Meghan McCarty

Picking up the pieces after the Sayre fire

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:18:29 -0800

Sights and Sounds from Oakridge Mobile Home Park

I visited Sylmar, the north San Fernando Valley community devastated by the Sayre fire, twice last week.

On Monday, nerves still raw and exposed, residents of the Oakridge Mobile Home Park were allowed to return to their homes - escorted by police in vanpools, looking out upon the catastrophic scene like tourists on a somber bus tour.

California on Fire

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:42:22 -0800

This weekend, fires are again devastating parts of Southern California. I wrote the following about October's Marek fire - also in Sylmar. Once again some of the most vulnerable have lost everything as fires decimated yet another mobile home park where many elderly and disadvantaged people once lived.

Video of The Marek Fire in Lopez Canyon near Skyview Mobile Home Park:
(Blue Star Mobile Home Park, mentioned in the following, is at the bottom of Lopez Canyon)

When Linda Sneddon speaks of the chaotic evacuation from the Blue Star Mobile Home Park in Sylmar on the early morning of October 13, she chokes up with anger.

"If they only would have evacuated us a little sooner, we would have been able to get our pets and everything out OK."

But they didn't have that chance. Her dog and two cats were lost in the fire that consumed her mobile home and all of her belongings. By the time police drove through the park and bellowed immediate evacuation orders from a PA system at 5 a.m., flames from the Marek fire could be seen on the hill with heavy winds carrying them toward Sneddon's home. Her pets had scattered and hid during the commotion and she had no time to find them.

The Fight Over Prop 8

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:32:55 -0800

The passage of Proposition 8 on election night by a margin of 4 percent didn't end the struggle for marriage rights in California. Law suits are already in the works to overturn the constitutional amendment that would eliminate the right of same sex marriage.

Every day since November 4, concerned citizens have taken to the streets in West Hollywood, Westwood, Long Beach, and here in Silverlake to protest what they see as a civil rights violation in the midst of this historic election.

De-what?: Injecting actual debate into the "debates"

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:59:28 -0800

Never before has a moment of walking in front of a teleprompter lit up the television screen as it did Tuesday night. In an awe-inspiring moment of unscripted maverickness, John McCain wandered into the path of Tom Brokaw's teleprompter and ... well ... perhaps it wasn't that exciting, but it was still the most exciting thing that happened during the second of the three presidential debates.

Down By the River

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:35:59 -0800

Down by the LA River - crossing Fletcher Drive into Elysian Valley.

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"In a city of stars, it is a has-been.

In a city of bone-shaking earthquakes and blowtorch winds, it has been tamed into a toothless creature of unnatural nature.

In its latter days, its banks and beds have been plastered over with cement. It has been befouled by oil and DDT and cyanide and human sewage. It has had more value as a movie set, more usefulness as a punch line, more potential as a freeway, than regard as a waterway ...

Los Angeles brags about its beaches and its mountains. On the subject of its river, however, it is silent. Within the river's banks lies more acreage than Central Park -- walled up, fenced off, locked away from human eyes, like a loony aunt hidden in the attic, not to be discussed in front of company ...

In other cities, great rivers are fringed by great houses and grand legends. St. Petersburg's palaces edge the canals of the Neva, where Rasputin drowned, full of cyanide and bullets. Slave-built plantation mansions front the reaches of the Mississippi, where young Mark Twain learned his river pilot's trade and his storytelling one.

Not so here."

(Morrison, Patt and Lamonica, Mark. Rio L.A. Los Angeles, CA: Angel City Press, 2001)

CNN - Taking the Pulse of the Debate

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:00:18 -0800

Watching CNN's debate coverage Friday night the eye couldn't help but turn to the "Audience Reaction Meter" that rose, fell, and flat-lined like a disconcerting heart monitor in an intensive care unit at every turn of rhetoric from the two candidates. Three lines - a blue one for Democrats, red for Republicans, and greenish white for independents bumped along on their various trajectories, instantaneously measuring voters' reactions to the candidates' performances as they unfolded in real time.

Confused viewers posted on Yahoo Answers and personal blogs, speculating about the science behind the reaction meter - was it really measuring audience heart response? A survey taken ahead of time? A remote clicker?

Spinspotter: A Balanced Equation for Objectivity?

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 06:11:32 -0800

Spinspotter.com and NewsTrust.net attempt a similar mission of assisting web information gatherers in making judgments on a news source's reliability and objectivity. With the increasing amount of information available from sources outside legacy media, such devices provide an important tool to sift through the fat of the internet. They also give readers an opportunity to make their own assessments of media bias. The user-generated nature of these sites creates some pitfalls and inconsistencies but, far from letting readers off the hook by providing judgment for them, sites like these engage the readers' critical judgment, making them more shrewd information consumers.

Reffing the Refs

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 02:20:04 -0800

Playing the ref is nothing new in politics. The Republicans have been hurling the "liberal media bias" accusation for decades but in this election cycle the jabs are particularly sharp and the fodder particularly rich.

The role of the press in lionizing Obama at the expense of Hillary Clinton during the primaries was hotly debated. Now critics have a new target in Sarah Palin. Questions over the media's unfair treatment of Palin began almost immediately as organizations scurried to dig up all and any information on a relative political cipher. The teen pregnancy frenzy entrenched that debate even further, driving the level of scrutiny of the media coverage to an all time high.

Kilkenny Virus - Anarchy or Democracy?

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 01:10:07 -0800

Michael Tomasky condemns the lawlessness of citizen journalism in his Guardian blog, Comment is Free, claiming, "There can't just be anarchy." Well ... actually there can, and more importantly there is. So despite Tomasky explicitly decrying the pithy rejoinder, it just has to be said: deal with it.

And deal with it we shall. With no one to enforce rules on "witnesses" that are simply bearing witness to events with technologies like cameras, keyboards, and the internet, the shift in rules will have to occur in the audience that consumes the information, and in the players that are being witnessed, or "citizen reported" on. Thus in the example given of Obama's "closed-door" fundraising speech, Obama and his aides learned a very valuable new rule: everything he says and does that is witnessed can be reported and scrutinized.

Revisionist Wikihistory weighs in on Sarah Palin

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 06:43:28 -0800

Jokes circulated last week in the wake of the Obama VP text message announcement that McCain's internet-challenged campaign would be releasing their news via pony express. But as speculation and eventual confirmation of his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin trickled in early Friday morning, some evidence surfaced that perhaps someone in his camp is savvier than they're getting credit for.

The whirlwind of predictions favoring Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty or former primary opponent Mitt Romney for the VP nomination came to a swift halt as a dark horse candidate who had been all but ruled off the shorter of the short list of probable nominees was announced as McCain's choice. If there's anything the media hates in an early morning breaking news story it's a dark horse. Who is this woman Sarah Palin? What about all that research and analysis we did on Pawlenty and Tom Ridge? For the American public, Palin is an even greater unknown. Politico.com reported from the scene of McCain's announcement rally what was probably a common first response:

Jay Schuermann, who rode up to Dayton from Cincinnati in a bus full of Republicans, admitted that he was quickly looking up Palin on Wikipedia on his BlackBerry as she was introduced.

Imagining, and Re-imagining the San Fernando Valley

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:54:15 -0800

Southern California, more than any other place in the world, is not just a landscape but a dreamscape. Built on the celluloid dreams of cinema, it's a mirage of glamour, prosperity, and new beginnings blooming out of the desert. No area has come to represent the hopes and dreams of the classic suburbanite more than the San Fernando Valley.

Sprouting from the minds of clever real estate developers who schemed to turn sleepy orange groves into hot property by buying up cheap agricultural land that would then be annexed to the city of Los Angeles (and able to drink up its new water supply), the Valley quickly blossomed into tidy streets of single-family homes with shiny new cars in the driveways: the American Dream.

But even in those boom times that tidy dream was not so spick and span. De facto segregation excluded African Americans and other minorities from all but a sliver of Valley developments. Today the dividing line of the 405 freeway separates the prosperous West Valley communities from the largely down-market and predominantly immigrant communities of the East Valley. But despite these realities, the imaginative construction of spacial identity is as strong as ever.

Following my bliss ... and grief, and humor, and anger as a journalist

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:28:44 -0800

I have a kind of greed for journalistic experiences - not the writing or the byline, but just the process of finding out the story, of adding a new story onto myself. Maybe that's anathema to journalism with a sober capital "J" - to hope to somehow suck up these experiences and incorporate them into my person rather than stand by observing on the sidelines, but it's a big part of my motivation. I don't need for it to be the biggest story, to be first on the scene, to bear witness to history unfolding on some giant world stage. It's those small stories, the ones stuffed down in the cracks that you would have stepped right over without a second thought that attract me. It's finding the monumental in the minute.

As a citizen, I'm interested in health care reform, following the election, and figuring out how speculation and hedge funds affect the economy. But as a journalist I just want to talk to interesting people, go to interesting places, and have conversations and experiences that shake me up a little.