When KNX News reporter Pete Demetriou arrived at the meeting for the Boyle Heights warehouse cleanup efforts on Thursday night, he was told by TV crew members they weren’t being allowed inside the meeting.
“They said, apparently, the decision had been made by the mayor's office that the media was not going to be allowed to come inside, partly for the reason that this was a virtual meeting,” Demetriou told KNX News’ Alex Silverman. “And I said, ‘Excuse me, on whose order? This is a public meeting. This is in a public place. It's taxpayer-funded, and there's something seriously, you know, that is important to the community here and deserves to be covered.”
He said that while no public officials were there at the meeting, their staff members were, and at one point, Demetriou said things got a little confrontational with one of the Bass staffers.
“He said, well, you can't bring your cameras or you can't bring anything else,” Demetriou recalled. “And I said, ‘We can bring anything we'd like in here. I said, ‘You get the mayor's staff and the communications staff here and talk with us about it, but I got news for you. We're coming in; I'm coming in with, you know, I'll bring the television people with me too, but we deserve to report and to cover this thing in the way we traditionally do these types of meetings.’”
The meeting, Demetriou said, had 50 chairs available and 70 people in the room.
“They were all watching a big screen with a big computer display on there that, you know, like a Zoom call,” he said.
He said he believes that was the case given the tensions that rose during the community meeting held last month regarding the warehouse fire. Protestors delayed the meeting by 20 minutes, and residents booed Mayor Karen Bass and other political leaders. They also booed and shouted at Lineage Chief Operating Officer Jeff Rivera.
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