Vice Mayor Bonnie Lowenthal can stop worrying about what’s left of the Press-Telegram. Or is that start worrying?

BONNIE LOWENTHAL by ALICE RUTHERFORD

As she contemplates a run for the 54th Assembly District next year, should Vice Mayor Bonnie Lowenthal be looking over her shoulder for a Press-Telegram reporter? Was calling the P-T out in a recent letter to Cal State Long Beach journalism professor William Babcock—asking him to “hold a public workshop on [the Press-Telegram’s] depleting of local staff and priorities”—a bold move or political suicide?

“I didn’t really think about that,” Vice Mayor Bonnie Lowenthal said outside a recent Beer & Politics discussion at Gallagher’s Pub & Grill, where she’d just ripped the P-T again. “Maybe I need to be more paranoid.”

Maybe.

But her letter pleased the P-T’s chief union steward Joe Segura, who’s been at the paper 33 years and is battling company execs over a new union contract for its 12 news reporters and handful of photographers.

“We believe we have pretty good support on the [city] council,” Segura said of Lowenthal’s letter. Nice, but the City Council isn’t involved in P-T union negotiations. “The problem is, during our contract talks we have been focusing on stabilizing the newsroom [staff], and [company] negotiator Jim Janiga doesn’t seem interested in that at all. He gets angry at the District story [“A Not-So-Perfect 10,” Aug. 15, which explored the paper’s decline since its 1997 sale to MediaNews Group], just yapping at me for trashing the paper—and yet the company’s been trashing the paper for 10 years.”

Segura talks contract again Oct. 4—this time with a federal mediator, because the company won’t give an inch. He wonders if Lowenthal can budge it, and how the P-T will handle the vice mayor now that she’s stood up to the paper.

“When [Long Beach Councilman Ray] Grabinski sat in on [contract] hearings, it really pissed off P-T management,” Segura said. “And I think they just beat the hell out of him in the next few years.”

“The instruction we had on the desk was that anything we had that came up with Grabinski in a favorable light, it was to be put in the wastepaper basket,” said retired P-T veteran George Laine, a former union steward. “And anything we had that put him in a negative light, it was to be accented and maybe put on Page One if possible.”

“Don’t spoil my lunch,” said Grabinski, a former Seventh District councilman, when reminded of his unsuccessful bids for mayor in 1994 and 2002. He lost both times to Beverly O’Neill, and declined to discuss either race, or his handling by Press-Telegram writers. Interesting—shouldn’t all that be ancient history?

“Now I’m free,” Grabinski said. “I’ve served my time.”

But what about Lowenthal? Is hers just starting?

“We’re not petty people,” said P-T Executive Editor Rich Archbold, disputing that the paper targeted Grabinski after his appearance at contract negotiations: “There’s nothing to that either.”

But Archbold finds the timing of Lowenthal’s letter highly suspect—and he says there’s no way the P-T would join a public forum like the one she’s seeking.

“I’m not going to talk in a forum involving union issues and contract negotiations,” Archbold said, “and I totally disagree with Bonnie on what she’s saying.

“Why didn’t she send this letter last year or the year before?” Archbold asked. “If you’re the reporter I think you are, I think you should dig a little deeper on the timing of this letter.”

Being cross-examined by Archbold returns me to 1990, when I first arrived at the P-T, which not only regarded itself as a powerhouse—it was still known as the paper that had investigated the Long Beach Police Department, helped clean up downtown, and even sent a reporter to Dallas when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Today, it’s a shadow of that former self—and its place in the community is correspondingly diminished. Niki Tennant, Lowenthal’s chief of staff, laughs when I ask her about the timing of the letter to Babcock. Lowenthal herself says, “I think there’s been grumbling for years. I think it increased when we saw fewer [reporters] staying there for a long time. I don’t know that I’m taking on [the P-T]. I feel that I’m ready for a discussion of issues that have bubbled over.”

So are some others.

“If Bonnie was to ask me,” George Laine says, “I’d tell her to hold a public forum and invite everybody she could.”

Tags: bonnie lowenthal, dean singleton, Long Beach, press telegram