Los Angeles Mayor’s Race

The Times says it is for healing L.A. It has introduced vox populi sections in which, supposedly, the community is heard. Yet it stops far short of allowing new leaders to emerge.

The painful reportorial twisting in your article on the forum seemed calculated to see that a relatively unknown mayoral candidate, Ted Hayes, did not appear to have won anything significant when he received far more votes from these campus politicians than did the other “real” candidates. (A picture accompanying the story showed Nick Patsaouras, who got zero student votes, and Stan Sanders, who got one-fourth the number of votes that Hayes got. Hayes was not shown.)

First the story suggested that the reason for the support for Hayes was that “only one of the front-runners showed up.” Only on a back page do we find that “major contenders” Julian Nava, Nick Patsaouras, and even a tardy Nate Holden showed up. It was made to appear as though the support for Hayes by student activists was, in some way, irrelevant; as though it was merely a vote of protest against the “real” candidates for not showing up, or that the vote was in some way unfairly manipulated out of the youths by Hayes in the story’s use of phrases like “Showing himself adept at sizing up the crowd.”

BILL BOLTE

Culver City