A Violin For The L.A. Times

10:45 am EST June 12th, 2008 | Media | 4 Comments

I’m generally unsympathetic to the decline of the newspaper industry in the last 10 years. It’s largely their fault for producing a lackluster product with all the zing of a cookie cutter. For my money even though it is exactly the opposite of me politically, the only daily paper I find interesting is the NY Post. The NY Post often seems sometimes to be the only paper trying to get people to read it, no matter how bad or slanted the actual journalism is inside. Compared to the poll tested crap that is uncontroversial to the point of boredom for most other dailies around the country (South Florida Sun Sentinel, I’m talking about you) it is refreshing.

Throw into that mix this story from Harold Meyerson decrying the gutting Sam Zell is doing to the L.A. Times. I’m pretty sure Zell is going to screw this up, but my main objection is referring to the L.A. Times as a great paper. When has that been?

When I lived in L.A. I was pretty surprised to find that the L.A. Times was as banal as the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. Up until then I figured that this was a product of South Florida’s mighty sleepy culture – but nobody ever accused L.A. of being a sleepy town. Yet, the most news the L.A. Times made was when they gave control over their Sunday magazine to the then-new Staples Center. Snooze.

The L.A. Times rarely breaks national stories. They are perfectly positioned to be the west coast newsbreakers in the way that the NY Times covers the national scene and the Washington Post covers the political scene – but they aren’t.

Newspapers began jumping the shark when they began worshipping at the altar of objectivity so much that it took the life out of the paper. As noted above with the NY Post, I like a paper that takes a point of view – no matter how stupid – because it shows a sign of life. That’s why people have been moving to online publications like Huffington Post and yes, Drudge. I recently went to the Newseum, and outside there is a display of the day’s front pages – one from each state. I shook my head as I walked down the line, an endless parade of “news you can use” pablum that some consultant told the editors sells papers but seems to have the opposite effect.

Our papers need to get a life.

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4 Responses to “A Violin For The L.A. Times”

  1. August J. Pollak says:
    June 12, 2008 at 10:57 am

    You’re crazy. The New York Post? Seriously? Why not just say USA Today is a great paper? It’s shock news, plus sports.

    I don’t understand how you could see a show like Inside Edition or Entertainment Tonight and say that it’s as good, or the same, or a worthy replacement, of an actual news broadcast. So why say that about the print equivalent?

    Furthermore, the Post is in no conceivable way an indication of a successful print newspaper- they practically have to give it away, and it loses nearly $30 million a year.

    It’s frankly depressing that you would even say- left or right- that you think news- by definition, something that is supposed to based on facts- should have a bias because that makes it interesting to you. That seems to be a much more self-centered way of simply saying you’re not interested in news when you don’t like it.

  2. Oliver Willis says:
    June 12, 2008 at 11:05 am

    I find the USA Today just as boring. I didn’t say the Post was successful, I said it was entertaining and tried to attract readers (frankly, I don’t know why the Post loses money). You can have a publication that uses facts that also has a point of view. The objectivity racket has brought us “Democrats, Republicans Differ On Amount Of Days In A Year”. The newspaper industry can keep that. I’d much rather a paper that said:

    BRAIN DEAD REPUBLICANS NEED A CALENDAR, SCIENCE SHOWS 365 DAYS A YEAR

    or

    TERROR LOVING DEMS NEED THEIR CLOCKS RUNG, GET PWNED BY CALENDAR

  3. Parthenon says:
    June 12, 2008 at 11:37 am

    I understand and sympathize with your point regarding the watering-down effect of objectivity in news – often it does lead to the sort of ‘he said, she said’ reporting as you mentioned in the calendar example, though I suspect deadlines may also play into that sort of laziness.

    There are several problems with having an obvious point of view (to the point of hyper-partisanship in most cases), though. One is the tendency to only read publications that support one’s already existing world view. Your blog is unusual in that it boasts several well-spoken, fairly articulate conservatives. In my admittedly brief experience this isn’t the case – all others I read typically preach only to the converted, based on reading the comments.

    Another is that I’m always suspicious that ‘point-of-view’ publications (they used to be called ‘yellow,’ I think) are hiding evidence from me, or using too small a data set. I have a friend, for instance, who gets most of his news from ‘onenewsnow’ and Fox and so believes that persecution of Christians is an extremely serious issue facing the world today.

  4. Sean D. Martin says:
    June 12, 2008 at 3:13 pm

    What’s lacking isn’t a point of view. What’s lacking is actual journalism.

    The reason nobody puts headlines like “BRAIN DEAD REPUBLICANS NEED A CALENDAR, SCIENCE SHOWS 365 DAYS A YEAR” or “TERROR LOVING DEMS NEED THEIR CLOCKS RUNG, GET PWNED BY CALENDAR” is because it would actually require them to check the facts of what they’ve been told.

    Too many news outlets today just echo what they’ve been told.