That self-awareness train rolls by and some just refuse to climb aboard

Charming.

And thank you CLF for your helpful and no doubt extremely knowledgeable advice as to what I should do with my career.

I’ll be sure to pass your advice along to the people who have given my journalism a very long list of local and national awards over the 30 years that I’ve been working as a journalist, the 20 or so different folks who have including my articles in anthologies and text books, my own book publishers, my literary agent, the six universities where I have either teaching appointments or where I regularly guest lecture, the non-profits that that have recruited me for grants and/or fellowships (for my journalism), plus the national writers organization where I serve on the board of directors, and the journalism organization where I was just this week asked to serve on the board of directors.

I imagine they’ll all find it helpful.

Oh, and did I mention the folks who work in and around law enforcement who think that Sanchez is likely guilty but who have repeatedly emailed to thank me for my reporting on this issue? They’ll find your career advice for me helpful too, I feel sure.

Yet in your original post about Alex’s arrest
http://witnessla.com/page/2/?s=alex+sanchez&Submit=Go
you wrote:

“Alex is an excellent and great-hearted man who has made a big difference in many lives.”

Immediately following that you wrote:

“He was targeted by the LAPD for years (when he was just beginning his gang intervention work) and they never were able to find anything on him—although not for lack of trying.

Now the FBI—which has made a near industry of making Mara Salvatrucha into the ultimate gang monsters—are having a go at it.”

So to summarize: A. Alex is a great guy and B. The LAPD and FBI have been out to get him for many years. This is clearly the hypothesis you are setting up. If that’s not a conspiracy theory, I don’t know what is.

In a later update in that same post you wrote:

“With Alex Sanchez’s arrest…. I am—as are many people whom I know— praying that there is nothing that will stick. I don’t believe it, frankly. Alex is a good man.”

So again, your explanation for why he couldn’t have done is this is because he is a “good man.” (Btw, praying that “nothing will stick” is a curious turn of phrase for a person that you consider innocent.)

Even later in the same post you wrote:

“Civil rights lawyer and gang expert Connie Rice said anti-gang workers sometimes struggle to completely leave behind gang affiliations.
“The best ones are the ones who have completely gotten out of the life, but kept the relationships and still are respected,” she said. “But they are the exception and not the rule. Most of these guys are go-betweens, some act as buffers and some are still in the gang.”
Rice said she had wondered about Sanchez because he had been absent from community meetings aimed at reducing MS-13 violence.
“The thing that makes it really complicated is that Alex did really good work,” she said. “He helped a lot of kids, put a lot of kids in school.””

And then you followed it up with, “For the record: I do not—repeat NOT-–agree with Connie on the above matter.”

Evidently, you don’t seem to believe that some of these gangsters could be playing both sides of the fence. So it doesn’t seem like there is *anything* that could convince you of Alex’s guilt. This is the point from which you start. And yet you call yourself a journalist.

We seem to have a different idea of what advocacy journalism is. (And btw, since when does reporting something in “narrative form” clear you of having to be an objective reporter?) As I see advocacy journalism, it is journalism that shines a spotlight on a subject. Not a biased, one-sided account of events that completely ignores any evidence which may be contrary to its hypothesis.

Look, do what you want to do. Support your friend Alex. Write about his bail hearings. But please, don’t call yourself a journalist. As a journalist, you don’t need to be a robot without feelings, emotions, biases. You can still be a human with biases, just KEEP THEM OUT OF YOUR STORIES.

As for the LA Times editors having biases, I don’t doubt it. All newspaper people do. I just don’t want to see those biases in print. (I do think the LA Times is showing a bias by *not* covering this story.)

If you want to really help Alex, why don’t you just stop calling yourself a “journalist” and start up a support site (or post on the sites that already exist), help raise more money for his defense, and use your connections to find him a better lawyer? As a friend, you would better serve him that way.

He’s got nothing. He’s just a bigot pulling numbers out of thin air.

So far you have not proven that the government is “out to get” Alex. That this is some kind of a vendetta.

Your main defense of him is that he just couldn’t have done this.

And where exactly have I made these statements?