[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]• In view of the Memorial Day holiday, the City Council meeting has been moved to Tuesday night at 7. See culvercity.org/agendas
A pity that my friend Gary Walker lost interest in the City Council before he wrote last week’s lead story in the Culver City News.
Often he is a clear-communicating, fair-minded journalist.
Last week, though, he traveled a circuitous route by way of Tallahassee or Adelaide.
Choppily, abstractly, he staggered to explain that a controversy erupted a month ago when the City Council elected its new mayor for the year, and not his guy.
He never developed a reliable trajectory for his story. What was the point? As a reader, you felt as if you were skating on a block of ice in mid-melt.
Mr. Walker plainly did not relish the assignment.
His work smelled like scalded hash.
Lazily composed, except for lacking insight, context, a speck of comprehension, a vague sense of familiarity with the Council he formerly covered and a remote grasp of balance, it was not a bad account.
To complete the unappealing package, the headline also was off-putting, “Former Officials Weigh In on Mayoral Controversy.”
A Few Missing Ingredients
Instead of characterizing — much less interviewing — the prime players in the drama over Why the Vice Mayor Was Passed Over for Promotion by Three of His Four Colleagues — Mr. Walker entered a forest and asked, “Where in the world are the trees?”
He interviewed the presumed victim and a series of persons who are decent enough but irrelevant to the subject. It was as if he spoke to whomever drifted by a bus stop. Except for one staple who never vanishes. Former Mayor Albert Vera, a friend of Mr. Walker’s, turns up in many of the journalist’s stories as an expert witness on all topics north of partial-birth abortion.
Mr. Walker either did not know or chose to ignore why Andy Weissman was elected over Mr. Silbiger. It was not a secret.
The election pitted an astute, measured, smart, respected, polished political leader against a Councilman who, for seven years, has been typically isolated, criticized by colleagues 50 percent of the time and ignored the other 50 percent.
The new mayor is treated in the Walker story as distantly as if he were the 15th Undersecretary of Global Warming Gobbledygook in Lichtenstein.
Where were interviews with any of the three Council members who voted for Mr. Weissman?
In the next to last sentence of his long-winded, hard-breathing piece, Mr. Walker explains that Mr. Weissman — the most accessible mayor in the history of Culver City — was not available for comment.
I presume the journalist rang him up at 3 in the morning.
It Doesn’t Take Deep Research
If Mr. Walker had conducted a teardrop of homework, he would have noticed that Scott Malsin and Mr. Weissman frequently have voted the same way. Similarly, Mr. Silbiger and Chris Armenta often have formed a tag team. That left just one person. Councilman Mehaul O’Leary, having previously voted with both factions, was the hinge, the swing vote. Obviously, Mr. O’Leary would be crucial to interview. Mr. Walker treats him like a touring flyspeck.
If Mr. Walker had interviewed the understandably disappointed Mr. Silbiger and then gone home, he would have had a better chance at spinning a passable yarn.
In the 12th paragraph, Mr. Walker, perhaps a budding spy novelist, announces that “rumors about nominating someone other than Silbiger had been swirling for several weeks.”
Grab that ghost in a polka dot sheet before he escapes.
Perhaps Culver City has been miscast. Is Culver City actually a befogged eastern European capital throbbing with international intrigue, where moustachioed villains skulk around in pink silk capes, crouching low in shadowy alleys after midnight?
This is not Big Town, Mr. Walker. Most people easily could walk from one end of the city to the other. Where is the mystery? Culver City is small enough to directly confront rumors instead of treating them as if they just floated in on the noon balloon from Saskatoon.
Mr. Walker struck out in all 44 paragraphs because he relied exclusively for eyewitness insight on Mr. Silbiger, a mission that usually ends disappointingly.
The closest Mr. Walker came to discovering a motive, much less a tolerable explanation, for the vote was this quote from Mr. Silbiger:
“It was definitely political. I thought that it came down to different political philosophies among Council members,” completely overlooking how unpopular Mr. Silbiger’s brown shoes have become with his colleagues.
