04.19.06
The Los Angeles Times and Pellicano II
David Garcia, the Los Angeles Times’ director of media relations actually made a statement to Nicki Finke today, after refusing to respond to numerous other reporters’ queries: “The Los Angeles Times, including its legal department, has never hired Anthony Pellicano ever. This includes in-house legal counsel as well as any outside legal counsel working on behalf of the Times.” Nicki is polite in attributing the response to a “semantics game”. I’ll be so politically incorrect as to call it a likely bold misrepresentation of the truth.
I’m absolutely not calling Mr. Garcia a fibber, but his statement reminds me of a particularly cogent quote from Upton Sinclair:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Even if Mr. Garcia does indeed understand the situation at the LAT, he still seems very careful to avoid mention of if his employer ever used Pellicano’s services without financial reimbursement, sort of in the vain of I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine. Did his newspaper’s reporters ever use Pellicano’s tidbits as uncorroborated sources of information for their stories? Did the LAT ever bury stories out of service to Pellicano’s clients while putting others on their front page, vis a vis the type of trading that Pellicano was famous for doing with the tabloids from the Mitteager tapes? Was Pellicano ever in their offices? Were their reporters ever in Pellicano’s offices? Did their staff receive any monetary gifts or favors from the disgraced P.I.? Were any of the LAT’s staff also on Pellicano’s payroll? Those are just a few of the many questions that Mr. Garcia should be able to clearly answer for both the LAT’s public and the journalistic community at this point.
Just on the face value of what Mr. Garcia said, and hoping for it to be true, I might conclude that the LAT never actually paid to have someone wiretapped though the paper still might have benefitted from Pellicano’s ill gotten spoils in their scoops on the entertainment industry. Essentially then no federal crime was committed by his newspaper. What I have no sense of however from Mr Garcia’s statement was if the LAT acted in an ethical manner delivering news objectively in a way that was fair and balanced to a city of over 9 million.
Mr. Garcia, I think I’ll write you a letter myself. If you answer, I promise to not only post it here but also distribute it to every journalist I know to stop those ugly rumors that have been circulating around Tinseltown about the Los Angeles Times’ collusive involvement with Anthony Pellicano.
