R.J. Smith writes tough in the March issue of Los Angeles about Bernard Weinraub, the former White House and war correspondent who has covered Hollywood for the New York Times since 1991. Smith opens by giving Weinraub kudos as the first NYT reporter to become a Hollywood must-read, "his prose searched for nuances of meaning...Everybody reads Bernie."

But Smith writes that after four years or so, Weinraub stopped being the skeptical outsider and "got into the pool." Smith also writes that the NYT did Weinraub no favors by keeping him in place after he married studio executive Amy Pascal in 1997.

Excerpts from The New York Times' L.A. Problem:

Hollywood didn't matter much to the Times [before Weinraub]. When Aljean Harmetz began her stint as Industry reporter in the late '70s, she was expected to file soft features, not breaking news. Larry Rohter replaced her in 1990 and quickly realized that he hated the place. Rohter told his bosses that he'd never met a worse bunch of liars than the ones in Hollywood -- and he'd covered the Communist Party in Beijing and the PRI in Mexico City...

Like so many New Yorkers who came to Hollywood before him, Weinraub started going native. A close reading of his work suggests that after four years on the beat, he was less the detached observer, and his stories were worse for it...

[Keeping sources is] tough in a business where people believe that stating a movie is doing poorly is a personal attack. Hollywood doesn't get journalism, and holds Army Archerd -- God bless him -- as its idea of a great reporter...

The truth is, long before his marriage gave his antagonists a big hammer to flail with, Weinraub had already peaked as a correspondent, and both the paper and its correspondent would have been better served with somebody new on the Coast. They had brought in Weinraub to show they were taking Hollywood more seriously. Yet by leaving him in, the Times has suggested what they really think of L.A. -- that it's a lightweight town, that it's about amusement, not real news. If a White House correspondent married a member of the administration, would the Times leave that person in? It's hard to believe they would.

The March issue is not yet online; the excerpts come from the print version. The piece also rehashes Weinraub's blunder last November when he lifted a paragraph from a blog.

Among the other stories in the new Los Angeles: Diane K. Shah profiles police chief Bill Bratton and Ariel Swartley reviews David Freeman's latest book, It's All True: A Novel of Hollywood. Also, Amy Wallace explores the sudden literary success of Ron McClarty, the actor who penned eight unpublished novels until Stephen King praised him in a column in Entertainment Weekly. Success followed. McClarty is a familiar face to fans of "Sex in the City": "he was the sex therapist who told Charlotte and Trey to name their private parts Rebecca and Schooner."