An article in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times reveals just how deep that paper’s institutional dislike of Governor Schwarzenegger runs.

In a piece covering the governor’s signing of California’s $117 billion 2005-2006 budget, staff writer Evan Halper spent most of the reader’s time on Schwarzenegger’s veto of $190 million in spending. That’s 0.16% of what the legislature sent him — an amount the state spends in 14 hours.

How does this compares to the Times‘ past coverage? Let’s just say they seem to have a preference for the good old days:

(click on the table to see the full size pdf … sorry for the fuzziness of the thumbnail; we’re still trying to figure out the best way to display tables)

In September of 2002, Gray Davis vetoed $235 million of programs — more than Schwarzenegger yesterday. Yet the Times devoted only 6% of its story (86 of 1,436 words) to Davis’ vetoes.

The Times‘ indifference to Davis’ vetoes continued in 2003 — 42 of 1,920 words. To be fair, Davis vetoed almost nothing, and the Times wrote almost nothing about it.

But in 2004, Schwarzenegger vetoed $116m out of the first budget sent to him — half of what Davis cut in 2002 — and the Times spent 34% of its article highlighting the veto and the vetoed programs. And the subhead for the report was not the benign wording that Davis got, but “Schwarzenegger uses line-item veto to cut $116 million in health and human services, environmental and education programs.” (That sounds evil! - ed.)

And today, 69% — yes, 69% — of the piece covers the relatively insignificant cuts. No more paragraph or two summarizing the major deletions, like Davis got even when he vetoed $45m more dollars — no, Halper went out and resourcefully got five quotes from legislators and supporters of the affected programs, including one that effectively accuses Schwarzenegger of leaving people to die of cancer. And in the he-said, she-said about that cut, Halper gives the administrator of the program the last at-bat. (Schwarzenegger is clearly even more evil than last year! - ed.)

By comparison, the AP story on the 2005-2006 budget signing had about 65 of 689 words devoted to the vetoes — under 10%.

And the subhead? “Schwarzenegger cuts dozens of items totaling $190 million to dismay of programs’ backers.” Not “Budget signed without new taxes” or “State’s credit rating also upgraded.” Not even “99.84% of Legislature’s budget approved.” No, not for the Times and their bête noire.

At the Times‘ current rate of progress, next year it will be able to devote 103% of the annual the-budget-got-signed story to anecdotes about vetoed programs. Since that story will only be months before the Apocalypse according to the LAT (the rest of us know it as Schwarzenegger’s potential 2006 re-election) expect to see mention of human sacrifice in the subhead.

[Patterico visitors: our other LA Times coverage is here.]

[Note: the older stories cited above are not in the Times’ free archive, but in the pay one — a nice feeling when you pay $200-something per year for the paper already. If you jump click on the post title above to see the complete post, we have the snip from the 2002 LAT story]

Technorati Tags: California, LA Times, Los Angeles Times, media, politics, Schwarzenegger

Here’s the snip from the 2002 LAT article:

Davis announced relatively small cuts Thursday, saying he had used the governor’s line-item veto authority to pare $235 million from the budget. Most of the money, $177 million, was cut from the $26.6-billion health and welfare budget. Davis is delaying a plan to expand a program that offers health care to low-income parents whose employers don’t provide health insurance.

The state will, however, expand the Healthy Families Program for children of low-income parents, pushing up the number of people enrolled to 624,000.

An additional resource is the state Department of Finance’s table “Budget Act Dates and Veto Information.” Some of the total dollars vetoed are different from the LAT figures; we use the LAT figures assuming they were what was known at the time the stories were filed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 at 6:10 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Los Angeles Times, California Schemin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.