 
|
 |
|
Topic Archive: Media criticism
Sharon Waxman, free of the New York Times label next to her name, blogs a question: how long can the mainstream media ignore the National...
Posted July 23, 2008 05:07 PM
Count Los Angeles cartoonist Donna Barstow (who writes the blog Griffith Park, Interrupted) unimpressed by this story about minority cartoonists banding together to draw identical...
Posted February 11, 2008 02:30 PM
LA-ClergyCases.com was started in 2005 by by the law firm (Hennigan, Bennett & Dorman) that represents the Archdiocese over sexual abuse allegations against priests and...
Posted February 26, 2007 07:56 AM
The Downtown News steps out of character with an 1,100-word editorial defending the LA Weekly's decision to run a story reporting that labor leader Miguel...
Posted November 6, 2006 12:04 AM
Occidental College professor Peter Dreier, a leader of L.A.'s progressive political sphere, calls David Zahniser's story on the Miguel Contreras death cover-up "irresponsible, gutter, tabloid...
Posted October 27, 2006 12:25 AM
In this week's double issue of The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann struggles to comprehend the rise of blogs as a news source and the boosterish...
Posted July 31, 2006 11:20 AM
Author and former Los Angeles Times science writer K.C. Cole explains why, in her view, print media too often shy away from difficult stories on...
Posted July 18, 2006 09:56 AM
After El Vaquero reported accurately last month on two suicides by students in the nursing program, Glendale College president John Davitt complained that the story...
Posted July 13, 2006 10:10 AM
Peacefire.org, which keeps track of the political websites and other non-sexual sites that are blocked by content filters, sent a note to subscribers saying that...
Posted June 16, 2006 09:14 AM
Three Los Angeles TV stations are fingered in a Center for Media and Democracy report out today critical of news operations that package video releases...
Posted April 6, 2006 11:20 AM
Former Los Angeles Times staff writer Evan Maxwell left daily journalism two decades ago to fashion a successful career as a romance novelist with his...
Posted April 6, 2006 02:55 AM
City Councilman Dan Baker resigned dramatically in front of TV cameras during Tuesday's council meeting, blaming a press "witch hunt" about his business dealings. Before...
Posted February 8, 2006 09:57 AM
⇒ City Controller Laura Chick turned up the heat today on schools Supt. Roy Romer, making a public records act request for all federal, state,...
Posted December 27, 2005 04:21 PM
Before he edited the L.A. Times Book Review, Steve Wasserman was deputy editor of the paper's op-ed page and Opinion section (and before that was...
Posted November 29, 2005 04:37 PM
♦ Curveball was a screwball and the Germans knew it, but President Bush exaggerated his bad info on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction anyway, the Times...
Posted November 21, 2005 11:11 AM
When the Times chose to stake its biggest website initiative on the dicey notion that Hollywood awards are a year-round obsession of its readers, my...
Posted November 19, 2005 02:46 PM
About the same time her first-person account of testifying in the the Valerie Plame affair appeared Saturday on the New York Times website, along with...
Posted October 16, 2005 02:14 PM
Follow-ups, catch-ups and clearing off the desk for Columbus Day... ♦ Sunday's L.A. Times fronts a Steve Lopez column about his violin-playing street person, Nathaniel Anthony...
Posted October 9, 2005 01:15 PM
President Bush said yesterday said that a serious terrorist threat to the tallest skyscraper in Los Angeles (now called US Bank tower) was thwarted sometime...
Posted October 7, 2005 10:29 AM
Mick Farren at CityBeat writes what a lot of writers and editors in the swirl of local alt weeklies think about the prospect of New...
Posted October 6, 2005 10:15 AM
The Online News Association has posted the awards finalists selected by a panel of judges (myself included) that met this weekend at USC. The annual...
Posted September 25, 2005 12:22 PM
Call it as you see it. In her LA Weekly column about the highs and lows of Katrina coverage, Nikki Finke wrote of Fox News'...
Posted September 9, 2005 11:34 AM
Tim Rutten's Saturday column in the LAT, nominally about the declining audience for Republican radio, posits that "While the political talk-show hosts and right-wing bloggers...
Posted August 27, 2005 12:40 AM
From Editor & Publisher: When a Man Dies in a Sex Act with a Horse -- What's a Reporter to Do? You know you want...
Posted July 19, 2005 02:09 PM
• American Media CEO David Pecker confirms in the New York Times that part of the controversial magazine deal with Arnold Schwarzenegger was that the tabloids...
Posted July 18, 2005 03:47 AM
Bob Woodward confirmed this afternoon that top FBI official W. Mark Felt was his famous secret source for several crucial stories in the Washington Post...
Posted May 31, 2005 04:39 PM
In today's Times, editorial page editor Andrés Martinez writes that "working at a major metropolitan newspaper these days can feel a bit like working for...
Posted April 27, 2005 01:59 AM
Jewish Journal senior editor Howard Blume has an interesting media piece on the refusal of reporters at the Daily News and LA Weekly to pursue...
Posted April 3, 2005 01:31 AM
David Shaw's Sunday media column in the Times struck me as one of his intellectually weakest efforts. His position that bloggers should not be covered...
Posted March 29, 2005 01:02 PM
Turns out a second writer had her op-ed piece on the great rains of 1861-62 rejected by the Times. Frances Dinkelspiel, a Berkeley journalist and...
Posted March 23, 2005 08:59 PM
David Abel, public policy consultant and publisher of The Planning Report, argues in this week's Outside the Tent that dumbed-down media are largely to blame...
Posted March 20, 2005 04:47 PM
Madeleine Brand did a good scene piece this morning on Day to Day about how soft the backstage press is with the Oscar winners. Transcripts...
Posted February 28, 2005 03:15 PM
Let the Oscar speeches begin. Updated from time to time, newest at the bottom: Sharon Waxman: Jon Friedman at CBS Marketwatch participates in the Sharon...
Posted February 25, 2005 03:50 PM
"Jack Dunphy" is the pseudonym of a politically conservative LAPD veteran who contributes to National Review Online. His most recent piece rails about the "carnival...
Posted February 19, 2005 08:41 PM
Other projects and a stubborn cold have slowed me down the last day or so. Here's some things I missed: • Estrich vs. Kinsley: USC law...
Posted February 17, 2005 11:03 AM
The Sunday Opinion feature "Outside the Tent" seems in love with bloggers as the critics of the Times that count. Today it's Patterico's turn. Writing...
Posted February 13, 2005 01:22 PM
Blogger Cheat Seeking Missiles didn't like a recent Times editorial about James Dobson and SpongeBob SquarePants, so he called to cancel his 25-year subscription. In...
Posted February 8, 2005 09:45 AM
Today's profile in the Times touches on the major turns in the life of Antonio Villaraigosa, but it's clear that, at least in the primary,...
Posted February 8, 2005 01:59 AM
Hilary Swank picked up another trophy last night at the SAG Awards for her performance as Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby. Earlier in the...
Posted February 6, 2005 01:35 PM
Rob Schneider bought a full-page ad in today's Variety (pg. 39) to reply to Times columnist Patrick Goldstein's Jan. 26 dig at the studios for...
Posted February 3, 2005 11:38 AM
Christiana Dominguez blogs at Phoblographer. Her dad runs the group that sponsored yesterday's ceremonial lighting of the Vincent Thomas Bridge that connects San Pedro to...
Posted January 31, 2005 12:05 PM
Columbia professor Todd Gitlin argues on the Times op-ed page Monday that reporting that tries to be objective (by the mainstream journalism definition) is far...
Posted January 17, 2005 12:14 AM
The Sunday Opinion section in today's Times (with an inauguration cover by the brothers behind JibJab.com, right) introduces a new feature, Outside the Tent. It's...
Posted January 16, 2005 01:06 PM
The former top news executive at CBS (1982-1986), Fox and Channel 2 here has been on something of a kick about liberal media bias lately...
Posted January 13, 2005 01:27 PM
Three network execs and producer Mary Mapes lost their jobs after an independent report concluded that a bogus "60 Minutes Wednesday" story on President Bush's...
Posted January 10, 2005 01:25 PM
On today's L.A. Times op-ed page, author Patrick Moore chides the LAT and the New York Times for not stating in last week's Susan Sontag...
Posted January 4, 2005 02:39 AM
Times media critic David Shaw on Sunday ran his list of the year's worst journalism moments. His top 10 include Dan Rather's use of fake...
Posted December 20, 2004 10:12 AM
The LA Weekly's Marc Cooper was quite disturbed by the Times coverage of the death of Gary Webb, the Sacramento reporter who shot himself last...
Posted December 16, 2004 10:07 AM
Regarding that pledge of blue-red civility and support for the president that blogger Jeff Jarvis made over the weekend, Reason magazine's Matt Welch dissents on...
Posted November 4, 2004 10:14 AM
The New York Review of Books is co-sponsoring a panel of journalists this Sunday at Occidental College on "The Media and Iraq: What Went Wrong?"...
Posted October 21, 2004 12:23 AM
Prompted by the gay media speculation about Rep. David Dreier and other recent events, the local chapter of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association...
Posted October 17, 2004 11:25 PM
In most news organizations, Tim Rutten writes in his Times media column, the allegations about a network star like Bill O'Reilly—accused of sexually harassing a...
Posted October 16, 2004 12:21 PM
Brooks Boliek covers Washington for The Hollywood Reporter and writes today that he's ashamed (sort of) to admit he is a journalist. One doesn't go...
Posted September 28, 2004 09:14 AM
Talk radio ideologue Hugh Hewitt has a long blog piece seeking to compare the controversy over Dan Rather's probably fake documents about George W. Bush...
Posted September 14, 2004 11:11 AM
Joel Bellman (who works for supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky but is writing for himself) has the "Counterpunch" in today's LAT Calendar arguing that the media has...
Posted July 26, 2004 01:13 PM
Writing in his LA Weekly column, Marc Cooper does some soul searching over the murder of investigative reporter Francisco Ortiz Franco of the Tijuana weekly...
Posted July 18, 2004 11:20 PM
The top editorial in today's L.A. Times, headline Show Riordan the Door, urges Gov. Schwarzenegger to use the latest blooper by Richard Riordan to do...
Posted July 10, 2004 10:35 AM
At best, Tim Rutten writes in today's Regarding Media column, 2004 will be the year of living dangerously for the news media. If they are...
Posted July 7, 2004 11:56 AM
Mickey Kaus takes a break from being unhappy about Kerry's strength to lead his Slate blog with a recitation of L.A. Times stories out of...
Posted July 7, 2004 11:02 AM
Tidbits from Howard Kurtz's story in the Washington Post on a new report card on the media from the Project for Excellence in Journalism: "Americans...
Posted March 15, 2004 10:10 AM
Tim Rutten's media column today is another talker (his second this week). He opens with a swipe at what he calls the "nattering class" of...
Posted December 13, 2003 10:05 PM
NYU's Jay Rosen, writing at his PressThink blog, takes issue with Tim Rutten's L.A. Times Wednesday column dinging the idea of the New York Times...
Posted December 12, 2003 06:16 AM
Jack Dunphy, the National Review mole in the LAPD, predicts that for the media it will be the OJ trial all over again: For those...
Posted July 21, 2003 01:32 PM
A Howard Rosenberg column in the L.A. Times last month about the way network news programs produce their stories irked ABC News president David Westin,...
Posted July 13, 2003 08:32 PM
Michael at Franklin Avenue called directory assistance to get the number for Wahoo's in the mid-Wilshire area, and the voice from somewhere else in the...
Posted July 13, 2003 07:53 PM
The creator of Slate's popular Today's Papers feature at first assembed the column here in Los Angeles, working deep into the early morning to get...
Posted June 13, 2003 10:25 AM
LA CityBeat's first issue is online now and includes a cover story (with photo of Osama Bin Laden) in which the LAPD's newscaster-turned-terrorism expert John...
Posted June 12, 2003 01:50 AM
This morning on Airtalk with Larry Mantle, Larry plans to discuss the anti-lap dance ordinance that's before the L.A. city council and talk with Michael...
Posted June 11, 2003 12:20 AM
The Los Angeles Press Club plans to give its second Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism to Michael Kelly, the editor at...
Posted June 5, 2003 11:05 AM
In response to the John Carroll memo on L.A. Times liberal bias, Marc Cooper of the LA Weekly conjures up a missive to Carroll from...
Posted June 4, 2003 08:26 PM
Steven Zeitchik of Publisher's Weekly covers the party scene and also wraps up the business end of the weekend's BookExpo America held in L.A. It...
Posted June 4, 2003 06:02 PM
L.A. Times managing editor Dean Baquet should be considered a contender for the top job at the New York Times if Howell Raines does not...
Posted June 4, 2003 12:26 PM
Virginia Postrel, herself a blogger and author, chides the online writers who have been piling on the New York Times knee-jerk style and addresses one...
Posted June 4, 2003 09:17 AM
Some kind of fees or subscriptions are in the future at the Los Angeles Times website, Tribune Interactive boss David Hiller says. He tells American...
Posted June 3, 2003 05:34 PM
Newsweek's June 9 issue offers up a script for a campaign ad should Arnold Schwarzenegger need one, and also considers the personal pros and cons...
Posted June 3, 2003 09:13 AM
One of the most multi-faceted scribes in the city -- two LAT columns, TV and radio commentaries, panels, bookstore appearances, VP of the Los Angeles...
Posted June 2, 2003 05:44 PM
The Republican majority on the FCC voted as expected to ease federal rules on media ownership. In Los Angeles this means that the Tribune Co....
Posted June 2, 2003 11:05 AM
L.A. Times national correspondent Scott Gold receives some nice praise from Editor John Carroll in the aftermath of Carroll's memo critiquing a recent Gold story...
Posted June 2, 2003 10:10 AM
CaliforniaAuthors.com is filing occasional reports from the BookExpo downtown. So is Roger L. Simon on his blog, here and here. C-SPAN2 is also devoting most...
Posted June 1, 2003 10:13 AM
In advance of this week's FCC vote on media ownership, L.A. Times business writer James Bates remembers when Los Angeles TV channels stopped at 2-4-5-7-9-11-13...
Posted June 1, 2003 12:48 AM
The Daily News editorial page gets off a good jab at the title given the new city office building in Van Nuys: "Not since the...
Posted June 1, 2003 12:02 AM
Robinson had been the managing editor at KCBS-TV Channel 2 in the early 1990s and had also worked at KTTV/FOX-TV Channel 11. He won eight...
Posted May 31, 2003 10:26 AM
The longest-established news outlet to focus on Santa Monica is not a newspaper but the website Surf Santa Monica, which opened as The Lookout in...
Posted May 30, 2003 04:06 PM
LAT science writer K.C. Cole shows up in this week's New Yorker with a story on Janet Conrad, "the woman who hunts neutrinos." Also in...
Posted May 30, 2003 10:00 AM
Thousands of booksellers, publishers, editors, authors and other literary figures are attending the gathering at the L.A. Convention Center. Bill O'Reilly, Molly Ivins, Al Franken...
Posted May 30, 2003 09:40 AM
Los Angeles author/blogger Roger L. Simon asks the question, half facetiously we hope, after being underwhelmed by Bob Scheer's latest column on Jessica Lynch in...
Posted May 30, 2003 12:25 AM
Interest in LAT Editor John Carroll's memo on liberal bias (originally posted here at L.A. Observed) has been heavy, especially at the conservative punditry sites....
Posted May 29, 2003 11:42 PM
Writing in the L.A. Independent, Beverly Hills author and journalist Tony Castro sounds skeptical that ex-mayor and current power broker Dick Riordan will actually produce...
Posted May 29, 2003 05:12 PM
Susan Estrich, the USC law professor who ran the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis, has an intriguing column out about newspaper op-ed pages. Nine out...
Posted May 29, 2003 02:21 PM
The magazine is relocating to New York from its offices in Woodland Hills, says Keith J. Kelly in the New York Post. Editor Jerry Kindela...
Posted May 29, 2003 07:12 AM
The new liberal political magazine being planned from L.A. by Helen O'Donnell won't be a revival of George but it still will try for a...
Posted May 29, 2003 06:08 AM
Best piece I've seen yet on the Rick Bragg affair (the most insight with the least anti-NYT distortion) is Seth Mnookin's report on the uproar...
Posted May 29, 2003 12:18 AM
L.A. Observed Exclusive: Memo from LAT editor John Carroll on the paper's "liberal bias."
Posted May 28, 2003 12:35 AM
Gross will become director of the USC Annenberg School of Communication on July 1. He has been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg...
Posted May 27, 2003 10:49 PM
Checking out the news rack headlines outside Starbucks this morning I did a double take at the colorful Daily News banner, thinking I'd missed a...
Posted May 27, 2003 08:57 PM
An LAT personnel memo today (posted at Romenseko's Media News) expands on the Sunday report here about television critic Howard Rosenberg retiring. He will give...
Posted May 27, 2003 07:56 PM
"Obviously, I'm taking a bullet here," the suspended New York Times Pulitzer winner tells Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. "Anyone with half a brain...
Posted May 27, 2003 11:30 AM
Buzz is sweeping the second floor at the LAT that the television critic will give up his longtime column this summer. If true, news execs...
Posted May 25, 2003 07:01 PM
Macarena Hernandez, the San Antonio reporter whose story was lifted by Jayson Blair, gives her side of the debacle in the LAT Sunday Opinion section....
Posted May 25, 2003 06:24 PM
Rick Bragg, who worked at the LAT for about a month before jumping to the New York Times, has been suspended by the NYT in...
Posted May 24, 2003 08:04 PM
The ex-con author and sometime L.A. Weekly columnist died in a hotel room and not heroically. Howard Blume, his editor at the Weekly, does the...
Posted May 23, 2003 08:36 AM
Memorial Day's "Airtalk with Larry Mantle" on KPCC-FM (89.3) will be a prerecorded show on historic preservation from the ghostly Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire, featuring...
Posted May 22, 2003 06:04 PM
The victory Tuesday of David Tokofsky means that ex-mayor Dick Riordan lost another bid to hold on to his (and Eli Broad's) influence on the...
Posted May 21, 2003 06:41 PM
Miguel Contreras and the L.A. labor council won big in Tuesday's victory of Martin Ludlow in the 10th council district. They already helped elect Ludlow's...
Posted May 21, 2003 10:33 AM
He shot iconic photos of the Watts riots and the Dodgers' welcoming parade in 1958. Neither of those, unfortunately, are in the online gallery at...
Posted May 20, 2003 02:49 PM
You may have missed the headline in this morning's LAT -- buried on B4. Ten Angelenos murdered in an especially violent spate ("We haven't had...
Posted May 20, 2003 10:46 AM
The ex-mayor and would-be publisher's Brentwood home is the site of a fundraiser tonight for the state Republican Party, Rick Orlov reports in the Daily...
Posted May 19, 2003 11:51 AM
Mal Florence was at the Times forever and was best known for covering USC football and writing Morning Briefing. He was 77 and mostly retired,...
Posted May 18, 2003 07:28 PM
Friends and former colleagues are pouring in heartfelt memories over at LAExaminer.com. She wrote the "Bite Me" column for New Times L.A. before the weekly...
Posted May 18, 2003 04:04 PM
From a Q-and-A on JournalismJobs.com with Matt Labash of the conservative Weekly Standard: JournalismJobs.com: Why have conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard and Fox...
Posted May 18, 2003 02:54 PM
From a column at ReasonOnline : "'Media bias' is usually code for 'insufficient bias toward my views.'"...
Posted May 18, 2003 10:03 AM
This blog is coming to life in the midst of the scandal over disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. He made up stories, claimed...
Posted May 14, 2003 01:13 AM
© 2003-2008 • About LA Observed • Contact the editor
| The two mortgage financing giants have been placed into government conservatorship.
| Federal regulators have issued a cease-and-desist order that requires the Newport Beach-based thrift to raise capital.
| American humorists — The new journalists.
| George Bush compares the "angry left" with the North Vietnamese, but it's the angry right that made McCain cry uncle.
| This is one time I think the candidate should step down to spend more time with her family. A cursory...
| USC and UCLA both start their football seasons with impressive wins over southern opponents.
Sponsors
Premium Blogads
Books, Blogs & Events
Get RSS Feeds
of LA Observed
of LA Observed
LA Observed publishes several Real Simple Syndication feeds for easy scanning of headlines. If you wish to subscribe to a feed, most popular RSS readers will do it for you. You can also enter the web address from the XML button below or click on a specific feed. For more help with RSS, try here or here.
