Meanwhile, the piece uncritically accepted the assertion of some anonymous politico that members of Congress from California spend "70 to 80% of their time on hard-core governing." Sure.
I've covered Villaraigosa and know he can be an unctuous glad-hander. Yes, he's an ambitious climber.
But he deserved better than the Edward Scissorhands, slice-and-dice analysis. And he's not the only one who has been penalized by the Weekly's thumb-on-the-scale approach.
It came as no surprise last month that the paper wanted to do a reality check on Police Chief William J. Bratton's claim that crime rates in the city were comparable to what they were in 1956.
But instead of merely parsing, per capita, which crimes had gotten worse, the Weekly determined to prove that something much more nefarious was at work.
The resulting story was so over the top that one of the Weekly's own veteran writers, Celeste Fremon, wrote a sharp rebuttal on her Witness LA blog.
Fremon, no pal of the LAPD in much of her own coverage, slammed the Weekly story for suggesting, without hard evidence, that department officials intentionally cooked the crime statistics.
"There was innuendo aplenty," Fremon wrote. "But facts? Even circumstantial, ominously suggestive, tangential facts. . . ? None."
Such attitudes even creep into the Weekly's seemingly more innocuous work.
In a news story last month on the closure of newsstands, the tabloid seemed to embrace the theory of one stand owner that "smart growth" planning -- which allows high-density development along transit corridors -- was the principal cause of his family business' demise.
Stewart deserves some credit for exploring the idea in her writing that the planning theory is really a Trojan horse that allows excess urban development.
But does the paper she edits have to be so credulous of the opposite claim, that "smart growth" is the key component in killing off a family newsstand? Next we'll be reading that all those close-packed apartments are promoting teen pregnancy.
I don't see the Weekly regaining its equilibrium as long as Stewart remains in charge of the news section. It's likely that a new top editor will be brought in from outside.
But no one I talked to expects the bombastic Ms. Stewart to be going anywhere any time soon.
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james.rainey@latimes.com
