WELCOME TO WENDYVILLE

Welcome to Wendyville where the stench of corruption is washing ashore with the coming high tide.

By the end of this decade the Aspenization of Santa Barbara will be mostly complete and the way it’s looking now, Citizen McCaw will be the unopposed-self anointed Queen of this domain, which was formerly our town.

Here is how that happens. Five years from now, when you happen to get down to Stearns Wharf, near what you think is the still undeveloped Bill Levy property, and notice for the first time a giant overreaching mausoleum of some kind, and learn it is a publicly funded museum to Rob Lowe’s acting career, you will stand there and wonder how that happened without your hearing about it. That’s how it happens. And it’s happening now.

One of the most popular games in town right now is trying to guess the angle on a Wendy-Press story. Cuddly story about the endangered miniature poodles on one of the islands? Oh that’s Wendy’s animal rights thing. Pesto crisis on the front page? Oh that’s Arthur in from the kitchen. But those are two samples of the easy stuff.

It’s the other things, like hidden and shifting agendas, bubbling out of sight that should cause worry because those are guaranteed tricky, toxic and fatally dangerous, especially in a time when cover-ups are so easily accomplished with cash.

By way of illustration, consider please what would happen in America’s number one city if Mr. Sulzberger of the New York Times were conducting himself like Wendy. All the gory details of everything said and done, by and to everyone would be leaked, posted, printed, blogged and splayed everywhere.

But here in Santa Barbara, there is close to a news black- out. The Daily Sound works hard but is huffing and puffing to get big enough fast enough. The Indy is weekly and mostly featurey. And worst, and most ominous, the Wendy-Mess is hiring more reporters and printing less local news.

One aspect of Mrs. McCaw’s extended hissy-fit reaction to Rob Lowe’s subscription status is, it turns out, a slightly weird passive aggressive outcome of putting all news on hold until she gets her way.

In the meantime, the news she sees fit to print is coming to be seen as, or is already obviously, openly, instantly perceived as having a pretty serious credibility problem.

Wendy has accomplished a hard to do thing. She’s got a $100 million newspaper that nobody believes.

Wendy, of course, doesn’t see it that way and her apparent position is that she has several hundred million spare dollars at-the-ready to prove her point.

While attorneys everywhere rise to their feet applauding, and friends and neighbors up and down our tree-lined streets quietly draw the curtains and hope the noise will just go away, we here at the webloid pledge to do everything in our power to be on hand at the ready and in the streets as witness to this already in progress Wendy Invasion and Total Control Takeover of Aspen West.

When 9 respected journalists walk out of a news shop saying the place has got no ethics and then the National Society of Professional Journalists backs it up, that should be just about all the warning you need.

Absence of ethics is corruption.

So then, as we all gently slide into another lightly brisk Santa Barbara fall season, we the webloid boldly inquire of citizens everywhere in SB, ‘are you ready for some football?’

Wendy is.

Howsabout you?

Either way, no worries. Its just a matter of binary choice. Either you have courage or you have corruption. Either you do have a First Amendment hometown Free Press or you do not.

The one thing clear from the Wendy-Mess summer of 06 is that Press Baron Wendy only does business on a take it or leave it basis.

Apparently accommodation, conciliation, consideration, collaboration and cooperation all left the newsroom with the ethics.

What do you think needs to be done and what are you willing to do?

Email:

dailywebloid_editor@yahoo.com

truth or money, cq