The two Austin Beutners--or, Who's sleepy, really?

I had a chance to read something cogent about Austin Beutner's candidacy for Mayor, at the Downtown News. Jon Regardie sits down and interviews the candidate before he makes a Town Hall speech last week. I think he's sat down with the candidate once before.

That's coverage.

Then, elsewhere, I read--and kept reading, still elsewhere--about how Richard Riordan nodded off during Austin Beutner's talk. With a link to the canned speech.

That's coverage?

You know who's really sleeping in this scenario, of course. The lazy scribes who would rather report on a doddering member of an audience of a canned speech than sit down and try to discuss the issues that face LA with a mayoral candidate.

Street-hassle and many others have had the "Doddering Dick Riordan is an idiotic, drooling, doddering old man" story in pocket for a long time.

This Riordan-is-sleeping angle is precisely the kind of pointlessly snide journalism that enables the the Weekly to manage political access far less well even than most unpaid bloggers, let alone far savvier scribes at weeklies across town.

I would guess that most consultants are already consigning the LA Weekly to the untouchable margins now for the mayor's race too, as most have for a long time now in nearly all other local political matters.

° ° ° ° °

For what it's worth, the Weekly whiffed on the biggest story out of downtown last week too: the eviction of the Latino Theater Center by the City of Los Angeles after a scant four years on a twenty-year lease.

This was an enormous hit for the Mayor, who pulled strings to insert the LTC into the vaunted if troubled space.

It took some actual reporting--by Ryan Vaillancourt--to get to the bottom of the story--a story on which the Weekly whiffed entirely.

But you can't say Weekly wasn't put on alert for the possibility, even two years ago:

By everyone's admission, the last time the Department of Cultural Affairs allowed its own real estate to be managed by an outside arts organization, it made a mess of it.

In 2006, after a long and intensely political battle, the city department awarded its prized downtown facility, the long-struggling Los Angeles Theatre Center on Spring Street, to the Latino Theater Company, which now holds a 20-year lease to operate the venue. The choice of the Latino Theater Company was openly supported by Villaraigosa over the equally prestigious Will & Company, a performance group devoted to bringing Shakespeare to underprivileged audiences nationwide.

Some local observers thought that Latino politicians, in the words of one newspaper editor at the time, "played the race card behind the scenes" to give an advantage to the Latino group over the nationally noted Shakespeare company. The mayor himself said, on the occasion of the award to Latino Theater Company instead of Will & Company: "Some argued, 'Oh, this is too ethnic.' I say, 'Why not?' "

I think Council satisfactorily followed up with the answer to the Mayor's question last week. They had already killed Sunset Junction, after all. They trotted out the Mayor's killjoy once again for Downtown Art Walk. And someone thought that Council was also going to let the Mayor's pet cultural project, LTC, skate? Not hardly.