LA Weekly Answers Mayor V

As we reported yesterday, after LA Weekly wrote a critical article about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in September, and then he defended himself with the LA Daily News last week.

Basically, the Weekly reported that Villaraigosa only does city business (according to his schedule) with 11% of his time. So Villaraigosa said that it wasn’t true because the Weekly only got his public calendar. Whole story is here.

Jill Stewart sent FBLA this email:

The question for us is, wtf is Antonio saying, exactly, in his slam on us?

Is Antonio saying that he has a second set of books that detail his real schedule and that prove he does actual city business? That would be news to us, and a big ethical breach by him if true, for withholding it from us. And that would be a really juicy new story.

More likely, and the only other possibility, is that the mayor lied when he said: “… they were upset because we only gave them my public calendar. They didn’t get to see what I was doing privately, with meetings here (at City Hall) or in other places.”

Nuh uh Tony. Never happened.

First, at no time were were upset. We had a blast putting this piece together. Second, we got his full, personal schedule – and there is no other. We saw everything he was doing, in 15-minute periods throughout his 16-hour days, for ten weeks, except the blackouts which we have reconfirmed this week are Personal, Family, Political Fundraising and Security-related.

We’ll have a short piece online tomorrow by Patrick Range McDonald quoting the mayor’s aide Matt Szabo, who retracts, on the record, what the mayor said to the Daily News. Szabo now says Villaraigosa misspoke. They DID NOT give us some sort of limited public calendar, we got the whole personal calendar shebang. And, WE DID see everything the mayor was doing for ten weeks, except the mostly personal, blacked out stuff.

Since Tony’s slam on the Weekly has been widely circulated, we intend to widely circulate the truth about his dissembling, as our response. We are not done yet.

And if there are slams – we’ll bring them to you!

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