At 33 years old, Seema (Lawdy, I Love Them There Dems) Mehta is getting her first crack at bigtime reporting with the Los Angeles Times, and she means to have people remember her unusual name.
Her job is to make sure, through a welter of every-morning coverage, that no Republican attains high office in California in November.
Like many Times’ reporters, Ms. Mehta embraced the newspaper’s loyalty oath to all political candidates and officeholders on the left.
Hence, for the last six weeks, even casual readers have been struck by the rookie girl’s jacklegged coverage of the 8-cylinder campaign by the Times to roadblock Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in their bids for governor and the U.S. Senate.
Ms. Mehta’s abrogation of traditional journalistic principles is shocking, even for the Times, never a bastion of journalistic standards.
Smashing objective reporting in the chops, Ms. Mehta, in her daily coverage, is openly rooting for old Jerry Brown to defeat Ms. Whitman and for the odious Sen. Barbara Boxer to whack Ms. Fiorina. That is fine for an essayist, but not for a mere beat reporter.
A Lesson for Girl Assassin
A reporter is charged to relay the action he is covering without inserting his opinions, that is, making value judgments.
This hallowed principle has not applied for decades at the Times in its political coverage — the candidate of the left is invariably elevated, the conservative, reflexively, is mocked, scorned.
Perhaps if Ms. Mehta were older or more seasoned, her lopsided daily accounts would be less crude.
Her unoriginal pattern never varies — when either candidate of the left, Mr. Brown or Ms. Boxer, makes a statement, it is immediately enshrined and delicately placed, inviolately, into the ground, never to be touched or questioned again.
When the Republican candidate makes an assertion, it is to be promptly challenged and volubly turned upside down, baldly.
In the 11th paragraph of this morning’s story, “Whitman rips Brown for not having job plan,” Ms. Mehta brashly spits into the eye of the embedded notion of objective reporting.
Ms. Mehta says: “Whitman has put out more detailed policy proposals than Brown.”
Seema Can’t Help Herself
This is where an honest reporter would have stopped. But, remembering her newspaper’s loyalty oath to the left, to laud the left and skewer the right, Ms. Mehta went on:
“Yet her claim that her proposals would lead to the creation of 2 million jobs by 2015 appears to be speculative. The booklet Whitman unveiled Thursday acknowledges that uncertainty on a page that purports to break down the jobs by sector.”
Of course it is speculative, as even the dimmest schoolchild knows, to predict beyond the present moment.
Ms. Mehta’s unvarnished intention was to smear the Republican challenger as the author of wild, irresponsible promises. That is because she strongly dislikes Ms. Whitman.
Much higher in the story, the fourth paragraph, Mr. Brown made a similar assertion, which Ms. Mehta allowed to stand because he is a candidate of the left.
To quote paragraph three:
“Brown countered that he has put forth ‘a very powerful’ and detailed clean-energy plan that would create 500,000 jobs and noted that he created 1.9 million jobs during his previous two terms as governor in the 1970s and ‘80s.”
Unlike her anti-Whitman treatment, Ms. Mehta stepped aside and allowed Mr. Brown’s claims to go unchallenged.
Hmmm.
In paragraph 13, Ms. Mehta — a reporter, mind you, not an essayist — says of Ms. Witman’s campaign booklet: “It contains some of the same falsehoods that have been featured in Whitman’s television ads or statements.”
Eh, what? Says who?
I figure the acutely partisan Ms. Mehta must be foaming and drooling all over her considerable lap by now.
Finally, in the penultimate paragraph, the undisciplined, almost uncontrollably angry Ms. Mehta openly, baldly criticizes Ms. Whitman for a claim that is 100 percent accurate but that Ms. Mehta falsely claims is wrong.
On a normal newspaper, Ms. Mehta would be summarily canned for such outrageous, unprofessional conduct.
