If the little notes the Sun has received are any indication of how people are feeling about the upcoming election, then Santa Maria is apprehensive, to say the least.
And, no surprises here, Etta Waterfield, who is seeing her way out of her Santa Maria City Council seat, is a favorite target of these, umm, feelings.
“Waterfield is a wily fox,” one person told me. I don’t know that I’d give her that much credit. A “wily fox” is mischievous and intelligent. Angsty Dems, amirite?
Waterfield got on their last nerve (and mine, too, which you would know if you’re a fan of this particular column). Their next target? Maribel Aguilera-Hernandez, whose name I accidentally misspelled last week. I apologize!
They’ve accused this little paper of siding with Waterfield and her ilk!
I’m offended.
I pointed out some less than flattering things about the person running against Aguilera-Hernandez, Carol Karamitsos, so obviously, I’m on the conservatives’ side! Have any of these people ever read my column before?
These people asked me via email whether I knew about Waterfield appointing Aguilera-Hernandez to the Santa Maria Planning Commission. Yes. But thanks for the hot tip.
I believe that people are individuals who can speak for themselves. If you really want to know about the candidates, go back and watch them vote on issues before the Santa Maria Planning Commission and the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District.
Also, did I know that Aguilera-Hernandez is a lawyer who has worked on cases for various oil companies, which obviously means that her stances on the city’s issues are less than genuine? Hmm. I wasn’t aware that being keen to help fix homelessness and being a petroleum industry attorney were mutually exclusive. I’m pretty sure you can be both of those things at the same time.
I do get the aversion to Big Oil. It makes you feel a little dirty, amirite?
What I don’t understand is why putting a candidate’s name first in the paper shows bias. Yes. One person was very upset with the paper about its consistency in using Aguilera-Hernandez’s name first in its story and headlines, which obviously showed that we are biased against Karamitsos—and not that we are consistent!
“And the quotes you chose for Maribel are just a bit more favorable than the ones you choose [sic] for Carol,” this woman wrote.
Um, we don’t make the quotes up. The people we interview speak for themselves, and we’re stuck with what they say. We ask questions, they give us answers, and we put the most usable, cohesive, understandable quotes in the paper.
We’re also stuck with the choices that the people we reach out to make, such as City Council candidates and opponents Gloria Soto and Steve Funkhouser, who didn’t respond to our interview requests. So we didn’t write about them. Bias!
If you read this column at all, you would have noticed that just a couple of weeks ago, I pointed out the questionable content of something Maribel said at a forum that Carol didn’t attend.
You know why? Because the only thing I’m biased about is calling out people who say questionable things and do questionable things.
This accusatory woman said she seriously questions the integrity of the Sun.
Hmm. Questionable.
The Canary is biased against angry accusations. Send more of them to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 3, 2022.
