Part 161: A Substack “Hero” Post – Independent Journalism in Los Angeles

Published March 20, 2025. Updated March 21, 2025.

Mar 21, 2025

Former Los Angeles City Councilmember Kevin de León speaks with vulgar gadflies on December 3, 2024 only days before his exit by author (GoPro Hero 11 Black).

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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

The Substack “Hero” post is supposed to be the one that introduces a publication to its reader. Different writers on this platform have described how such a post might be the most important thing you’ll put online, at least on Substack, if not on other social media platforms, and Substack encourages you to do that as well. “Short and sweet” advises one Substack author, noting that it should help an author go from “zero to hero.” Putting out the welcome mat for good is certainly something I’ve abstained from, at least for now, and something I’m still not sure I’m going to fully do, given that quite often I like to have my news top-line most visible; after all, what’s the point in breaking a story if you’re not going to stick with it? And I like to think I’m always breaking news.

So here it goes: I’m Zachary Ellison, an independent journalist from Los Angeles and, worse, an investigative journalist, which means that I’m going to be investigating every single person that I contact. The fear of journalism, much less truly independent journalism—not just unedited but uncontrolled by an ownership beyond the author and not subject to the influence of such ownership in determining what stories get run—is more commonplace than some would like to admit. It’s not so much that a given pitch isn’t accepted, as much as it’s that highly pertinent information that just might change the public view isn’t given the time of day. In Los Angeles this is getting deeply problematic; for starters, our paper of record, the Los Angeles Times, which has cast itself as a product of independent journalism, is now literally using artificial intelligence (AI).This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

On March 3, the owner of the Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, rolled out a new gimmick “to better engage with our audience,” and it wasn’t a hero post. Rather, the Times new AI tool is focused on not only pigeonholing but also counter-arguing its own authors, and needless to say, this doesn’t really pass the smell test. For starters, anyone can Google, and what was once an arduous fact-checking process can now be accomplished in a matter of minutes. Presenting a label and counterargument on top of flagging half its homepage with “Voices” isn’t exactly the type of transformation the Times needed to save itself from a budget crisis that has resulted in droves of layoffs and buyouts. The bigger problem isn’t so much partisanship as it is that no one believes half of what they read in the major news outlets anymore, and it’s more than Donald Trump who has effectuated this dynamic, or even a single side of the American political debate.

Also debuting is the LA Times Studio, which is supposed to run from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, presenting “video-streaming content daily with news, features, and other programming of interest to our community.” The Times even promises to take you places, with “continuous live camera feeds from iconic locations in Los Angeles, from Hollywood to Malibu.” If Substack is increasingly struggling to be Substack rather than a platform that seeks to pry away users from other platforms such as TikTok and YouTube (see the Substack Creator Accelerator Fund). Then the Los Angeles Times is having a full-blown identity crisis, and it didn’t start very well, with Times columnist Gustavo Arellano causing the internet to blow up with a single post for all the wrong reasons (Did you know AI might not be so smart?) and creating a media debacle.

The February 25 column by Arellano focused on the Ku Klux Klan and its history in Orange County, which, being to the south of Los Angeles, is like a not so distant cousin whom you occasionally want to see. Just a century ago, the KKK came onto America not like today’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, with Arellano writing, “Today, the powers that be bray ‘MAGA’ and dare people to oppose their pretend patriotism.” Soon-Shiong’s vaunted Perplexity AI appropriately contextualized this by noting that many people downplay the pernicious nature of the KKK in a since-removed posting following media outcry. As he described in his follow-up column on the matter on March 7, “Either way, friends began texting me stories from local and national outlets within hours of my column’s appearing online claiming the AI tool used by The Times outright endorsed the KKK.” Arellano had predicted that such a tool couldn’t withstand his journalism, and needless to say, a lot of fun was had poking at something not quite really true.

To be fair, as profiled in the L.A. Taco on February 10 by journalist Hadley Tomicki, it’s much more true that Soon-Shiong has had “a streak of startling moves and ongoing public expressions that appear to align with, or outright boost, prominent voices with the Trump Administration and MAGA movement.” After going over the record, Tomicki asked a simple question: “What is this noted surgeon, Brentwood compound owner, and multi-billionaire trying to accomplish here?” The answer seems to be something akin to an anti-hero, because there are few signs these content changes are hardly going to pull the Times out of a nosedive. Soon-Shiong has openly flirted with new Trump administration Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as being the healthiest thing to happen in America since we discovered taking vitamins. Who said covering politics, investigations, and media in LA was pointless? One thing’s for sure, this isn’t going to end well over at the Times anytime soon.

It’s one thing for a news publication to lose the support of its own journalists with a few faithful diehards refusing to be fired, resign, or take a buyout; it’s another for it to publish pure nonsense. The L.A. Taco’s timeline of the Times’s decline encompassed a year, but I would argue that the Times has been in a severe news-quality decline for much longer, going back to October 2022 when Los Angeles had its biggest political scandal ever. So big that even the vaunted Los Angeles Police Department’s recruiting department is still talking about what they heard on the LA Fed Tapes, the craziest scandal the national news stopped covering. As reported by the Times duo of Richard Winton and Libor Jany, not only was the LAPD recruiting office secretly racist (surprise!), but they too were talking about the October Surprise of the 21st century.

In recordings provided by a whistleblower (and we love whistleblowers!), more noxious remarks were made, but not only that: Winton and Jany went to a subsequent source who described what was heard as “worse than what Nury Martinez and the council members said,” with Winton and Jany then summarizing how the LAPD investigated a married couple of former employees at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO (LA Fed). The Los Angeles Times won Pulitzer Prizes for covering the explosive scandal, which featured two illegally recorded conversations between former City Council President Martinez, former Councilmembers Kevin de León (KDL) and Gil Cedillo, and the former president of the powerful labor union, Ron Herrera. The last figure featured in a second recording that included a Democratic political consultant, Hannah Cho, and a former Chief of Staff Justin Wesson, who also happened to be the son of former City Council President Herb Wesson. It was truly the scandal of a lifetime.

Yet no one has ever gotten to the bottom of who made those recordings, much less who was the final person leaking them on Reddit under the username “Honest-Finding-1581.” The biggest political secret of 21st-century Los Angeles remains a news secret, even in the pages of the most powerful publication in America’s second-largest city. Both Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo have filed lawsuits over the leak against the couple, with both vehemently denying responsibility. In the accompanying treatise, the leaker writes, “- If Rick Caruso wins the Mayor's race, he will clean house at City Hall, including making sure Nury Martinez is out.” Adding politely, “That would put [Justin] Wesson out of a job. So, the LA Fed is putting all it's money in Karen Bass's campaign [sic].” This Substack started as an attempt to expose the political machinations behind this calculated leak, my own whistleblower story, but suffice to say, the droids that so many were looking for weren’t there. So many were sure it must have been an inside job that they didn’t even bother to analyze the recording, much less the accompanying note, to “connect the dots.”

The Times coverage, much like its experiment with AI or Substack’s attempt to ply itself as the next social media saving platform, is likely doomed to fail. If the Los Angeles Times was supposed to be the Washington Post on the Watergate of Los Angeles, it hasn’t gotten there, nor are there many signs that even basic reporting steps like providing some in-depth coverage of the civil lawsuits or the technological issues behind the leak, such as the spoofing of internet protocol addresses, have fallen by the wayside. Is Zachary Ellison, Substack whistleblower journalist, wrong, or is this scandal just too right? This week Rick Caruso declined to endorse a recall effort against Karen Bass while still refusing to confirm if he’s going to run for mayor again in 2028, much less governor of California two years sooner in 2026. Caruso wrote firmly on X, “This is a time when Los Angeles needs unity, not costly and expensive political distractions.”

Rick Caruso also quoted in rebuttal RFK Jr.’s former running mate for President, Nicole Shanahan, whose wealth derives from her husband, a co-founder of Google, wrote about the proposed recall: “It would run into June’s primary and cost the city millions we don't have.” Caruso, like Soon-Shiong is also a billionaire and quite fond of Brentwood, and the two at least seem to know each other, even if Caruso split from Trump unlike Soon-Shiong, who's been running headfirst toward him like a speeding sportscar on Sunset Boulevard. Ironically, this isn’t the only awkward pairing, and the Times hasn’t shied away from going after the attorney for KDL, Mark Geragos, whose firm now also represents Cedillo, with Matt Hamilton recently reporting that Geragos is being sued over his management of a jewelry company. Geragos, who worked with Cedillo’s former attorney, Brian Kabateck, in March 2023, sued the Times for libel over its reporting about his management of a sizable settlement (which he lost). Kabateck has denied wrongdoing in suing the accused leakers of the LA Fed Tapes for the leak. Geragos hasn’t responded to requests for comment.

The cost of responding to the LA Fed Tapes scandal has been more than reputational. For starters, in addition to drawing hundreds if not thousands of angry people to City Hall, it’s forced a crisis of governance. When some backdoor conversations and not others become public, and that happens right before an election, and then the finger-pointing happens, you’ve really got to wonder exactly what’s going on. My explanation from the start has been consistent: I attempted to report suspicions about what was about to take place on August 26, 2022, before any recordings were posted on Reddit, and the individual I fingered, former Caruso employee Sam Garrison, appears in the transcript on the tip of KDL’s forked tongue in a comedically conspicuous way. Attorneys for the two accused leakers have denied having any motivation to harm the LA Fed, much less influence the outcome of an election potentially or settle any scores with Nury Martinez. The transcript published by the LA Times reads: “When the L.A. Times gets a bug up their ass, you know, they just like… So I talked to Sam Garrison the other day, who is the GR [government representative], he reports directly to Carol Folt.” Folt seems set to leave USC this summer, but Garrison, who served as Caruso’s Chief of Staff at USC is likely to remain.

So are the two LA Fed employees just playing possum, or is there something else going on here? As noted by popular independent journalist James Li in his recent TikTok discussion of the wildfires and their political aftermath, referencing another section of the recording where Nury Martinez discusses the Sepulveda Basin and how it always catches fire, “Now I don’t want to get into conspiracy theories.” Yet conspiracy theories have run rampant from the start about the source of the LA Fed Theory, fueled in no small part by Los Angeles Magazine, co-owned by Mark Geragos.

It’s no secret that much of the upper class of Los Angeles aligned itself behind Rick Caruso’s $100 million-plus run for mayor in 2022, and it’s worth remembering that KDL came in third behind Bass and Caruso, but what is going on here? De León lost his re-election campaign despite an audio leak against his opponent, Ysabel Jurado, and from the LA Fed transcript, it’s beyond clear KDL knows his way around political scandals, but what’s he really supposed to do when it happens to him? Legal muscle and political muscle go hand in hand.

I never set out to be a hero, but this just might be my hero post! Whistleblowing isn’t something so much that you seek out as it’s something that happens to you, and either you deal with it, or you spend the rest of your life running away from the truth. Circling back to where we started, it’s worth remembering, as Gustavo Arellano describes, that the thing the KKK disliked the most was when “A whistleblower obtained the membership rolls of the Orange County KKK and passed them around town.” It wasn’t so much the act as what it showed: “The rolls revealed that nine out of 10 members of the Anaheim police department belonged to the Klan, along with the four councilmembers.” Last October, after both the District Attorney’s office and City Attorney’s office declined to file charges against the two accused LA Fed Tapes leakers, the Times journalists wrote, “While civil suits by two of the participants in the conversation are pending, the latest development greatly reduces the chances of a trial that would unearth definitive answers about how and why the scandal was set into motion.” I couldn’t disagree more; it could happen.

While the LA Fed Tapes might be political gold, ultimately, I think they were intended not so much as an act of whistleblowing as they were race-baiting to win an election. Such actions are sadly nothing new in America, and they go back to a time when the KKK sought to not just terrorize African-Americans but to be a legitimate political movement. Their rise and fall in Orange County is worth understanding, and it’s a cautionary tale against presuming that racially-based grievances aren’t driving public perception in a way that builds consensus. It’s 100% the role of independent investigative journalism to guard against acts of perfidy by exposing the full truth, and doing so isn’t the least bit libelous, or dare I say, controversial.

To view the majority of case files from the LA Fed Tapes civil case:

Link: Kevin de León vs. Santos Leon and Karla Vasquez.pdf (Case No. 23STCV24461)

Link: Gil Cedillo vs. Santos Leon, Karla Vasquez, and LA Fed.pdf (Case No. 23STCV24442)

First published October: Part 118: Publishing the LA Fed Papers – Trial and Error Justice in the Digital Age