Summary: Another Desert Sun hit piece bylined from Tatiana Sanchez seeks again to carry sociopathic mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s water against councilmembers Greg Pettis and Sam Toles. According to the Desert Sun, traveling on behalf of the city is apparently a bad thing. The Desert Sun, in its contemptibly simplistic and dependably right-wing mindset, cannot or will not understand that part of what we expect our public servants to do is travel and champion our interests in the councils of regional governance where the decisions that affect our destiny are often made. Of course, it would be too much to expect any kind of careful or considerate reporting from the Desert Sun, which routinely assigns reporters to cover Cathedral City who neither know their beat nor much care about it, instead regarding covering Cathedral City as beneath them. Cathedral City residents who know the truth need to be prepared to push back hard against such propagandistic misreporting.
Tatiana Sanchez’s breathless reportage in the Desert Sun about “absenteeism” among various local city council members demonstrates once again how poorly that Gannett newspaper’s reporters know their beats, and how easily they can be bamboozled by ambitious, conniving, prevaricating politicians such as Cathedral City’s Kathleen Joan DeRosa into becoming dependable foot soldiers in local political conflicts.
The article purports to detail the attendance records of various Coachella Valley Council members. Not surprisingly, since the piece obviously was inspired by a whisper from DeRosa into the year of dipsomaniacal Desert Sun executive editor Greg Burton (with whom, oft-repeated rumor has it, DeRosa is engaged in a meretricious social and personal relationship), Sanchez has concentrated on DeRosa’s political rivals in Cathedral City, councilmember Greg Pettis and lame-duck councilman Sam Toles.
As usual for the Desert Sun, Sanchez’s reportage lacks any sort of nuance whatsoever, but appears intended to call forth a kind of visceral, condemnatory reaction from Desert Sun readers, including low information voters in Cathedral City.
If Ms. Sanchez knew her beat at all, and had she been diligent in doing her job, rather than being contends to accept spoon feeding from DeRosa, she would have understood that many council members, including Cathedral City’s Pettis, do in fact travel frequently as part of their jobs. We say this again, as part of their jobs. We constituents expect our council members to participate actively in regional governance activities. Now some Cathedral City Council members make a point of not traveling. Our question for these councilmembers is simple: are you aware that history is made by those who show up?
Since history is, indeed, made by those who show up, travel and participation in regional governance activities are critical to ensure that the views of this community are heard when the decisions that affect our destiny are made. By participating in a regional boards, commissions, and other activities, Mr. Pettis has been able to ensure over the years that Cathedral City’s voice is heard, and that Cathedral City is neither forgotten nor sacrificed on the altar of other cities’ interests when critical policy choices are made. Of course, it would be too much to expect the simplistic minds at the Desert Sun to understand any such thing.
Apparently, being uninformed, unwise, and just downright foolish is a job qualification in our local Gannett newspaper, whose editorial-page editor, James Folmer (who claims to be a California native) made a gross editorial gaffe, a few years back, referring to California’s Legislature in print as the “General Assembly.” Such a gaffe demonstrated, as if he at shouted it from the house tops, that Folmer did not know much about the community about which he presumed to editorialize.
Of course, we in Cathedral City are not without resources of our own to push back against the efforts of a bitter, frustrated sociopath of a mayor to scorch the earth to the greatest extent possible before she leaves office. It is an open secret in Cathedral City that Kathleen Joan DeRosa believes she should have been Mayor-for-Life, and that she regarded councilmember Stan Henry’s decision to run against her this fall as a personal betrayal.
Of course, DeRosa’s political viability has been declining since the fall of 2012, when voters rejected her transparent effort to pack the city Council with a permanent three-vote majority. When voters gave former councilmember Charles “Bud” England his pink slip, they knew what they were doing; they were getting rid of a dependable toady and controlled vote of DeRosa. By replacing England with Henry, voters chose a more independent voice whom DeRosa could not automatically control.
Given that DeRosa has acknowledged that she prefers to burn bridges rather than build them, and given Henry’s willingness to see things through his own eyes, and not through the prism DeRosa sought to impose on him, it was hardly surprising that the bloom should have been off the relationship between the two of them fairly soon after Stan Henry joined the Council after retiring as Cathedral City's Chief of Police. The relationship between a Mayor and a chief of police is far different from the relationship between two Council peers.
Of course, while the nuances of politics in Cathedral City matter to those of us who live here, they are apparently far too dull for reporters from our Gannett newspaper to be willing to do the due diligence to find them. The Desert Sun has never bothered to appoint a beat reporter to Cathedral City who knows well the dynamics of this community.
Indeed, Cathedral City has been ill-served by a succession of callow, naïve, and easily fooled novice journalists. More than one of these novices made it clear by both word and action that they considered being assigned to cover Cathedral City an imposition, that paying attention to this community was beneath them. That sense of condescension made such Desert Sun reporters as Rasha Aly, Bill Byron, and Tamara Sone, among others, easy targets for a sociopathic mayor for whom the telling of deliberate, politically targeted lies has become second nature.
Because we are not without resources to push back, using social media and other instrumentalities, we should do so. By pushing back, we were able to push DeRosa water carrier Tamara Sone out of Cathedral City and out of her job at the Desert Sun altogether. Additionally, we should be sending acidulous letters to the editor in sufficient number that James Folmer cannot simply spike them to satisfy his desire to protect our sociopathic mayor, or to give expression to the evident personal antipathy he entertains toward me and toward those who have dared to question his integrity and professionalism. We need to do some digging, and to bring out into the light of day the true circumstances of our mayor’s residency and to hold her accountable. If the Desert Sun cannot, or will not, make a commitment to fairness and accuracy in its reporting, then we need to push back, hard.
