Western water reporter recounts being ripped off

A nasty little irony: A first-rate Western writer about water, Emily Green, recounts how her massive five-part newspaper series on a Las Vegas water grab was scooped up and rewritten into a book by a another writer. In other words, her work on a rip-off was in turn ripped off (and she has the quotes to prove it). 

How 21st century. Who has time to research and report? Cut and Paste and Run. 

But it was partly her fault, she admits. She cared way too much about the issue: 

I thought satisfying the Sun commission for a character-driven five-part, big-read treatment of the Vegas pipeline story required knowing the whole story, which meant months and months of work. I took so long to research and write the series that the managing editor refused to pay the bill when he saw it in late December 2007. When I moved to take the reporting elsewhere, the paper threatened to sue me. Before our lawyers parted four months later, the Sun printed an editorial saying the paper had thoroughly researched the subject and the pipeline would not harm ranchers. Knowing that its editor was sitting on evidence to the contrary, I began compulsively watching Law & Order. It didn’t matter that it was fictional. Like so many Americans, I needed a more just world than the one I actually inhabit. 

She goes on to compare the "media meltdown" that devastated her old paper the Sun, as well as of course the Los Angeles Times, to global warming. Its effects are equally broad and unpredictable. 

Here in Los Angeles, the situation is also grave. To use an example from my beat, Nevada didn’t invent the modern American water grab. California did, with the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times an essential tool. Few dispute that David Halberstam was right in arguing that after 1960, Otis Chandler transformed the Times from a Chinatown-era bully pulpit into a great American newspaper. Had Halberstam lived, who knows what the author of The Powers That Be would have made of the paper’s last decade under the ownership of the Tribune Co.? A decade ago, a sordid scheme to sap an aquifer in San Bernardino County near the Mojave National Preserve was beaten back, in large part because of reporting by a once-formidable environment desk at the Times. Today, while the backer of the same plan consorts openly with the mayor of Los Angeles and former Governor Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, the project is progressing through what passes for government review. The Times, prostrate on a bankruptcy court’s operating table, is no longer dogging the story.

This is the notorious Cadiz project. Green is a little modest; the Times may not be dogging the project, but Green certainly is a thorn in its side in that paper and on her blog (on its site) Chance of Rain.

[Here's a link to the impressive new-born Los Angeles Review of Books, where the "Cut and Paste and Run" piece ran, and a photo from it as well, on the virtual cover of the LARB]