Los Angeles Times

News editors need to retake Journalism 101 or move to features when stories about the White House dog take precedence over a controversial veto by the President's unconfirmed appointment to Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed a bill, House Substitute for SB 218, April 23 which would have placed additional restrictions on third trimester abortions and allowed more criminal charges over late-term procedures to occur.

With the exception of "Special Report with Bret Baier" that night and "Fox and Friends" the morning of April 24, the broadcast media avoided covering the controversial decision. But "Today," "The Early Show," and "Good Morning America" all had time to cover Michelle Obama talking about the first family's new dog Bo the morning of April 24.

Check out the following two stories:

1. A former Catholic priest comes forward Monday (4/20/09) to claim that another priest abused him as a teenager nearly 30 years ago. (The accused priest has no other similar public complaints and denies the allegations against him.)

2. A former school teacher was sentenced Wednesday (4/22/09) after pleading no contest to eight felony counts, including having sex with two girls under the age of 16. The man "admitted to having intercourse with the girls, performing oral sex with the teens and taking extremely explicit nude photographs of his victims -- including pictures of him with one of the girls - before sending the images over the Internet."

Now it's quiz time! To which story did the Los Angeles Times devote two generous color photos and a 640-word article? Which story did the Times totally ignore?

I will begin this right at the top by saying that I don't care a whit if the appointment of any American official brings hope to Egyptians. After all, an American official should be concerned with America's interests not Egypt's. Not that I am saying that American officials or appointments should necessarily have as a chief criteria for appointment an interest in the denigration of any foreign land, but that what's good for America should be any new official's chief concern.

However, apparently the L.A. Times thinks that it is germane to U.S. interests that Egyptians are "rejoicing" that President Obama has appointed a female American Muslim to his administration. In, "Muslim woman's appointment as Obama advisor draws cautious optimism" from April 22, Noha El-Hennawy is reporting from Cairo that Egyptians are happy with Obama's purported outreach to Muslims.

A search of Nexis between April 7 -- the day when pirates seized the U.S.-registered and American-crewed Maersk Alabama -- and today, April 10, shows that both the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times failed to even mention President Barack Obama in their stories on the ongoing hostage situation. The New York Times did, once, in a page A6 April 9 story by Mark Mazetti and Sharon Otterman, but it came 15 paragraphs into the 26-paragraph story and served to explain Obama's absence in the ongoing U.S. response:

At the White House, military and national security officials tracked the developments from the Situation Room, and they provided several briefings to President Obama and other administration officials throughout the day.

Mr. Obama first learned of the hijacking early on Wednesday morning after he returned to the White House from his overseas trip, and he later convened an interagency group on maritime safety, aides said. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said, ''Our top priority is the personal safety of the crew members on board.'' 

Basically, the nation's top three newspapers are letting President Obama off the hook from any scrutiny regarding his involvement or lack thereof in the ongoing hostage situation. 

Is this really what it has come to - columnists lobbying the government for a bailout?

Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law school professor, wrote in her last column for the Los Angeles Times on April 9 that it is time for a government bailout for journalism because our way of society is reliant on that profession for its survival.

"If newspapers become mostly infotainment websites - if the number of well-trained investigative journalists dwindles still further - and if we're soon left with nothing but the yapping heads who dominate cable ‘news' and talk radio, how will we recognize, or hope to forestall, impending national and global crises?" Brooks wrote.

The brute dishonesty and ignorance with which the Los Angeles Times opines on issues related to the Catholic Church never ceases to astound. The latest shameful entry is an error-ridden and misleading editorial (Wed. 4/1/09) on the Obama-Notre Dame scandal. This follows an equally fallacious opinion piece from Tim Rutten just a few days ago.

The article begins by slamming those who oppose Obama's appearance at Notre Dame as "seem[ing] to believe they are more Catholic than the pope." It also besmirches the Cardinal Newman Society, a leading voice in opposition to Obama's appearance, as "a self-appointed guardian of orthodoxy."

What the Times doesn't tell its readership (whose number continues to dwindle) is that protesters of Obama's appearance simply want to uphold what the full body of United States Catholic bishops boldly declared in a statement five years ago:

The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.

Loss of human life is a tragedy.

Media outlets rightly treated the recent Montana plane crash that killed seven adults and seven children as such.

But correctly reporting the deaths of fourteen people as a tragedy doesn't mean the media necessarily did their job. If they feel compelled to note that victims were "ultrarich," they should also note the business that made them that way. Particularly if it's as controversial as abortion.

As pointed out by Tom Blumer in a March 24 Newsbusters post, Associated Press reporters were compelled to report on the victim's socioeconomic status. The AP's Matthew Brown wrote on March 23, "Three California families headed to a retreat for the ultrarich were among the 14 victims of a plane crash in Montana." Later that same day, the AP's Matt Gouras and Joan Lowy referred to the intended destination as "the ritzy Yellowstone Club resort."

There is plenty of evidence that many environmental activists are, at bottom, dangerous extremists who have deluded themselves into believing that the earth's population must be radically reduced if humanity is to survive. There is also growing evidence that this far-out viewpoint is more widely accepted among so-called mainstream environmentalists than the establishment media would have us believe.

Occasionally, these views surface. Ted Turner, father of five, infamously asserted the need to reduce the earth's population to 2 billion about a decade ago. He also expressed a stronger personal preference: "Personally, I think the population should be closer to when we had indigenous populations, back before the advent of farming. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was somewhere between 40 and 100 million people." In the early 1990s, the late Jacques Cousteau suggested that "World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day." More recently, though less famously, at a Psychology Today blog, writer Stephen Kotter asserted "we need to lose 4.4 billion people and we need to lose them fast."

But I don't recall seeing an adviser to a government as prominent as the UK's Jonathon Porritt publicly utter such sentiments. But utter them he has. The UK Times Online took note on March 22:

How often have you wondered whether or not the liberals who are so outraged by conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh have ever actually listened to his program?

Shockingly, an op-ed in Sunday's Los Angeles Times asked such a question.

In fact, author Andrew Klavan took it a step further:

If you are reading this newspaper, the likelihood is that you agree with the Obama administration's recent attacks on conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh. That's the likelihood; here's the certainty: You've never listened to Rush Limbaugh.

That was just the beginning (h/t Gary Hall):

If the Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten is determined to establish himself as one of the nation's worst journalists when it comes to writing on the issues of abortion and Catholicism, he's doing a helluva job. His latest column on the Obama-Notre Dame controversy unfairly characterizes pro-lifers and misrepresents the scandal.

Here's how Rutten portrays pro-life Catholics who are protesting President Obama's appearance at Notre Dame:

Some people just won't be happy until the Inquisition has office space again and kindling is being piled up around the local stakes.

Puh-leeze. Rutten is completely ignorant to the fact that those who protest Obama's appearance are simply seeking to uphold what the full body of United States Catholic bishops declared five years ago:

The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.

And if Rutten or anyone else is unclear as to what those "fundamental moral principles" include, the very same document states:

[T]he killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified.

Got it?

Put Subhead HERE

The L.A. Times has always considered itself the cream of the newspaper crop in the Western U.S., the height of the industry. It is supposed to represent the best in newspaper professionalism. Papers like the L.A. Times are also held up as an example of what we don't want to lose when supporters talk of instituting newspaper industry bailouts in the halls of Congress. Well, our friends at lies.com aren't fooled!

With all the grave warnings of that excellence of newspapers that might be lost echoing in your ears, I offer an amusing example of that "excellence" for you today. Take a closer look at the accompanying photos of one of the pages in Friday's print edition of the L.A. Times. Notice that the L.A. Times rushed to press before they even tipped in the subheads and photo captions and left the dummy type in its place.

Hail the professionalism of the L.A. Times.

Media outlets including CNN, Time magazine, and the Los Angeles Times are reporting that "over 1 million" women in Brazil illegally terminate their pregnancies every year. (Abortion is illegal there, except under rare circumstances.) However, this figure appears to originate from a group called Ipas, an organization dedicated to "advancing women's reproductive rights." It openly endorses legalized abortion.

And besides the dubious nature of the source, history tells us that this "1 million" number should be looked upon very suspiciously.

Quick quiz for you. The number one enemy of solar and wind energy projects in the Mojave desert is a) Big Business b) Dick Cheney c) a Republican "cabal" d) environmentalists, with the political backing of  Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

Of course, the answer is d).

But here's, perhaps, the surprising part. The Los Angeles Times has the story (emphasis mine) in its March 25 paper:

The L.A. Times took upon itself a difficult task. The chore: to make it seem like Obama is in control of Congress at the same time that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is still a powerhouse there. The truth of the matter is that Barack Obama has revealed little influence over the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives but the Times wants to make it seem as if Obama is firmly in charge to puff his reputation. To do that, it would have to prove that Pelosi is taking a back-seat to the president. Yet, the Times also wants to show support for Pelosi. The resulting article is filled with one contradiction after another as it ends up attempting to say that both of them are in charge of the House. Quite a few journalistic back flips were made in the effort, too.

The L.A. Times headlined its piece, "Pelosi's role diminishes under Obama." This headline might tend to tell the reader that Nancy Pelosi has stepped back from her iron-fisted control of the House to allow Obama to push his agenda. Yet, even as the first six paragraphs of the piece starts that way, most of the article tends to dispute both the headline and the concept that Pelosi has relinquished any control at all to the White House. In fact, it says just the opposite, that she is just as firmly in control as ever, ceding nothing to Obama.

According to New York University instructor Jacob Appel, Kansas' notorious late-term abortionist George Tiller should be looked upon as "a genuine hero who ranks alongside Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. in the pantheon of defenders of human liberty." Good ... grief. Just when I thought I've read it all.

Appel formulated his sick view in a letter to the editor in today's Los Angeles Times (Sun. 3/22/09).

Tiller's practice is truly an abomination. His office has reportedly instructed women to expel their late-term unborn babies into a toilet. (See this eye-opening segment from the O'Reilly Factor from 12/12/2006.) Tiller currently faces 19 counts of "violating the state's late-term abortion law." Yet Appel says Tiller should be held "in esteem."

OK, this story has GOT to have been written by that satirical website The Onion! Barack Obama is about to be crowned "Newsmaker of the Year" by the National Newspaper Publishers Assn. The ceremony is to take place this afternoon,March 20, at the White House.

And here is the kicker... it's CLOSED to the press!

Seriously! This dude is getting an award from the press and he's closed the ceremony to the press. Where is the outrage? Where is the screaming about how Obama is the most "secretive president" since Bush? Where are comments about the lack of "transparency"? More to the point where are the guffaws about just how ridiculous this move is?

Could this be a sign of things to come?

Now that CNBC Chicago Mercantile Exchange reporter Rick Santelli has mysteriously disappeared from the spotlight after his criticism of President Barack Obama's mortgage proposal in February and now that CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer has been marginalized after his lackluster appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" on March 12, could the new target of the Obama machine and the left and their accomplices in the media be CNBC "The Kudlow Report" host Larry Kudlow?

James Rainey, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times, set his sights on Kudlow in his March 13 column. Kudlow's show is one of the last vestiges of pro-free market capitalism left at a time when populism has become the theme of the day.

Rainey's column, headlined as a critique of CNBC focused on two personalities - Kudlow and Cramer, even though Cramer has been raked over the coals since he made his March 3 remarks calling Obama's policies "greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president."

It seems that so-called stimulus package funding is being spread around so widely that some of its beneficiaries can't figure out how to spend it as intended.

When it became clear to a few small cities in California's Los Angeles County that they didn't have appropriate transportation projects for their promised stimulus funding, they decided to sell the rights to that funding to other nearby locales at a discount. The selling city's resulting cash would then go into its unrestricted general fund and could be spent on anything the city wished.

Apparently these transactions aren't that unusual in the topsy-turvy world of California state and municipal finance. But it was a, uh, bridge too far for LA County's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). After approving a few stimulus-related swaps (noted in stories here and here), the MTA reversed course and putting the kibosh on those and prohibiting any future deals (noted in stories here, here, and here).

Apparently it hasn't occurred to anyone, including the local media, or the New York Times's Jennifer Steinhauer, that if these municipalities really don't need and can't use the money, US taxpayers ought to be first in line to get it back.

Here's a portion of the coverage from the Whittier Daily News:

Los Angeles's NBC television affiliate must not have gotten the memo telling them that they should not utter the name of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), lest anyone reach the "wrong" conclusions.

NBC Los Angeles is the only media outlet I have found thus far to identify ACORN's presence in a story about a "disruptive display of disobedience" by members the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) at a school board meeting Tuesday (the story credit is to "Associated Press/NBC Los Angeles," but as you will see later, I found no AP story containing an ACORN reference).

Here is the story headline that the Google News crawler apparently originally found:

Look at how it changed.

"Villaraigosa affair may not be one to remember," prophesied the July 7, 2007 headline in the L.A. Times. A year and a half later, the Associated Press danced around the Democratic Los Angeles mayor's adulterous liaison with a Spanish-language reporter assigned to the city hall beat.

From today's story on his March 3 re-election accessed at CBSNews.com (emphases mine), notice how the AP pulls its punches, euphemizing the adulterous affair in the 12th paragraph of the story:

The mayor of Los Angeles easily won re-election after a bumpy first term in the nation's second-largest city, fueling speculation that he will be among contenders next year to succeed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the first Hispanic mayor in more than a century, was rewarded Tuesday with a second, four-year trip to City Hall despite an uneven first term that saw the breakup of his marriage and the defeat of his signature plan to reform city schools.

Did you hear the one about Joe Biden claiming that Louisiana under Governor Bobby Jindal is losing 400 jobs a day?

Probably not. A search at the Washington Post on "Biden 400 jobs Louisiana" (not in quotes) came back with no results. No relevant results were returned with the same searches done at the New York Times and the LA Times.

The math-challenged Biden, who infamously said during the presidential campaign that the word "jobs" has three letters (maybe you don't know about that one either), made this false claim Wednesday morning, and almost no one noticed.

One exception was TV station KSLA, which filed this report (related but not identically scripted video can be found at link; direct link to vid is here). Reporter Fred Childress's "Fact Check" told us that Biden isn't merely wrong; the Bayou State actually gained seasonally adjusted jobs in December:

The Democrats campaigned to take over the reins of the majority in Congress by promising to "drain the swamp" of a "culture of corruption" by the Republican Party. Examples of Democratic corruption or self-dealing go largely unnoticed. For two weeks now, the national media has ignored a Los Angeles Times report that Rep. Grace Napolitano has paid herself more than $150,000 in interest on $150,000 she loaned herself in her initial 1998 House campaign. (The Whittier Daily News later amended that figure upward to $205,922.) With the exception of the Hannity show on Fox News, no one else in the national media has noticed. Andrew Zajac reported on February 14:

Rep. Grace F. Napolitano (D-Norwalk) has collected tens of thousands of dollars in personal income by charging double-digit interest on money she lent her campaign 11 years ago and soliciting donations from Washington lobbyists at "debt retirement" fundraisers.

Two polls on President Barack Obama's popularity reach conclusions that could hardly be more different.

A New York Times/CBS News poll says that Obama is "benefiting from remarkably high levels of optimism and confidence among Americans about his leadership." But a Gallup poll reports slipping support, and a doubling of his disapproval rate.

What gives?

The first clue about whose poll probably more closely reflects America's mood is the over-the-top, almost Granma-like narrative coming from Jeff Zeleny and Megan Thee-Brenan at Manhattan's Old Gray Lady, whose parent company's stock price in noontime trading today is back below the cost of its Sunday edition (bolds are mine):

The L.A. Times published a story on February 9 that states that "the GOP" is "uneasy" about Rush's "self-coronation" as the voice of Republicans. But, after reading the story one realizes that it does not really prove the claim. In fact, only one person is quoted mentioning Rush at all. The rest of the story is but the Times' conjecture and the claims of "some" and "experts" but nothing that convinces that any segment of the GOP, large or small, is "uneasy" about Rush.

Instead of a story detailing those uneasy about Rush, it seems far more as if what we have here is the L.A.Times trying to create the very "uneasiness" it claims to be reporting upon.

When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and paper published in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists -- in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling -- he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.

But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg's research less than two weeks after it's publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news.

The Stieg paper's release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle & Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).

After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a major error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted today, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers.

Here's how the Stieg research showing supposed warming was received by the mainstream press:

As we've stated before, no one can challenge the awful harm wrecked upon youth at the hands of Catholic clergy. The harm is real, incredibly sad, and unspeakably damaging. But that is no excuse for the Los Angeles Times to continue its dishonest practice of false and misleading presentations on the narrative of Cardinal Roger Mahony and the Los Angeles Catholic Church abuse scandal.

The latest offense from the Times is a dishonest op-ed (Tue. 2/3/09) from ex-staffer William Lobdell, who just-so-happens to be promoting a new book that's out in three weeks.

Does anyone think that a major newspaper like the Los Angeles Times would ever allow a hateful and patently false anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim personal attack to be published in its letters to the editor? Of course not. But check out this whopper of anti-Catholic vitriol that is in the pages of the Times today (Mon. 2/2/09):

The Jesuits have a saying, "Give me the boy until he is 7, and I will give you the man." You can now add, "Give Adolf Hitler the boy until he is 7, and he will give you the pope."

RALPH WETTERHAHN
Long Beach

"For an illegal immigrant, getting into UCLA was the easy part," lamented the headline for a Groundhog Day article by Los Angeles Times's Jason Song.

"A San Pedro girl's undocumented status means no financial aid. Money is tight, classes are tough, and just getting to campus takes 2 1/2 hours," reads the subheader for Song's February 2 Column One story.

Yes, despite the national and state economies in recession and California in a major budget crunch, the L.A. Times has the chutzpah to lament the obstacles to a taxpayer-subsidized college education for an illegal immigrant.

It seems considering legal immigrants and American citizens the victims of the high social and governmental costs of illegal immigration just isn't in Song's liberal hymnal. Apparently Song's aim was to paint one Karina De La Cruz as a downtrodden Cinderella in need of a beneficent fairy godmother (emphasis mine):

As we've noted several times before, Los Angeles Times Opinion Editor Tim Rutten hardly misses an opportunity to bash the Catholic Church. So imagine my shock and amazement when I picked up his Saturday column (1/30/09). Rutten rips a reported federal grand jury investigation of L.A. Cardinal Roger Mahony's handling of the abuse scandal as "frivolous" and "overreaching." (For the record, the archdiocese's attorney has said that he was told that Mahony is not a target of an inquiry.)

Did a wave of clarity and sanity suddenly overcome Rutten? Rather than bellowing the hysterical falsehoods that have often been aired in the Times and in the media in recent years, Rutten's must-read piece wipes away a number of myths.

The formerly family friendly cable network "ABC Family" has been airing sexually oriented programs of late that are riling parents of young children.

In particular, the hit series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" is so racy that viewer discretion is advised.

Such seems to go against the concept of a "family" channel, wouldn't you think?

On Sunday, The Los Angeles Times addressed the growing debate (sneak peek video of upcoming "Secret Life" season premiere embedded below the fold):