 
|
 |
|
The media column by R. J. Smith in the September issue of Los Angeles visits with L.A. Times editor John Carroll and takes a read on the fallout from his May 22 memo chiding the paper for occasional liberal bias. The column is not yet online (though you can read the memo here, along with my original post and some of the reaction here and here, as it was L.A. Observed that first reported on its existence.) Smith finds that Carroll had an unintended run as a national conservative hero.
"I do think that we, like every paper, slip every now and then in trying to play things down the middle," Carroll says. "And the slips more often than not are to the liberal side. You seldom see a story in which there's something you might consider a flagrant bias on the conservative side.
"I also think that a paper that's situated in a place that has a particular political predisposition -- and Los Angeles tends to be to the liberal side of American politics -- has an obligation to present to its readers a broader world. As a reader of a newspaper I would be offended if my paper only played back my own biases and my own politics."
Carroll subsequently apologized to the staff writer who was singled out in the memo, but Smith finds that the missive itself has had little lasting resonance in the newsroom. One editor says, comparing it to Carroll's later directive on grammar, "I think the verb memo has inspired far more fear and loathing in this building."
The liberal bias memo's effect on L.A. Observed, however, was enduring -- as David Shaw covers in his Sunday LAT "Media Matters" column (link here when it goes online), which is all about me and the blog. The memo coverage got picked up everywhere and put L.A. Observed on the blogging map. I tossed out an outdated stat when Shaw and I spoke a couple of weeks ago, so just to update, this week the average traffic was more than 5,000 hits and 1,700 unique visitors a day. It falls way off on weekends, so if you are reading this -- go outside.
Shaw proclaims me to be neither ideologue nor egomaniac, and not noticeably partisan or terribly passionate. I might argue the last point, and others would surely argue them all, but I can't complain about the story. I'd just add there are tons of great blog writers in L.A., with more traffic and more to say than I do. Some of them are listed on the right side. Give 'em a read if you don't already.
"so if you are reading this -- go outside."
Touche!
We love you... please don't mind the flamers and trolls!
Posted by: eggplant at August 24, 2003 01:38 AMThe first blog? Doncha mean the worst blog? Some say so http://cathyseipp.journalspace.com/?entryid=103&h=shea
Posted by: HackLondon at August 24, 2003 12:16 PMOOh, that was mean! I hadn't heard Cathy Snipe's complaint until now. She took umbrage at the statement, "I feel very much that I am a Jew, for I have been traumatized by the Holocaust, educated by Jewish writers and poets, inculcated in the secular culture of modern urban Judaism..." She suggests I go inculcate myself elsewhere.
I'm proud of all that I have learned from Jews,
and I'm sorry that she rejects me because I feel that my education has helped make me "Jewish" in a secular sense. Perhaps she is less traumatized
by the Holocaust and its survivors than I have been, doesn't know the great Jewish writers and poets from Norman Mailer to Alan Ginsberg that I knew as a writer for the Village Voice and a staffer at Esquire, and has never lived in the kind of stew that New York City is. I'm sorry she felt the need to diminish me, but that is the position many take and they are entitled to it. But I wonder where she was the day I faced two years in Federal prison and a $200,000 fine in my successful fight to have the CDA overturned in Federal court? Where was she when
I pointed out in the Voice that Nelson Rockefeller, who apointed my uncle to two judgeships, had been loaning money to a man who was considered a Nazi front by our government in WW II? Where were her congratulations when our Correspondent Andreas Harsono won a Neiman?
The achievements of the American Reporter and its progressive writers and reporters around the world - who created the Internet's only journalist-owned daily newspaper and its first blog - are far more significant than anything her sniping will accomplish. And the cowardice of this blog in refusing to acknowledge a Hollywood-born publication - that has struggled against media giants and jealousy from the day it started - remains the issue.
Posted by: Joe Shea at August 24, 2003 11:56 PM
of LA Observed
If you're so even-handed, why don't you link to The American Reporter? Are we too even-handed for you? Or just too original? Just too independent? Here we are: the first blog (by virtue of our proprietary coding), the first daily newspaper with original content and its own reportyers to open for business on the Internet, and the publication that was first to stanmd up against the government censorship of the Communications Decency Act, the paper that broke the Good Friday Northern Ireland cease-fire, etc., etc., and you'll link to 15 kinds of irrelevant crap before you'll link to us. David Shaw is full of crap when the subject is this blog.
Posted by: Joe Shea at August 23, 2003 11:05 PM