ANOTHER PRAVDA PUFF PIECE FROM THE DESERT SUN

Summary: With its puff piece on "five-star" sociopath/mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa's so-called legacy in Cathedral City, The Desert Sun has managed to make a mockery of journalism with yet another pandering, Pravda-like piece of “personality journalism” so slavish and sycophantic in its character as to cause a readers to throw up a little in their mouths upon reading baby reporter Sherry Barkas’s hagiographic love offering to the worst mayor in Cathedral City’s history.  Of course, our local Gannett paper has always carried Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s water, but this bullshit is some of the worst yet.

Slavish, simpering, pandering, propagandistic, Pravda-like “personality journalism.”

These are about the kindest words one can use to describe the incredibly sycophantic coverage with which our local Gannett newspaper insulted the intelligence of its Cathedral City readers in its story this morning about the so-called legacy of outgoing “five-star” sociopath/Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa.

Certainly, the adulatory tone of baby reporter Sherry Barkas’s multiple column inch love-feast does nothing to allay a pervasive community suspicion that the Desert Sun has always given DeRosa softball, preferential coverage because DeRosa has gone out of her way to cultivate close, even meretricious, personal relationships with senior management at the newspaper.

Indeed, the Desert Sun has a long and dishonorable history of routinely assigning relatively inexperienced reporters to cover Cathedral City, reporters who don’t know their beat well enough not to be spoonfed whatever bullshit DeRosa ladles out to them.  Indeed, we know of no other Coachella Valley mayor who, on leaving office, receives such uncritical, unthoughtful, unintelligent coverage.  Reading this morning’s intelligence-insulting story put one in mind of reading Pravda or even Renmin Ribao’s hagiographic coverage of Mao Zedong during the worst cult-of-personality excesses of China’s cultural Revolution.

One may say that the intelligence of Cathedral City readers has been insulted because we all know much better than Ms. Barkas what is really happening in our community, a community which has been ill-served and ill led during the ten bitter winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s mayoralty.  It is insulting to this community that the Desert Sun routinely assigns to it reporters who are so easily deceived and so lacking in the most basic knowledge of the beat they are supposed to cover.  Case in point, Barkas’s puff piece does not even correctly recite the year in which DeRosa was first elected mayor, after having run a deceitful and dishonorable whispering campaign against her predecessor, George Stettler, an altogether honorable man.

Of course, not a word of DeRosa’s underhanded and deceitful propensities ever appears in The Desert Sun’s brown-nose coverage of her antics.  Though it is common knowledge among Cathedral City voters that DeRosa had an epic October meltdown on social media, attempting to stir up a whispering campaign against (victorious) council candidate Mark Carnevale and darting anti-Semitic slurs in winning candidate Shelley Kaplan’s direction as well, The Desert Sun never informed its readers of what both readers and newspaper already knew and knew well.  When DeRosa posted on Facebook that Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Carnevale were simply “bobble heads” for a long time councilmember and DeRosa nemesis Greg Pettis, her screed inevitably caused voters to be turned off on Theresa Hooks’s candidacy.  Because DeRosa apparently couldn’t control her temper, it certainly appears that enough voters switched their votes to cost Theresa Hooks the election.  With friends like Kathleen Joan DeRosa, apparently nobody needs enemies, yet the Desert Sun continues to cover for her.

It is hard to say which is more offensive, the almost quotidian untruths we have been told so often by the outgoing Mayor and her supporters, the casual disdain in which the outgoing mayor and her supporters hold Cathedral City’s Latino majority and its substantial queer nation, or the way in which the Desert Sun, a right-wing, racially biased news outlet, routinely carries the political water for this lame-duck incumbent, routinely dismissing all criticism of her poor performance and routinely attacking those of us who see through her.

I threw up a little in my mouth this morning reading this latest piece of puerile propaganda pandering.  But, from the BS-purveyors at the Desert Sun we should not expect anything better.