The Self-Immolation of the Los Angeles Times

The Washington Post has struggled with its growing struggle of integrity and staffing issues. They were fishing around for the worst story they could find to impugn the character of Judge Roy Moore in his special election bid for the US Senate.

Even though the hollow, hateful smears brought down his bid, the Washington Post has lost what little integrity they claimed to carry from henceforth.

Another liberal rag, the Los Angeles Times, published a hit piece against me, but in spite of their best efforts, more people came out in support for me and what I stand for. Those liberals who tried to use the story against me, would have attacked me with or without the LA Times article.

Now the Los Angeles Times is the featured story as the paper's circulation crumbles and the editorial staff gets purged.

‘Anything could happen’: Amid newsroom clashes, Los Angeles Times becomes its own story
By Paul Farhi January 26 at 6:09 PM 

The news has been frenetic lately for reporters at the Los Angeles Times. Massive wildfires swept a region just getting over a historic drought, followed by deadly mudslides, and then the explosive Turpin family child-abuse saga — a chain of events that tested the chops of the prizewinning newsroom.


They are losing staff every day. They can't keep up with operating costs, and more readers are fed up with fake news

But some of the biggest news at the Times has been coming from within its downtown headquarters. The paper — one of the largest and most important news organizations in America — has been beset by turmoil the past two weeks, prompting questions about its future.


The Tribune Company has sold off shares and interests in buildings and other real estate. They have been laying off workers, and they have cycled through one editor after another.

After decades of successful resistance by management and years of demoralizing cutbacks, the Times’s journalists voted overwhelmingly last week to unionize. Before bargaining can begin, however, reporters are concerned about a plan by the Times’s management to reorganize the way the paper produces news.


The push to unionize is a last-ditch attempt for those overpaid liberal propagandists to hold onto their jobs. What they do not realize, however, is that unionization does not guarantee a job. They are not the owners of all the resources and staffing. The company owners get to decide what they do with their printing presses, digital machines, etc.

They can choose to shut down the paper altogether, sell off all their materiel, and put all the journalists on the street.

Under a new “pyramid” structure proposed this month, a network of nonstaff contributors would produce the bulk of the information the Times publishes online. Reporters say the paper has quietly begun hiring a cadre of editors to supervise the reorganization, which would effectively create a new company within the company.

Yes, people who will not act like a bunch of entitled social justice warriors who think that the world owes them … everything. These hacks are predominantly straight out of college, where they have been taught to see the world through a Marxist conflict-theory lens.

They don't report the news as much as promote a narrative.

The man who introduced the plan — blindsiding the newsroom when he presented it to an investor conference in New York — was publisher Ross Levinsohn, the fifth person to hold that title in the past five years. Last week, Levinsohn was suspended by the paper’s owner, Chicago-based Tronc, after NPR revealed a series of sexual harassment allegations against him in previous jobs. The company said it is investigating.


Ouch! More #MeToo

The state of play at the Times, as well as the existential dread swirling around it, was neatly summarized in a tweet this week by Matt Pearce, a Times national reporter and an organizer of the union effort: “Basically, anything could happen at this point at the L.A. Times and people in the newsroom could only be half surprised by it. We’re hiring [editors] that aren’t being announced to the newsroom, our publisher wants to turn us into a pyramid, and by the way, he’s under investigation.”

In fact, more shoes are dropping.

On Thursday, reporters protested after top editor Lewis D’Vorkin suspended Kimi Yoshino, the Times’s financial editor. His reason was unclear — neither party would comment — but Times reporters say D’Vorkin suspected that Yoshino had been a source for other media reports about the Times, including an unflattering profile of D’Vorkin in the Columbia Journalism Review, which dubbed him “LA journalism’s ‘Prince of Darkness.’ ”


Now the reporters are ratting out their editors. So much distrust, but the reporters can thank themselves for creating this hostile environment. Unions create conflict rather than resolve conflict. The pit workers against workers, and workers against management, and objective journalism is completely lost in the process.

“We were very upset to learn yesterday that Kimi was abruptly asked to take a leave of absence and not even permitted to return to her office to collect her belongings and turn off her laptop,” said a letter signed by Times business journalists and promptly disseminated online. “This treatment of Kimi is a serious cause for concern.”

Aww. Poor babies!

Did they forget that the newsroom belongs to the owners, not the workers? I wonder also how much money the reporters are losing because they have to pay union dues to a union which has no incentive to work for the workers.

A spokeswoman for Tronc said it could not comment on employee matters.

D’Vorkin, who took over as Times editor in November, is a controversial figure in media circles. At Forbes, he undertook some unorthodox steps to arrest the magazine’s declining fortunes — including setting up a network of outside contributors to write stories for Forbes.com, some unpaid and some compensated on the basis of how many readers their stories attracted. He also permitted ads that blurred the lines between promotional content and news stories.


OK …

In other words, D'Vorkin recognized the shifting media market and responded accordingly. Unions will never learn.

As the Times newsroom organizing committee characterized it in a letter to Tronc’s board on Tuesday, D’Vorkin “devalued Forbes’ journalism by sullying it with unpaid contributor content, pay-for-clicks schemes and troubling presentations of advertorial.”

Such is the fate of journalism. Everyone of us can tell stories, now, that no one can silence. The corporate leaders along the coasts cannot stop the news from coming forward anymore. Times are changing, and liberal corporate media cannot adjust anymore.

Only days into his new job at the Times, D’Vorkin drew the enmity of many in his newsroom by his response to complaints lodged by the Disney Co. over a Times series that detailed Disney’s influence over city officials in Anaheim, home of Disneyland. In the face of Disney executives’ protests, D’Vorkin ordered his journalists not to promote the Times’s own stories on social media. The entertainment giant is a key advertiser as well as a news source for the Times.


Wow! Media giants have turned into media whores! But this is not really news. The Los Angeles Times has been covering for liberals and Democratic politicians for decades. They are just getting really sloppy and brazen about it.

He also declined to reveal details of his meeting with Disney executives about the issue or to publish more than a few paragraphs about the paper’s discussions with the company, which had drawn national attention. D’Vorkin declined to comment for this article, referring a reporter to Tronc’s corporate spokesman.


Newspaper journalists are turning into spokesmen trying to sell a product. Nothing more.

The non-response appears to go to the heart of one of the central complaints by people at the paper: that a company engaged in communications doesn’t communicate very well with its own employees.


Why should they? The paper has not communicated the truth with the public for decades.

“It’s frustrating to hear about plans that we weren’t consulted about,” Anthony Pesce, a Times data journalist, told The Washington Post. “This paper is comprised of smart and engaged journalists who want nothing more than to see [the paper] succeed.”


Smart? Not really, considering that one of their reporters openly advertisers her connection with rabid anti-Semite Helen Thomas:

Amid the tumult, the Times has produced some of the best journalism in its 136-year history. In addition to its penetrating series about Disney, it broke a huge scandal in July involving a former dean at the University of Southern California’s medical school. It has been a leader in revealing sexual harassment allegations against leading Hollywood figures, such as directors James Toback and Brett Ratner. And in 2016, it won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for its coverage of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, its 44th Pulitzer.

But even those triumphs have come at a price. In August, Tronc fired the paper’s four top editors following an investigation triggered by staff complaints about the handling of major stories, including those about the USC dean.


WOW!

Tronc (the unusual new name is shorthand for Tribune Online Content) is an offshoot of the long-troubled Tribune Co., which emerged from bankruptcy protection in 2012. Tronc owns what had been Tribune Co.’s newspaper assets, including the Times, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News.

And these newspapers are practically giving away their online content, offering 10 weeks of unlimited access on websites for $1.

And still it seems that most readers are not biting.

Like almost every newspaper in the United States, the Times and its parent company has been buffeted for years by a precipitous decline in advertising and the flight of subscribers. During the 1990s, the Times had more than 1,000 journalists. It now employs about 400. Still, the events of recent days seem to have left both the newsroom and its readers a bit dazed and unsure of what’s coming next.


Bankruptcy. Layoffs. Oblivion.

One Times reader conveyed the bafflement in a tweet on Friday: “I subscribe to LAT b/c I think it’s impt to support my local paper, & their journalists do great work. But what’s going on there is awful. Is it helpful or counterproductive for me to cancel my subscription?”


Helpful.


Final Reflection


I am glad to see that Los Angeles Times go up in flames, and to see the conflagration break out within its own ranks. Elected officials, conservatives, Christians, grassroots activists concerned about their communities have had to contend with the liberal Fake News media for decades. There was so little that individuals could do at the time, since newspapers were the biggest megaphones in the public sphere and they dictated what people knew and did not know.

We lost Vietnam in large part because Walter Cronkite declared that the US forced has lost Vietnam. In fact, the military expeditions were becoming successful, and it is all wrong. The media had inordinate power and little accountability. They printed a false story, and the devastating consequences lasted for months if not years. Retractions were never adequate, and in many cases, media giants were printing lies or unsubstantiated reports.

Not good.

Now the corrupt, liberal media is getting the epic comeuppance! Boy, do they deserve it,