IS THE DAILY PILOT FADING AWAAAAAAAY?
(We hope not--but we hope it gets better)
As we've written before, we like the fact that we have a daily newspaper in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach.
In fact, the only reason we read any newspapers at all is for local news. We get all our national and international news from the Internet, the radio or TV.
Still, we have not been pleased with the lefty direction of the Daily Pilot; that became more noticeable after the advent of the Improvers in Costa Mesa.
Over the past few years, it seemed to us that that we could hardly pick up a copy of the Pilot without seeing some smear, some innuendo, some insult from the Pilot aimed at some of the people who want to make Costa Mesa a nicer place.
The paper even seemed to feature some local crackpots and kooks with their wild conspiracy theories as to why Costa Mesans were electing people to office who promised to fix broken Costa Mesa.
We were treated to some comments--including one stupid column from City Councilperson Linda Dixon--implying that there were dark forces at work trying to run this or that group out of the city. Dixon even used the anti-white hate term "lily-white," in her goofy column that was specifically aimed at defeating Mayor Mansoor and improvement in general.
When citizens tried to get our small non-sports parks made safe for their non-sports intended purposes, they were accused, in the pages of the Pilot, of trying to chase one ethnic group out of the city because members of that group are often interested in soccer. Of course, many other people also play soccer, but when you set out to smear, you have to be selective and you have to play the race card as it is handed to you.
Attempts to improve the Westside were, and are, being painted as further attempts to run people out of the city.
Before the last election, we even saw the pages of the Pilot disgraced with columns and letters from pompous self-important fools, who live across the border in Newport Beach, who used up ink in telling Costa Mesans that we should defeat Mayor Mansoor and Wendy Leece.
When the CM PRESS tried to present some reasoned arguments to counter the smears that appeared in the Pilot, we were never given any space in the paper. Not so much as a single line.
Yes, dear friends, our community newspaper, the Daily Pilot, has shut out your dear editor of the CM PRESS and presumably others who might present some persuasive arguments to counter the smears. That's why you don't see any letters or columns from us in the Pilot. And, we've sent the paper many letters and columns to counter the false things we've read there.
Maybe, with the disastrous results in the just past election for the pals of the Pilot, things have come to a head at the paper. In this just past election, the Pilot appeared to pull out all the stops in order to get Bruce Garlich and Mike Scheafer elected. Day after day, readers were treated to puff comments about the two, and negative ones about Mansoor, and, by association, Leece.
The Pilot failed miserably. Mansoor and Leece won without breaking a sweat. The voters gave these two a mandate to improve this city. This was a rejection of the positions taken by the Pilot and all their lefty pals.
Shortly after the election, the editor of the Pilot, S. J. Cahn, quit. No good reasons were given for this sudden departure. Did it have anything to do with the fact that the Pilot was so out of touch with voters? The paper will probably say there's no connection, but....
Right now, the Pilot isn't even running editorials or letters. How long this will continue is anyone's guess but, without these editorials and letters, the paper is losing much local interest and may lose readers as a result.
So, what would the CM PRESS like to see at the Pilot?
We'd like to see new columnists who actually know something about the local scene and who write about it. We'd like to see an expanded opinion section with many more letters from readers. We'd like to see a more "improvement minded" newspaper run and written by people who actually live in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach and who have a stake in making our two communities even nicer than they are now instead of pushing failed left wing ideologies and hatred for our traditional values. We'd also like to see the end to wasted ink columns that have no relevance to Costa Mesa and Newport Beach.
Oh, as an aside, when we wrote an earlier column in a similar vein about the Pilot, we got an email from another guy with a blog who said that we were wrong and that the Pilot was solid. A virtual Rock of Gibralter, as we say in the biz. That was before the editor quit.
Of course, this other guy also ran a poll on his blog (that was sent to us--because we almost never read blogs) that showed that Chris Bunyan was going to win the recent election in a virtual landslide. Laugh out loud. As we predicted, Mr. Bunyan came in dead last in the election.
This other guy used to write a column for the Pilot and he is a member of Return to Reason and he supported Garlich and Scheafer in the election, so one suspects his views are colored by hanging out with too many swells in the whine and geez set and/or are influenced by political ideology and wishful thinking.
Come on Pilot, we're pulling for you. Make the necessary changes over there and don't fade away on us. Get in touch with the real people of Costa Mesa and not the phonies who always seem to have your corporate ear.
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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.
