When serious people criticize the media, they talk about serious things: Is the news being skewed? Is the public getting an incomplete picture due to biased coverage? Does the follow-the-leader approach of the mainstream media turn minor stories into major scandals? And so on.
But when the mainstream media chooses to criticize itself, it becomes consumed by matters that have almost nothing to do with the general sense that there is something grotesquely off about the way things are written about in America’s newspapers. Was a photograph cropped incorrectly, or was it photoshopped inappropriately? Was a person’s race mentioned for no good reason? Are enough women represented on op-ed pages? Why aren’t more copy editors African-American?
The latest example of the ridiculous self-examination activities at American newspapers is the “scandal” at the Los Angeles Times. Evidently the paper’s senior leadership thought it would be a good idea to get “guest editors” to put out its Sunday opinion section. So the editorial-page editor secured the services of Brian Grazer. It happens that Grazer is an Academy-Award winning producer and one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, despite his really bad haircut.
Grazer would seem to fit the bill perfectly. Only it turns out he engages a PR firm that employs the editorial-page editor’s girlfriend. And so the screams of “CONFLICT OF INTEREST! CONFLICT OF INTEREST!” rang out all over Southern California.
This is absurd. Beyond absurd. The L.A. Times was actually lucky to score Grazer for its laughable “guest editor” slot, and if the Editorial Page Editor used his girlfriend to help — or even took advice from her on whom to hire — so what? The problem with the L.A. Times isn’t that its Editorial Page Editor dates a PR person who served as a go-between for him with Brian Grazer. The problem with the L.A. Times is that it came up with the “guest editor” idea in the first place.
The problem with the L.A. Times is that it is a dull, characterless, mindlessly liberal piece of junk whose managers don’t know the difference between a real scandal — the scandal that is putting out a newspaper as bad as the Times in the second largest city in the country — and a fake one.
Which is par for the course when the newspaper industry decides to police itself.