoil much in evidence," played off the headline of Jim Newton's LAT article, "Teens' arrest in sign protest roils Glendora."

As if to say, "we really know what this is about LAT, and you don't." After all, SGV Trib City Editor Edward Barrera said in one of his columns that the LAT "took the pre-election bait"; he "cleared up inaccuracies" in the LAT story on his blog; he called the incident a "minor story for us" and called the LAT piece "oddly written" in another blog post; and, in his first post on the subject, Barrera outright mocked the LAT headline: "Roiled..er..not really. Unless of course you read the breathless prose of this LA Times story today."

Anyhow, the SGV Trib article that did go to press after the election reminded readers that back in the heady days of the recall a few years ago, the mom of the two girls who were recently arrested was herself involved in getting members of the "other side" arrested for outright stealing campaign signs. [What the hell is with this town?] However, just like its coverage before the election this time around, back then (from what I can dig up) the SGV Trib didn't inform its readers of the interesting facts surrounding these arrests—the paper never mentioned the woman's relation to the overall Glendoran planet's ongoing feud, etc.

While it is all well and good that the SGV Trib acknowledged—in the end—that the incident was an interesting story and ran an interesting article, it is an odd thing to criticize another newspaper for not having all the facts that you yourself refuse to publish, even if your criticisms of the other newspaper are valid. If you already know the relevant facts that need to be told surrounding the story, then just go ahead and tell the damn story.

By the way, if you are already nostalgic for the 2007 Glendora Municipal Election experience, [you must be a real sick person, like me] you can always watch some old coverage on YouTube: