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Topic Archive: Media criticism
Occidental College professor and local progressive leader Peter Dreier has a pretty interesting blog post at the Huffington Post detailing how parents and school officials got the Pasadena Star-News to...
Posted August 21, 2009 11:09 PM
It wasn't just the L.A. Times that didn't know where to place Michael Jackson at first. Jonathan Dobrer, a Friendly Fire blogger for the Daily News opinion pages, posts his...
Posted June 26, 2009 7:25 PM
As expected, Sunday's four-page advertorial section for "The Soloist" in the Los Angeles Times is being talked about as the second act of the controversy that began with last week's...
Posted April 13, 2009 12:57 AM
Politics reporter John Schwada blogs at Fox 11 about studies showing that many people found the news media too blatantly favoring Barack Obama during the campaign. Actually, I find all...
Posted November 7, 2008 12:17 AM
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 Enquirer story saying that John...
Posted July 23, 2008 5:07 PM
Rafting (or canoeing, kayaking, etc) the Los Angeles River is one of the old standby L.A. feature stories that some journalist will propose every few years, thinking it's a fresh...
Posted April 29, 2008 7:15 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 panels in yesterday's newspapers. It...
Posted February 11, 2008 2:30 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 defends Cardinal Mahony against accusations...
Posted February 26, 2007 7:56 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 Contreras died in a botanica...
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 journalism, with no redeeming value"...
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 label — citizen journalism —...
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 the science beat. It’s not...
Posted July 18, 2006 9:56 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 reflected poorly on the institution....
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 its own website can't be...
Posted June 16, 2006 9:14 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 from sources and PR agencies...
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 wife Ann Maxwell. Now living...
Posted April 6, 2006 2:55 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 leaving the room he wrote...
Posted February 8, 2006 9:57 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, county, and internal audits of...
Posted December 27, 2005 4:21 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 a researcher for Robert Scheer.)...
Posted November 29, 2005 4:37 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 said in Sunday's lede story...
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 main fear was that the...
Posted November 19, 2005 2:46 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 a long takeout by the...
Posted October 16, 2005 2:14 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 Ayers, taking in the stage...
Posted October 9, 2005 1:15 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 since 9/11. Just how serious...
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 Times buying the LA Weekly...
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 Online Journalism Awards, administered by...
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' Bill O'Reilly: FNC's Bill O'Reilly,...
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 claim to have a quarrel...
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 to read it....
Posted July 19, 2005 2:09 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 would lay off when he...
Posted July 18, 2005 3:47 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 during the Watergate scandal in...
Posted May 31, 2005 4:39 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 the East German Politburo, circa...
Posted April 27, 2005 1:59 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 long-rumored details about Mayor Hahn's...
Posted April 3, 2005 1:31 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 by shield laws that protect...
Posted March 29, 2005 1:02 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 books blogger at Ghost Word...
Posted March 23, 2005 8:59 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 for the city's pathetic voter...
Posted March 20, 2005 4:47 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 of the Q-A with best...
Posted February 28, 2005 3:15 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 Waxman book tour. Interview excerpt:...
Posted February 25, 2005 3:50 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 of racial pandering" he says...
Posted February 19, 2005 8:41 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 professor and columnist Susan Estrich...
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 as Patrick Frey, he argues...
Posted February 13, 2005 1:22 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 the pitch to get him...
Posted February 8, 2005 9:45 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, these set pieces won't be...
Posted February 8, 2005 1:59 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 day, Tim Rutten's Regarding Media...
Posted February 6, 2005 1:35 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 making sequels like the upcoming...
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 Terminal Island and Long Beach....
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 from finished. Rumors of the...
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 billed as "an experimental column...
Posted January 16, 2005 1:06 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 (he is more conservative). On...
Posted January 13, 2005 1:27 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 National Guard failed to apply...
Posted January 10, 2005 1:25 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 obituaries that she was a...
Posted January 4, 2005 2:39 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 memos for a "60 Minutes"...
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 week. He's been writing about...
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 his personal blog: To split...
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?" The Review's co-editor Robert B....
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 will hold a panel discussion...
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 younger, junior network producer—would prompt...
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 into journalism for the bucks,...
Posted September 28, 2004 9:14 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 to that anti-Fox speech given...
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 bought into a faux frenzy...
Posted July 26, 2004 1:13 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 magazine Zeta and the more...
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 away with the "redundant office"...
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 not so lucky, it will...
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 Iraq that he says have...
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 think journalists are sloppier, less...
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 self-proclaimed media critics so obsessed...
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 public editor. Editor John Carroll's...
Posted December 12, 2003 6:16 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 in the news trade, those...
Posted July 21, 2003 1:32 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, he tells Howard Kurtz in...
Posted July 13, 2003 8:32 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 country politely asked: "Sir? Can...
Posted July 13, 2003 7:53 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 it ready for East Coast...
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 Miller is turned loose to...
Posted June 12, 2003 1:50 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 Lewis about his new baseball...
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 large for Atlantic Monthly and...
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 the desk of White House...
Posted June 4, 2003 8:26 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 doesn't sound like it was...
Posted June 4, 2003 6:02 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 survive the scandals rocking his...
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 of the essential differences between...
Posted June 4, 2003 9:17 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 Journalism Review: "I think that...
Posted June 3, 2003 5:34 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 of his running for governor....
Posted June 3, 2003 9:13 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 Press Club -- answers questions...
Posted June 2, 2003 5:44 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. can retain both the L.A....
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 on abortion for displaying liberal...
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 of the weekend to the...
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 and the only Dodgers games...
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 days of the Soviet Empire...
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 Emmy awards during a 22-year...
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 1999, a year to the...
Posted May 30, 2003 4:06 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 the New Yorker is a...
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 and Tucker Carlson are all...
Posted May 30, 2003 9:40 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 the L.A. Times....
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. Opinion Journal's James Taranto led...
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 a weekly newspaper in September...
Posted May 29, 2003 5:12 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 of 10 op-ed items are...
Posted May 29, 2003 2:21 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 was let go yesterday. [For...
Posted May 29, 2003 7:12 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 little of the Kennedy association....
Posted May 29, 2003 6:08 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 about Bragg among other New...
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 School for 35 years and...
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 major obituary. Splashed large across...
Posted May 27, 2003 8:57 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 up the TV column in...
Posted May 27, 2003 7:56 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 can see that. I'm too...
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 (among others) won't miss him....
Posted May 25, 2003 7:01 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. She argues that blaming the...
Posted May 25, 2003 6:24 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 the Jayson Blair aftermath. There...
Posted May 24, 2003 8:04 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 honors. Howard also gets off...
Posted May 23, 2003 8:36 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 charming stories about growing up...
Posted May 22, 2003 6:04 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 L.A. school board. The mayor...
Posted May 21, 2003 6:41 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 former boss Antonio Villaraigosa on...
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 LATimes.com....
Posted May 20, 2003 2:49 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 a weekend like this in...
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 News. Among the scheduled attendees...
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, but I don't think he...
Posted May 18, 2003 7:28 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 folded last year and was...
Posted May 18, 2003 4:04 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 News Channel become more popular...
Posted May 18, 2003 2:54 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 to be in locales where...
Posted May 14, 2003 1:13 AM
© 2003-2009 • About LA Observed • Email the editor
| Bev Hills billionaire Ron Burkle has $56 million in loans against his two houses. The McCourts have borrowed $28 million on their properties.
| Advice for Greenies in a Complicated World
| Steve Jones, the self-proclaimed Sire of Wilshire (a nod to the physical address of his former home at Indie 103.1 FM), is back on the air!
| She gaped at me like I was living history -- Miss Jane Pittman come to put her withered lips to the "Young Only" fountain straw of ageism.
As newspapers and television pull back from investigative reporting, foundations and other organizations are beginning to fill the void. One of the most interesting is Accountable California, a project of Local 721 of the Service Employees International Union.
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