An interesting day yesterday, Debra Bowen won her primary – which is great news – and an interesting mix of election results otherwise.

I biffed my election-day post favoring Bowen, but will try and make up for that in the next few months.

Meanwhile, a LA Times sidenote.

Steve Lopez – who is, I have to admit, frustratingly good sometimes, and frustratingly thick others – has one of his thick columns up today.

He’s lauding the LA Times coverage of the Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls:

Whatever the results of Tuesday’s hold-your-nose primary for governor, this much is true:

Democrats Steve Westly and Phil Angelides were both gutted and fileted by this newspaper over the past several weeks. I mean that in a good way.

Readers learned, primarily from reporters Dan Morain and Evan Halper, that Westly and Angelides were anything but the upstanding, straight-talking crusaders they claimed to be. It was this newspaper, let’s remember, that pointed out the absurdity of an Angelides TV ad blasting Westly for donations from “a corrupt Chicago businessman.” As Morain and Halper discovered, Angelides himself had tried to tap the same guy.

The Times deserves the attaboy. But then, S-Lo steps off the cliff:

I almost hesitate to mention any of this, because there’s nothing surprising or unusual about the way Westly and Angelides were knocked around by The Times. That’s a newspaper’s job: Hold candidates up to public inspection, study the viability of their promises and slap them around as needed.

I’m just wondering why the paper hasn’t gotten huzzahs from the professional gas bags who worked themselves into a frenzy three years ago over our equally tough reporting on a candidate named Arnold Schwarzenegger. As that doddering shill Hugh Hewitt put it back then, The Times was “an organ of the Democratic Party” with no interest other than “agenda journalism.”

I was one of those “gas bags” in my post here. here’s what I said then:

…what I think torqued me off as a consumer of mass media – and I think others as well – was the LA Times blindness to the fact that it is a part of a larger ongoing dialog, and that the stories on Arnold’s sexual – I’m not sure how to characterize this – behavior clearly would have an impact, and were in fact reported to have an impact, by Carroll’s own admission.

I’ve said all along that what matters is that the paper act with at least the appearance of impartiality, or as my pet journalist said, ‘fairness’. Had the Times wrapped its Thursday piece in an explanation that made three simple points:

1) We’ve been working on this full-bore since August 6, we wish we’d run it sooner, but we didn’t believe it was right not to run it before you voted;
2) We understand the problems this presents for Arnold and his campaign, as well as the appearance it gives that we’re ‘hitting’ him, and we’ve given him and his campaign space to respond;
3) We devoted equal resources trying to dig into rumors about Davis’ behavior and been unable to come up with enough solid, sourced information to make a story out of it.

I’d have been mildly unhappy, but certainly not angry, and would have had no cause to be angry.

But the Times didn’t so any such thing.

What was the point?

That the Times had erred in running a thinly-sourced last-minute slam on Schwarzenegger the Thursday before the election.

And, that the public perception of the Times’ positions could be looked at by looking at the positions of it’s paid columnists – who were uniformly opposed to Ahnold. (As an aside, in the Calendar section today, there’s an article titled “Unity, yes, but still no anthem” with the secondary headline (the one after the jump) of “Wanted: a song that will rally the immigrant rights movement”. Imagine if you would the Times leading with “Wanted: a song that will rally the border-security movement” – having trouble? So am I)

I absolutely think the Times should be critiquing candidates – including the incumbent.

I just don’t think they should be doing it, out of the blue, on the weekend before the vote. That looks more like a campaign tactic than valuable reporting.

And if Lopez doesn’t understand that difference, he should step back from writing about electoral politics and write more about homelessness and the local politics about it. In fact, I can seed him with some good stories on the subject.