How Fernando Guerra and StudyLA Launder Garcetti’s Narratives at LMU
In late October, Loyola Marymount University hosted a fireside chat between Fernando Guerra, director of LMU’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles (StudyLA), and LA’s occasional mayor Eric Garcetti for an hour of trite banter on LA’s past, present, and future. At first glance, this looks like business as usual. Garcetti is no stranger to the circuit of fluffy luncheons and cheesy corporate thought leader conferences.
But if you dig beneath the layers of Garcettese, it appears there’s a lot more going on between Garcetti, Guerra’s StudyLA project, and local media outlets like KPCC. In a local media ecosystem with little competition and few critical voices, institutions like KPCC, StudyLA and LMU more broadly function as laundromats for political power, where narratives can be “respectfully” manufactured in return for access to power. Whether it’s an astroturfed Olympic bid or an astroturfed (and eventually aborted) Garcetti presidential bid, feedback loops of influence exist: PR sells better as “objective journalism” when no one can call out your lies.
StudyLA opened in 1996. LA was still recovering from the ‘94 Northridge earthquake and ‘92 Uprising. Bradley had stepped down. Peter Ueberroth, Republican “hero” of the ‘84 Olympics had given up on the Rebuild L.A. project. Garcetti was several years deep into a degree at Oxford. Tenured professor and self-described “urban crusader” Fernando Guerra, like much of the political elite, saw this rebuilding period as an opportunity to retool and reimagine the city as the new millennium approached.
In the two decades since, Guerra has used StudyLA to attract political power both to LMU and to himself. Reviews on his Rate My Professor profile attest to what we’ve witnessed as well: this is a guy who, like Garcetti, absolutely loves to be surrounded by local power brokers. Guerra is also a registered lobbyist at City Hall, where he has worked for the likes of Sandstone Properties, a property management company that has a very specific vested Olympic interests. The first is a partnership with Uber to introduce flying taxis to LA in time for LA2028.
Sandstone also has multiple hotel development projects in the immediate area around Staples and L.A. Live, the epicenter of LA2028 plans. On Sandstone’s behalf, Guerra (with De Aztlan Group) lobbied City Council, the CLA, and Convention and Tourism Development for Sandstone in Q2 of 2017, which is right before the 2028 deal was rubber stamped.
If you look at LMU’s Development Council, you’ll recognize a lot of power brokers familiar to followers of NOlympics LA or social justice in LA. As recently as 2014, Steve Soboroff, co-braintrust behind the STAPLES Center and the subsequent gentrification of South Park and current Head of the Police Commission, was on the council. Soboroff is also an Olympics booster (and former failed mayoral candidate), though we did catch him echoing our concerns about police militarization on an email thread with Michel Moore where they acknowledged that the 2028 Olympics will necessarily increase police militarization.
LMU’s Development Council also includes Renata Simril, CEO of the LA84 Foundation and another LMU alum. Simril is one of the most outspoken local Olympics mega-boosters and corporate partner with the Blackstone Group. Her motives along with those of the LA84 Foundation seem suspect at best.
In 2016, StudyLA ran a widely-cited poll claiming that 88% of Angelenos support another Olympic bid. At the time, LA was bidding for the 2024 Olympics. These are clearly dictator numbers and read that way to anyone with any experience analyzing political polling. 88% is the specific margin that the authoritarian leader of Uzbekistan won by in 2015. By comparison, a poll from that same year showed a 66% disapproval rating for Trump among Californians. The questions posed in the StudyLA polls were inherently biased with a forced choice (lack of “neutral” response) skewing to the boosters’ whims. This is the sneaky stuff that most sports and Olympics journalists or city beat reporters (and certainly the public at large) are not adequately prepared to catch. The local, national, and international press was happy to repeat this as bulletproof fact that there is unheard of support in LA.
Later, after we had been organizing for a few months and it was clear LA’s political elite were going to settle for the 2028 bid (in exchange for eschewing a second bidding process entirely), Guerra and StudyLA ran a second poll claiming 83% of Angelenos support LA2028.
Guerra has openly explained how he believes polling can affect public behavior. “What’s important about public opinion is that opinions lead to behavior, and behavior leads to certain opinions,” Guerra told The Argonaut in 2018, describing how his nasty feedback loop of influence and bias works: StudyLA’s goal is to influence public opinion, and, by Guerra’s admission, their polls will in turn influence public behavior.
Baked into these fundamentally poor practices are this notion that LA is an abnormally positive place (despite all our social ills), a myth Guerra is keen on perpetuating and propagating.
In a 2017 interview with LMU, Guerra laid out his theory as to why he believes Angelenos are so optimistic:
I think part of it is that we tend to fail to understand that things are actually pretty good in our neighborhoods. That, while Los Angeles has a lot of issues, crime is down. People talk about racial strife, but in most places it’s not an issue. People talk about the schools not being that good, but when you ask people who have children in the schools, they’re OK with it. So, you know you have this narrative about Los Angeles, and that’s not unique to Los Angeles, but you have this narrative by the civic elites or people pushing certain policies to get resources or to get attention you’ve got to say there’s a problem. But the narrative of the average person is very different and I think that’s the explanation. When you talk to people instead of elites, you get a different narrative. Now, I’m not trying to be anti-elites because I think leadership matters, I think elites are important and their opinion is very important, but elite opinion and public opinion are different.” [emphasis added]
The problem here, of course, is that LMU, an elitist institution working on behalf of well-endowed oligarchs, is consciously trying to define what public opinion is.
This isn’t tinfoil conspiracy theory stuff here. The forces and figures at LMU are very happy to showcase who they’re working for. LMU’s president is even an unapologetic Olympic booster.
Here’s Timothy Snyder, president of LMU, openly “rooting for” LA hosting another sock puppet Olympics, as had Guerra, and everyone at City Hall.
And here’s Guerra kicking off a panel in 2016, eschewing any pretense of objectivity and blatantly expressing his interest and enthusiasm in securing the 2024 bid:
Today we’re going to be talking about the Olympics, and the possibility of Los Angeles hosting the Olympics for the third time in 2024. To have this discussion, we have three very knowledgeable individuals [to talk] about what is going on, what our chances are, the advantages of Los Angeles, and why we’re gonna get the Olympics in 2024. [emphasis added]
What makes this ecosystem of casual corruption even more effective is the local news media’s cooperation and full compliance. The current owner of the LA Times is business partners with the IOC as well as many of the power brokers comprising the LA sports industrial complex, like its media partner LA84 Foundation. Curbed LA is owned by Vox, where LA2028 business guy and friend of Jeffrey Epstein Casey Wasserman is on the board. None of these news outlets conducted their own polling, like how you commonly see in cities where resistance efforts to bids are successful, like Boston, Calgary, Denver, and other cities with a healthier fourth estate and body politic more broadly. Boston’s WBUR ran monthly polling on public support for the Boston 2024 bid every month during the process, and for a year after the bid was killed.
No media polling exists in LA in this bid’s five year history.
Until recently, Guerra sat on the board at KPCC, one of the few public news outlets in LA’s media desert. KPCC covered the LA 2024 and LA 2028 bids as well as our mayor’s dismal tenure with rose-tinted glasses whenever possible and acted as another Olympic booster during the bid process. Just take a look at “LA loves the Olympics, even though they’re 11 years away” from September 2017, where you’ll find no mention of the fact that Guerra was a KPCC board member at the time. They also notably decided to interview an activist with No Boston instead of NOlympics LA organizers who live and organize in LA.
One of KPCC’s producers even apologized to us in 2017 after the Olympic bid was rubber stamped, promising on some version of “being better” in the future, another in a never-ending chain of hollow promises from LA establishment institutions that has yet to materialize over two years later.
Beyond the friendly, uncritical coverage by KPCC and other outlets, there are many other examples of KPCC failing to disclose its relationship to Guerra while reporting on the polling his institute was doing to help bolster LA’s global profile. We raised this with the head of Communications at KPCC, who insisted the non-disclosure was an honest mistake. To date, it hasn’t been corrected in pieces like this.
Neither KPCC nor LMU have much integrity to vouch for, even though both of their industries rely on their institutional integrity as currency. Their combined purview is clearly to uphold the politicians and politics of the status quo, which means getting each other’s backs when pesky people like us come asking them difficult questions. There are good journalists at KPCC and elsewhere, but the overall output of these outlets does more harm than good by protecting moneyed interests.
We felt both StudyLA’s tilted Olympic polls, juiced by a compliant press, were conducted with a clear bias for positive outcomes and were inconclusive regardless. So we didn’t just complain about them (who would listen, anyway?) – we ran our own.
One year ago, we published the results of our largest survey measuring what (if anything) Angelenos and Californians knew about negative risks of hosting another Olympiad would be. Here’s what we found:
In addition to the fact that people overwhelmingly and easily reject the notion of an Olympics when presented with any of the potential risks, we also learned that most people lack basic information and have extremely limited awareness of LA’s olympic bid. “Only 1% of respondents said that they had been following LA’s Olympic bid very closely, whereas over half (54%) were not following closely at all.”
This is one of the first questions we asked, before sharing any information about negative impacts. Our survey results map to our on-the-ground experience and casts even further doubt on the 88% figure. For example, how could so many people be in support of something that most people don’t even know is happening?
Our own survey’s open responses showed that people independently and intuitively recognized that the Olympics have positive outcomes for the wealthy and negative outcomes for everyone else. Even most respondents that listed (mythical) positive outcomes of the 2028 games noted that they would be short-lived and unequally distributed.
Shortly after we released our survey results and the press picked up on them, I interviewed Fernando Guerra. He gave me a lot of telling information, namely that he wasn’t a fan of our poll (“that survey would probably get a D- in my methodology course”) because it ran counter to the narrative he’s invested a significant amount of time in helping construct.
Guerra told me about his polls supporting a Garcetti presidential run, which, a year later, has already become a punchline, even to Garcetti’s centrist base as well as those on the right and left who despise him. Most importantly though, Guerra admitted that we needed more polling on whether anyone in LA actually wants the Olympics.
NOlympicsLA: So do you think there should be more polling on the Olympics?
Guerra: Yeah, but who’s gonna pay for it!?
He explained that more polling won’t be done because polls are too expensive. The interview paints a telling picture of a power broker who is not used to open criticism (in part because journalists don’t ask them difficult questions) getting caught off guard. If anything, it paints him for who he really is: someone whose role is to facilitate politicians and business and help arrive at certain political outcomes. You can read our complete interview transcript.
Back to this year’s “Mayor Eric Garcetti on the Future of LA” event, where LMU selectively tweeted only the non-confrontational questions lobbed at the mayor.
Despite the thick cloud of boosterism hanging in Ahmanson Auditorium, several critical questions regarding the Olympics and Garcetti’s feeble tenure snuck through.
One of the critical questions LMU didn’t tweet from their event was from us. One of our members confronted the Mayor and Guerra with the fact that seemingly no one outside of local boosters and media/real estate oligarchs wants the Olympics.
Here’s a transcript of their exchange:
Jodi: Hi I’m Jodi. You’ll have to excuse me – I have a lot of notes.
Eric Garcetti: No problem
Jodi: In early 2016 Study LA ran a poll that said 88% of Angelinos were in favor of bringing the Olympics back to LA and since then there have been all sorts of paradigm shifting events that have happened such as the election of President Trump, your bid for president, the wild fires that are happening – the largest in California history, the biggest earthquake since 1996, and also -going along with the Olympics route- there has been a huge explosion of Olympic dissent all around the world including the first transnational anti-Olympic Summit in Tokyo earlier in July…
Guerra: [interrupting] And the question to the Mayor is?
Jodi: Yeah sorry about that. I’m getting to that.
Guerra: We have a lot of students, so get to the question please.
Jodi: So we are currently in a completely different climate and my question is why and how can Olympic boosters continue to cite this poll with any sort of confidence and how can you use it as justification not to hold a vote to bring the Olympics to…
Guerra: [interrupts] So Mayor, the question is about – well there are people who are against the Olympics…
Eric Garcetti: No question.
Guerra: …and there are issues. Things have changed, you know? Why should we continue on this path?
Eric Garcetti: I don’t think it’s [inaudible] I walk away tomorrow I think we’ve had those folks who are [inaudible] 1984 or something pretty special that transcended everything. And I guess the question back at folks against the Olympics is what is it exactly that they are against? There’s a lot of myths around, you know? We had a terrible police department that was doing some pretty bad things in 1984. It wasn’t because of the Olympics. They were doing it way before. After, we had to go through Rodney King to reform that. But during the Olympics it was a time where we came together where the world believed that they belonged. I think we need these spaces and places. The Olympics and the history of the Olympics comes from Greece when people were at war with each other. And we can continue to fracture even more, but that was a moment when sports became a truce. And I’m not against sports. I actually love sports. I think it’s a critical part of human culture. I talked to an African competitor who said, “When I marched into my first Olympics it was the first time I saw mighty America and the Soviet Union and everything and I was on equal ground with them. It was about the importance of me being a human being that was equal to everybody else”. The nations of the world could for a moment say North Koreans and South Koreans eating dinner together at a moment that their leaders were at almost open warfare with each other in Rio. It’s the 160 million dollars that I was talking about that we leveraged so that we could use this moment to do things like expand swim classes for black and brown kids in this city. If you’re black you have a 65% chance if you’re 12 not knowing how to swim, which is a life saving thing as well as why are we closing that door? If you’re Latino it’s 45%. So for me it’s just – and I think that the reason it is for Angelinos – I don’t know what the poll would be, that was an outlier that was even higher than the rest, but it’s always at about 70-75%. It’s something that people do look to. They hate corrupt banks. People hate corrupt businesses. People hate corrupt politicians and they hate corrupt moments in any movement whether it’s Olympics or others. But for those athletes who spend their lives for the fans who believe in them, you know? It’s like saying let’s get rid of any sport in this town. I didn’t do that. I think it’s an important part of human existence and there’s no wool over peoples’ eyes. We will make money. I mean [inaudible] coming back we will put that money in a foundation just as we did with LA84 that’s been about racial justice, sports justice, gender justice…
Guerra: So you’re 100%…
Eric Garcetti: I just believe in it, yeah.
Guerra: You’re 100% still committed to it?
Jodi: Are there any plans to do another poll?
Guerra: Next question.
That’s a mountain words from the Mayor saying so very little. This tone of rigid defensiveness is another indicator of what little interest Guerra and Garcetti have in the ongoing feelings and concerns of everyday Angelenos.
Garcetti is much more articulate when he’s on offense, in pitch mode, in a room full of his wealthy friends and allies. Garcetti didn’t say it on this night — likely because it was too public and had too many of us critical peasants in attendance — but he’s been trotting out a pretty telling new catchphrase on the circuit of bullshit thought leader keynotes: “I sell LA for a living.”
He certainly does, and with LMU’s help, the wheels get greased that much easier.