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Notable stuff (to me) in or about the local media this Memorial Day weekend:
• Tim Rutten calls the New York Times' admission that its pre-war coverage of Iraq was sloppy and hyped by bad sources worse than the Jayson Blair scandal: "The most serious of the credibility crises that have afflicted America's mainstream news media over the past two years." [LAT Calendar] Also, NYT Public Editor Daniel Okrent: "The failure was not individual, but institutional." [NYT]
• Last week's NYT Editor's Note on Iraq coverage parodied, with gratuitous side mention of the Santa Monica Daily Press. [low culture, hat tip to Bob Patterson of Just Above Sunset]
• Eli Broad wants to be the guy who brings the National Football League back to the Coliseum: "I think I would be a logical person to be involved. I have the resources..." That he does, but does anyone in L.A. care about having football in Los Angeles? USC, it seems, is not so happy about the whole idea. [L.A. Daily News]
• City Hall power broker Ted Stein's early dabbles in wielding influence, a Times investigative story diluted with a question-mark headline: "Did Stein 'Pay to Play' at Start of Civic Career?" Let us know when you decide... [LAT]
• New books coming from Walter Moseley (Little Scarlet, an Easy Rawlins novel set after the Watts riots), love-him-or-loathe-him historian Mike Davis (Heavy Metal Freeway: California's Season in Hell, about last year's recall election), and the LA Weekly's John Powers (Sore Winners: [And the Rest of Us] in George Bush's America), called by David L. Ulin "a book that takes on icons of both the left and the right [Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Ashcroft], decoding the through-the-looking-glass landscape of contemporary American culture with the same clear-eyed intelligence that makes the author's column "On" such an essential read"). Also, the L.A. Times Magazine's Martin Smith and Patrick Kiger have sold a follow-up to Poplorica to Harper-Collins, and the original book has been optioned by producer Mark L. Wolper. [LAT Calendar, Publishers Lunch]
• Santa Monica gets tough on yard shrubbery that's too tall, threatening fines of $25,000 a day. Bobby Shriver, the Deputy Governor's brother, is mad as hell. [LAT]
• The Grand Avenue beautification and park project — the latest scheme to try to make downtown inviting, like it or not — will cost $1.2 billion. Retired former councilman Ernani Bernardi pshaws. [L.A. Daily News]
• Jillian Barberie loses half her gig at "Good Day L.A./Good Day Live." She'll stay on the local show, exit the national show. [RonFineman.com]
• Charles Johnson says Newsweek magazine reads "more and more like the farthest left of the leftist rags." Its crime: Running a gallery of Abu Ghraib abuse photos under the headline "Abu Gulag." I guess he's never seen any actual leftist mags. [Little Green Footballs]
of LA Observed
On Grand Avenue, both the LAT's piece in Opinion and the two Daily News articles totally miss (or ignore) the point about what just happened and why. Two out of town developers were just selected as finalists after a series of meetings and presentations that the public was barred from - and after the developers were not allowed to in any way communicate with the public.
In addition, there has been much speculation that the entire process was rigged from the beginning to select the Related Companies in order to meet the personal agendas of the leaders of the committee, most of whom had serious conflicts of interest. Now whether or not that is true – Related was one of the finalists and it was made very clear that they are the ones who will get the project.
I might add that the two finalists have as their lead architects the weakest of all the architects involved in the process. This virtually guarantees that if you thought Bunker Hill could not be any more of an urban disaster – just wait until you see what it looks like after Related and corporate hack architect David Childs get finished with it.
The irony of al this is that the taxpayers are now going to subsidize a third rate project by third rate architects instead of the urban masterpiece that the Frank Gehry team could have delivered. Then on top of that - all of the developer's profits we will have paid for, will then get shipped back to New York.
Posted by: Brady Westwater at May 31, 2004 02:46 PM