Los Angeles Daily News killed coverage on L.A. Valley College Scandal

Readers of IndyBay, Google News, News Break App and Twitter have been able to read the Valley Academic and Cultural Center's backstory at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys/North Hollywood, shedding new light on the multi-million dollar racketeering scheme. These new revelations were augmented by the recent publication that L.A. Valley College’s website had been hacked (again); a story first reported here and that has not been covered by any other outlets – including LAVC’s own student newspaper The Valley Star News.

L.A. Valley College appears to have only become aware and corrected the hack after it was published – indicating a system of internal failure that was only corrected as a result of the news press putting a spotlight on the situation. In light of recent local media critique about former LAVC President “Erika Endrijonas Beneficiary of Santa Barbara News BlackOut,” it raises the question – with all the documents and information that are now surfacing about LAVC’s Media Arts Department, especially in light of Pinner Construction’s fraud claims, why the Los Angeles Daily News didn’t run a story on it at the time?

The Los Angeles Daily News is the second-largest-circulating daily newspaper in Los Angeles after The Los Angeles Times. But the Daily News has published little to no negative coverage of L.A. Valley College – with perhaps the single exception of an ex-employee’s jury judgement for $2.9 million dollars.

In August 2022 multiple news outlets published about L.A. Valley College’s racketeering scheme against Pinner Construction – including LAVC’s own student newspaper The Valley Star News.

The Los Angeles Daily News however appears to have left its readers completely unaware that the taxpayers and local students were being defrauded by the school.

New emails and messages reveal that Los Angeles Daily News was in talks with LAVC Cinema/Media Arts Students in 2016 and had seen all the documents that have been published so far and killed the story in favor of publishing favorable news coverage about the Valley Academic and Cultural Center’s Approval. The L.A. Daily News had full knowledge that the Media Arts Department was in a state of disarray as documented by multiple public documents and that dozens of students were in limbo.

According to newly surfaced emails between a student and then Los Angeles Daily News reporter Dana Bartholomew discussed developing a story during the Summer of 2016 to be published in Fall 2016.

Student emails to the Los Angeles Daily News brought to their attention that multiple students had filed accreditation complaints and petitions with Los Angeles Valley College – including the email thread of a Dozen LAVC Cinema Student Narratives.

Further at Bartholomew’s suggestion, the student emailing with him began forming a coalition of angry students to protest fraud and mistreatment of students at LAVC. This in turn surfaced information that Student 1 and Student 2 did not have when they filed original charges with the Accreditation Commission and brought complaints to the LACCD Board of Trustees.

At a meeting between two students around July 9/10 2016, yet another student shared another negative experience using the Media Arts labs during the 2016 Spring semester. This student alleged that the Media Arts Instructional Assistant (mentioned in Student 1’s accreditation complaint) had permitted a vagrant to enter the labs, access a school computer to watch pornography and close the door with the female student alone in the room. The student also alleged that this was the basis for a screaming match witnessed by multiple other students between Eric Swelstad, Arantzanzu aka Arantxa Rodriguez, Laurie Nalepa and the instructional assistant James Highley aka Philip.

Whether this incident occurred as described or not is unknown and the student who made the allegation two years later appeared in an online advertisement for the LAVC Media Arts Department.

What is known is that at least one email from two other students to Media Arts Faculty member Chad Sustin reference the confrontation between Swelstad, Nalepa and Highley and that it was witnessed by several students. The email is also dated a couple months prior during the Spring 2016 semester.

The information in this accusation was further brought to the attention of several elected officials by the student it was told too – including NoHo Neighborhood Council Representative Jo Ann Rivas, LACCD Board of Trustees President Scott Svonkin , and

Another issue raised during summer 2016 came in the form of an email to California Community College Vice-Chancellor Van Ton-Quinlivan, documenting that LAVC had defrauded the state of a multi-million dollar grant. The whistleblower report was deemed credible enough that Van Ton-Quinlivan personally responded to the email. This was in turn forwarded again to the Los Angeles Daily News.

But none of this information – the accreditation complaints, the dozen student narratives, the multiple student petitions,the questionable academic credit/fake degrees, exploitation of low-income students socioeconomic status to secure lucrative grants despite the benefits of them not being passed on too those students, the Me Too allegations, or the indifference of public officials, ended up being published in the Los Angeles Daily News.

What was published by the Los Angeles Daily News ended up being two sympathetic pieces about LAVC’s push for the Valley Academic and Cultural Center. They also included quotes from Media Arts Department Chair Eric Swelstad that the Los Angeles Daily News had seen the same documentation that readers have now, that Swelstad was lying about the education being provided.

A twenty-million-dollar racketeering scheme did not just happen overnight at Los Angeles Valley College. Neither did fraud against low-income students. It happened with the cooperation of the LAVC Citizen’s Building Oversight Committee, NoHo Neighborhood Council Reps, the LACCD Board of Trustees and last but not least the Los Angeles Daily News.

It is worth noting that a year-and-a-half later, the State of California declined to renew the Deputy Sector Navigator Grant to Los Angeles Valley College.