[I'll take a page from the Captain Ed playbook and repost this one for those that might have missed it over the holidays. It was originally posted on Christmas Eve eve. This all started out with my complaint email to the LAT Readers' Representative over what I thought was a particularly vile and disgusting anti-war/anti-Bush cartoon by the cartoonist known by the moniker Mr. Fish. Be sure and take your blood pressure meds before following any of those links!]

This is the gist of what I will be sending to Kent Zelas, assistant Readers’ Representative for the LA Times in response to this request from him to me:

Since you also mentioned that you see a leftward bias in the reporting in the paper, however, I would be interested to know of specific examples from the news sections so that I can share those with the editors there.

They aim to give the news straight-up and want to know where readers are seeing any kind of slant. [emph. mine]

I truly don’t believe that the LA Times news section writers and editors give a gnat’s whit if I, or anyone else, thinks that their stories are biased toward the Liberal perspective, but hey, where’s the sport if I don’t respond? Besides, since Patrick Frey has done such a wonderful job tracking this over the last few years it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel. So I’ll start with some of my observations via links to posts here at “Okie”:

Dear Kent –

I have outlined below a short laundry list of articles that have appeared in the LAT news sections over the past year that I believe show a deep Leftward bias at the paper and which I have written about on my blog, Okie on the Lam. In addition to that, there is a link to a blogger that goes by the moniker of “Patterico” who makes me look like a rank amateur with his yearly wrap-up of LAT foibles.

From the content in the “letters to the editor” that are selected for printing, it does appear that your paper is serving its intended audience, as the majority of those read like they come from the minds of KPFK listeners. My best guess is that your paper’s editorial philosophy and biased news reporting have caused the greater part of your former right/center-right readers to cancel their subscriptions and to look elsewhere for news and news analysis. That is a shame really, because the LAT is in no financial position to lose anymore readership, as it has done continually for the last few years, and Los Angeles deserves a strong public voice in print — and that means that all of those living in the LA basin should be represented — conservatives, moderates and liberals alike. I don’t believe that your paper is serving this function except for the few conservative columns that are run in the Op-Ed section, which mainly function to stir up the more radical Lefties that write those letters-to-ed that often make me stammer in wonder, “They live among us — yipes!”

For my part, I don’t mind bias if the party putting it out is honest about it. At least you know that they are aware and that it is a conscious act and one can read through it, as obnoxious as that can be sometimes. It’s too bad that the Leftward bias isn’t contained to the Op-Ed and news analysis pages and kept out of the Who-What-When-Where-Why articles that should simply be just News. So Kent, if you are truly curious, follow some of the links below to see how this center-right blogger perceives your newspaper — but to get the entire gist of just how deep the Leftward bias runs at the LAT, don’t pass up Patterico’s yearly reviews. Only those that refuse to see — won’t see.

– “Okie”

• During the Israel/Hezbollah War — unabashed support for the Lebanese based Hezbollah and a denigration of Israel. Summed up by the pictures from Qana featuring “Green Helmet”.
• An admission from Evan Maxwell (former LA Times writer) that the leaders at the paper consider it their mission to “shape the debate the rest of us engage in”, mostly in a partisan manner.
• Even on the Entertainment Section, Calendar, their writers, like Tim Rutten, just can’t help but hang their Liberal bias out there for all to see. I even gave ol’ Tim an award for this back in April for his saying that the reporters that leaked the classified information on the NSA warrantless wiretaps on al-Qaeda communications coming “into” the US were providing an “extraordinary public service”. Way to go, Timmy!
• The Times writers/editors seemingly couldn’t understand that the Valerie Plame leak was a non-event, but leaking the NSA & SWIFT anti-terror programs were going to lead to more American deaths in the future.
• It’s Timmy Rutten again, this time thinking-out-loud in print that his rights as a reporter trump my rights to not get killed by a terrorist!
• The LA Times Calendar section does a puff-piece on Rob Reiner instead of roasting him on a spit for his illegal use of 23 million dollars of public funds to gather signatures for his Prop.82, another soak-the-rich tax to fund a mandatory state-controlled pre-school program.
• Lying about Katrina.
• Starting ’06 off right, (or rather make that Left), with the down playing the Democrats that were also caught up in the Abramoff scandal and the start of labeling Iraqi terrorists as “rebels”. Come to think of it, they never did pay much attention to Harry Reid’s highly questionable land deals either!
• Lying by omission in the Embryonic Stem Cell debate.
• Spinning down the good economic news of 2006.
• The cowardly non-publishing of the Mohammad Cartoons.

Over at Patterico’s Pontifications, Patrick gave his 2005 year-in-review of all the LA Times Liberal foibles:

This year’s installment will cover familiar topics, such as general anti-Republican and pro-Democrat bias, culture wars issues, and media coverage. It will also cover events specific to the year, with a heavy emphasis on judicial confirmation battles, the war in Iraq and the war on terror, and other miscellaneous issues.

This post summarizes an entire year’s worth of work documenting omissions, distortions, and misrepresentations by this newspaper. When someone truly takes the time to provide specific examples of liberal bias in the news media, the result can be voluminous, and this post is no exception. Feel free to bookmark it and return to it in the coming days, browsing through the categories as they interest you.

Can’t wait for his review of 2006! Don’t have to wait — Here’s Patterico’s 2006 wrap-up of the LAT’s less-finer moments!

As far as I’m concerned, one of the most egregious affronts to Joe Blow America this last year was a tag-team match by the LA Times and The New York Times — The determined act of publishing highly-damaging “Classified Information” about the SWIFT-money-transfer investigations — the anti-terrorist program that tracked terrorist funding via International monetary transfers what seemed like mere weeks after exposing the “classified” NSA program to track incoming al-Qaeda communications. Even the arrogant NYT has since come forward and in print stated that this program was legal, and they had not discovered any abuses by the Bush administration — but they still believed that they had the right and the “duty” to their readers to print the stories. My comments about this were not kind, to say the least. I don’t buy their argument for why they did it, either.

So, I gave NYT’s Keller and the LAT’s Baquet an award — just like ol’ Timmy’s.

That should be enough to keep my good buddy, the assistant readers’ rep busy into the new year — but I doubt that he’ll follow any of those links. After all, everyone in the newsroom of the Los Angeles Times knows that they aren’t biased — they’re just right . . . about everything.

Which makes them [still] mostly wrong . . . about everything. (db)

Technorati Tags: Liberal Media Bias, Los Angeles Times, LAT, LA Times, Patterico’s Pontifications

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Blogger News, Media Bias. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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