VOSD Refuses to Correct Its Faulty Reporting on Encinitas Housing Issues 

For background, scroll down to my Dec. 27, 2018 post. It’s taken me months to compose and post this followup because I didn’t want to agree with the conclusion the evidence leads to.

That conclusion: Voice of San Diego (VOSD) persistently misrepresented the facts in stories about Proposition A, density bonus and the Housing Element Update (HEU) in Encinitas. When called out on their faulty reporting, Editor-in-Chief Scott Lewis and Associate Editor Jesse Marx refused to make amends.

The bulleted points give the sequence of events:

• On Nov. 14, 2018, VOSD published a Marx story about Encinitas housing that was laced with inaccuracies. It continued the erroneous slant that started with a March 9, 2016 VOSD story by Maya Srikrishnan.

• On Nov. 21, I posted to Marx, saying VOSD had consistently gotten Encinitas housing issues wrong. I suggested he should start over and get it right. In another post to him on Nov. 30, I said essentially the same thing. He replied and asked what he had gotten wrong. I responded that to get the story right, Marx would have to scrap almost everything VOSD had published on Encinitas housing, go back before Prop A, follow the city’s abortive efforts at an HEU, and bring the story up to present day. I included contact information for four Encinitas residents who know more about the issues than I do.

• On Dec. 4, Marx replied with a misinterpretation of a point I made about Prop A in my Nov. 30 post. I replied to correct him and again suggested he contact a resident I named who is thoroughly versed on the issues. Marx called that resident, but if he got any information he didn’t publish it. On Dec. 5 and 6, I posted lengthy comments to Marx on Encinitas housing issues and VOSD’s reporting on them. I waited for a reply or a corrective story. Neither happened, so I posted my Dec. 27 critique. I emailed the URL to Marx, Editor-in-Chief Lewis and three other VOSD staffers.

• On Jan. 3, 2019, Lewis replied, saying the criticisms in my Dec. 27 post were unsubstantiated. This despite my having included six quotes from VOSD reporting that contained inaccuracies. I replied at length to Lewis, suggesting reporting steps VOSD could follow to get the story right. I also provided contact information for six knowledgeable Encinitas residents. I referred Lewis to my email exchange with Marx for further specifics.

• On Jan. 4, Lewis replied, saying I should explain how VOSD was wrong. He said he had not seen my email exchange with Marx. On Jan. 5, I replied that he was asking me to do his job. I referred him to emails other Encinitas residents had posted to VOSD regarding its faulty reporting and to the critical comments below previous VOSD stories on Encinitas housing. If Lewis had looked in VOSD’s archive, he would have found those comments and an April 20, 2016 commentary written by three Encinitas residents “to supply missing background information, correct factual errors and provide a more precise context for some of the assertions made in the VOSD article.” The residents had met with Srikrishnan before her March 9, 2016 story, had tried to familiarize her with the facts and were disappointed in the results.

• On Jan. 5, Lewis again asked me to explain how VOSD got their Encinitas housing stories wrong. This despite the specifics I had given in my blog post, in my emails to him, previously to Marx, and those I had referred Lewis to in the VOSD archive. Lewis showed himself to be like a man who, when told his fly is open, demands more proof before checking for himself. Nevertheless, he wrote “as a gesture to diffuse this tension I’ll spend some time looking into this.”

• I waited a month. On Feb. 5, I posted to Lewis and asked what he had found. He replied that he found nothing incorrect in what VOSD wrote. It’s impossible to read VOSD’s reporting on Encinitas housing issues since March 9, 2016, the three residents’ April 20, 2016 commentary, comments below the stories in VOSD’s archive, my Dec. 27 blog post and my emails to Marx, and still find VOSD’s reporting faultless. Either Lewis didn’t look, he’s blind to his publication’s faults, or VOSD intentionally misrepresented the facts about Encinitas housing issues. For good measure, I referred Lewis to the Encinitas Undercover blog, which has called out VOSD three times for bad reporting on Encinitas issues.

All this is water under the bridge now. Yet, as late as Feb. 20, 2019, Marx wrote: “Encinitas is one of 47 municipalities . . . that has failed to submit a plan to the state identifying sites for housing production of all income levels.” The city had submitted the HEU to the state on Dec. 21, 2018.

Until VOSD’s refusal to correct their faulty reporting on Encinitas housing issues, I had given them the benefit of the doubt. They had done what appeared to be accurate reporting on too many other subjects to conclude they were intentionally falsifying their Encinitas reporting. A few other locals accused VOSD of being pro-development and pro-BIA (Building Industry Association of San Diego County).

According to their website, VOSD is “funded by individual members, major charitable gifts, foundations and community partnerships.” I find no institutional connection with the BIA on the site. I don’t know if VOSD’s board members or individual supporters are linked to the BIA.

On Feb 14, 2019, the BIA hosted a breakfast meeting at the La Jolla Marriott hotel. Here are the details:

“Community Relations: It Can Make or Break Project Approval
Learn the Builder’s Strategy & How You Can Help
Today, the NIMBYs have a very loud voice and are halting projects around the county. Learn from a panel of experts to see what builders/developers are doing to get projects approved and how our industry must help.”

There were four speakers on the “panel of experts.” One was VOSD Staff Writer Lisa Halverstadt.

Credibility for any news outlet depends on objective, accurate reporting. If an outlet’s faulty reporting on one issue goes uncorrected, its coverage of every other issue becomes questionable.

For well-informed, accurate reporting on Encinitas housing issues, see Barbara Henry’s stories in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

— Doug Fiske