Grazergate, the epilogue
David Hiller's decision to kill the Brian Grazer section this Sunday makes my continued tenure as Los Angeles Times editorial page editor untenable. The person in this job needs to have an unimpeachable integrity, and Hiller's decision amounts to a vote of no confidence in my continued leadership.
I regret that my failure to anticipate and adequately address the perception of a conflict in this matter has placed Hiller -- whom I like and respect a great deal, incidentally -- and my colleagues on the editorial board in such an awkward position, not to mention Brian Grazer and Kelly Mullens, who did nothing wrong here but have been caught up in all this. Nick Goldberg and Michael Newman are two of the smartest, most talented people I have worked with, and any lapses in judgment here were mine, not theirs.
I accept responsibility for creating this appearance problem, though I also maintain that the newspaper is overreacting today. We are depriving readers of an interesting, serious section that is beyond reproach, and unfairly insulting the individuals we approached to participate in this guest editor program by telling them it is a corrupt concept. How we come about this decision when 24 hours ago the managing editor of this newspaper was assuring me he didn't see a story after I walked him through the facts, and while Hiller maintains we did nothing wrong, is a bit perplexing. In trying to keep up with the blogosphere, and boasting about their ability to go after their own, navel-gazing newsrooms run the risk of becoming parodies of themselves.
Among the biggest possible conflicts of interest a newspaper can enter into is to have the same people involved in news coverage running opinion pages. I am proud of the fact that Jeff Johnson, Dean Baquet and I fully separated the opinion pages from the newsroom at the Times. I accept my share of the responsibility for placing the Times in this predicament, but I will not be lectured on ethics by some ostensibly objective news reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects, or who have suggested that our editorial page coordinate more closely with the newsroom's agenda, and I strongly urge the present and future leadership of the paper to resist the cries to revisit the separation between news and opinion that we have achieved.
We're a long ways removed from the fall of 2004 when Michael Kinsley and John Carroll lured me out to the West Coast, with promises of investing more resources on the LAT opinion pages and web site. Some of the retrenchment is understandable given the business fundamentals, but I have been alarmed recently by the company's failure to acknowledge that our opinion journalism, central to the paper's role as a virtual town square for community debate and dialogue, should not be crudely scaled back as part of across-the-board cuts. Decisions being made now to cut the one part of the paper that is predominantly about ideas and community voices go too far in my view, and are shortsighted.
Still, I am proud of what we've accomplished in the last two years. The Times has a provocative editorial page of intellectual integrity that adheres to principles over time, rather than the tactical, shrill partisanship that has become too much the norm of our public discourse and plenty of other editorial pages. The op-ed page continues to provide a lively mix of opinion from all quarters, and we have put in place a strong roster of weekly op-ed columnists and contributing editors. Sunday's Current is firing on all cylinders and we have recently launched a series of online-only feautres, including more columns, weekly online chats, weeklong debates and other features.
It has been a tremendous privilege working here on Spring Street and being associated with the talented team of opinionators on the second floor, and the vast majority of other journalists at the Times building and around the world who are hugely talented and committed.
I am sorry I let you down,
Andrés
So in the same week I find out I am going to get to read Brian Grazer's (WHO?) insightful comments this coming Sunday, and those of his friends including the ever-inquisitive Ron Howard, we find out the section is cancelled, Tribune cancels the Hollywood Christmas Parade (through their KTLA outlet; KTLA said they couldn't "devote the right amount of lights, cameras, etc" to the event, thus essentially killing it, and probably killing Johnny Grant, too --- There may be a penthouse suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt available, and soon), we also find out from Andres Martinez: 1) It's okay for a paper to have an APPEARANCE of a conflict of interest, and, 2) The newsroom has an "agenda". As someone tangentially involved in the "Staples Debacle" in 1999 (and before), it is frightening to witness just how low a once-great newspaper can fall. The days of Jack Smith, Jim Murray and great world and national coverage are long over; some of the local columnists still appear to have some balls (including Patt The Hatt) --- And solid local coverage has been in the past ever since the buy-outs of the '90s got rid of most of the paper's best writers and photogs. So, here's MY idea: Let Big Willy Robinson, who spoke so eloquently at Otis' funeral (and suddenly, scaring the hell out of the security agents and the other uptights in that Pasadena church), take over the paper for a few weeks. Yeah, he isn't from west of the 405, so practically no one in the executive suites will know who he is (hell, the new guys wouldn't know anyone from LOS ANGELES, much less West LA), but Big Willy could crack the whip and have the paper cover the REAL Los Angeles ... You know, the one the Times' execs drive through in their 7-series Beemers on the way to work ... or whatever it is they think they're doing ... I've been reading the paper for over 35 years, essentially raised on it, got into journalism because of it (and their Watergate coverage) and even worked for it for a time ... This is all very, very sad ... Worked for a decade at KTLA, too, and am also witnessing the end of that LA institution, under the same ownership in Chi-town ... Very sad and strange.
Posted by: Steve Parker | March 22, 2007 at 11:23 PM
Put the Whale out of its misery.
LA is a hard metropolitan area to do a newspaper in. I despise the Times's politics, but my main problem is that it is so BOOOORING!
I don't care if the OpEd Editor is poking a PR-person. Seems like a tempest in a teapot to me. I just wish there was something vaguely interesting in the paper.
Posted by: Grumpy Old Man | March 22, 2007 at 10:52 PM
The Times of old are gone and surely will be dead soon. I use to enjoy the Times when I grew up in LA (60's and 70's). Since then it has looked like a NASCAR race: go fast and keep turning left. When they dumped Rameriz from the oped page, and put Brownstiens commentary pieces in section A, then I was done even buying the paper once in awhile at the rack. Maybe some of the secularist oped writers can say an extra prayer for the Times tonight.
Posted by: paul miner | March 22, 2007 at 09:45 PM
It's a wonder this man became a newspaper editor, since he cannot craft a coherent sentence.
Posted by: JF | March 22, 2007 at 09:29 PM
Mr. Martinez had his girlfriend's friend contibute to whatever section he heads. Big deal! The real world mirrors this scenario. Friends help friends get jobs all the time. It's called "networking"-- hailed as a good thing, by some, and clearly, as a bad thing by others. Maybe someone else wanted to job! The LA Times has just entered the world of reality television. I can't believe it!
Posted by: Kathy Koupai | March 22, 2007 at 09:27 PM
So the guy who linked to the L.A. Times story from Drudge wants only objective news? Hmmm.
I used to be a faithful reader of the L.A. Times editorial and op-ed pages, and I still turn to them daily. But now it's only out of habit. I give the pages a quick look and turn elsewhere. Why? Where those pages used to be the liveliest and most interesting in the paper, now they're simply the most boring, virtually moribund. My suspicion is that Robert Scheer and the cartoonist Ramirez were canned simply because they were the highest-paid guys on the page. The present collection of bland, inoffensive, ineffectual columnists and commentators were chosen primarily, I suspect, because they work cheap. They certainly weren't chosen because they're lively, interesting writers or provocative, outspoken thinkers.
Posted by: Bob Laurence | March 22, 2007 at 09:05 PM
Gee, a Lib newspaper losing people and imploding? What does that tell you?
Posted by: Rocco Tool | March 22, 2007 at 09:03 PM
My E-mail address is andycyber@aim.com if you want to comment on what I just said.
Posted by: phoenixandrew | March 22, 2007 at 08:25 PM
I hope The Chandlers succeed in buying out Tribune. It's the only way to restore sanity to the L.A. Times. After all, it was The Chandlers that created the L.A. Times and Tribune is an unprofessionally run company owned by ignorant midwesterners who don't know jack about running a newspaper or Los Angeles in that regard.
Posted by: phoenixandrew | March 22, 2007 at 08:23 PM
Too bad... I remember the fiasco with Staples... why is it that the hard working grubby reporters and writers are always the ones with the 'high standards' of their profession? Why is it that the 'Management' is ALWAYS messing up?
This was a great paper. Once.
I remember Otis Chandler. You are NO Otis Chandler.
I knew Otis Chandler. I worked for Otis Chandler.
I loved the Los Angeles Times.
This is like "Katherine Graham. and Captian Crunch... Honor and excellence is a thing of the past... there is no heroism here... We can't even trust you now. The job you did on 'Arnold' stopped my 27 years of subscriptions. For shame... what lies. what bias. How nasty.
Now, with this, and your sagging profits and the Trib screwing around cutting things, and people..., *No more Ramirez - what a talent!) and printing only bias half-truth liberal garbage. I'm so sick of looking at dead soldiers... you don;t even mention any valor or heroism...maybe you don't know the meaning of the word. Now, the Hollywood factor of influence...(wait til Geffin gets hold of you or Eli or some other ego-infested billionaire) . . . your credibility is gone... and now, no one wiil even notice, or care, and it's not coming back.
Only those who there when it was great will care. We made it great.
You are not even trying.
Posted by: jessica jesek | March 22, 2007 at 08:19 PM
Isn't it time we move the White House to Hollywood?
There a few great actors with "presidential experience" ~ Martin Sheen to name one. Every time I watch "American President" I want Michael Douglas in the white house! All the good guy and bad guys are ready to serve.
I would love to see Hollywood in charge of our country & national security because the news would be good news & no one can sell a story like Hollywood ~ it would seem like heaven.
These people have "scripts" - the "playbooks to whip this country in shape.
Best of all, they would says nice nice things about the good old U.S.A. because they would be in charge.
Posted by: Patsy | March 22, 2007 at 07:59 PM
Maxine,
He doesn't even look Mexican? Should Mr. Martinez be wearing a shorn wifebeater and khakis by Dickies to appease your concept of what a Mexican should look like? Maybe even keep a couple of roosters by his desk?
Believe me, as a longtime journalist, having a "z" at the end of your name DOES NOT help you climb the career ladder. That only works if you're a D-cup blonde or if your last name ends in "-ski," "-itz" or "-enthal."
Cheers,
Rick Gomez
PS: I understand the word "bi-racial" is preferred to mulatto. Please mention this at your Klan meeting.
Posted by: Rick G. | March 22, 2007 at 07:48 PM
Friends:
Let's face it: the LA times is a very terrible, boring and predictable newspaper. And that's what it was long before what somebody called the "hog butchers" in Chicago came to own it.
Compapre the LA Times, leaving out its "Metro" or entertainment sections, with similarly-pared sections of the NY Times, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hartford Courant, Portland Press Herald (ME), The Oregonian (Portland, OR), The Philadelphia Enquier - or a zillion other clones.
They're all the same. And, editorially - at least with regard to national issues - they're still the same. Read one, and you've read them all. They're all either "outraged" or "disappointed" about the same thing - or they're all demanding investigations into the same thing - or they're all endorsing the same national candidates who say the same thing.
Yet, the santimony drips and drips. News writers, editors, and opinion columnists are so blinded by their self-love and regard that any larger financial stumbling on their paper's part has to be - just has to be - due to the "suits" in Chicago or wherever - meddling or cost-cutting - or otherwise compromising journalistic "integrity" for the almighty advertising dollar.
Note to LA Time folks: Get over yourselves. You are not the voice of anybody but, well, yourselves. You write sometimes-catchy things that often aspire to what I saw in high school writing when it comes to government, science, foreign affairs, etc.
It's perhaps time to recognize that you and your bretheren are reaching irrelevancy. The web has brought just too many competing stories and views for you to stand above it all - as keepers of some kind of great reporting or analytical traditon.
No, it's not over yet for you. But the end is coming.
You sense it, too. Why else invite a Hollywood producer (a surely rare and never-heard voice in LA's "diverse community"), whose employee is allegedly banging one of your employees, to be a featured editor?
You did it because it was a cute gimmick. And, lacking any other approach to clone journalism, that's all you have.
Get some real jobs. It might help you to see some real diversity.
Sincerely,
Rick Bornemann
Posted by: Rick Bornemann | March 22, 2007 at 07:08 PM
Funny, Andres Martinez doesn't look the least bit Mexican.
Not even Mulatto, not even Half-breed.
I love how Caucasians tack on a "z" to their last name to move up the career ladder!
Love, Maxine
Posted by: Maxine Weiss | March 22, 2007 at 06:54 PM
What we are talking about here is nothing more than greed, money and sex.
Exploitation of all is nothing new.
But what is, is the Internet.
Lets welcome the LA Times showing the courage to post up this post that simply asks its readers, opinionators - a word I had never heard before - the board of directors of the LA Times, its suppliers, employees and independent contractors to start the road to becoming “independent thinkers” by simply reading and then commenting on Hollywood blockbuster author Edward Jay Epstein's, THE DIAMOND INVENTION that talks to the most devious mafia of mafia, price fixing of price fixing organizations able, the result of the U.S. Justice Department as well as the United States Congress “turning a blind eye” to our sacrosanct Anti-Trust-Anti-Monopolies-Anti-Price Fixing laws, to price their own currency, that I refer to by its accurate name, Diamond Currency, at more than a barrel of oil, resulting in the DeBeers-Anglo American Cartel, the cartel of cartels, the special interest of special interest group to be in "command and control" of not simply the diamond drilling bit market but each and every market including the stock market, real estate market, insurance market etc etc and of course all the currency and commodity markets.
I would know.
I was destined to take over from my father’s first cousin, David Moshal-Gevisser Englehard Oppenheimer, the American head of the DAAC but I chose “wisely”, relying on my “conscience”.
“Gewissen” is “conscience” in Germany.
In German, “Gevisser” is “certain”.
Assessing risk in “rigged markets” is my business.
Gary S. Gevisser
[Word count 263]
Posted by: Gary S. Gevisser | March 22, 2007 at 06:52 PM
I'm struck by the anger in so many of these posts. For all its foibles and failings, the Times is indisputably a great newspaper, with the resources necessary to find out the truth about important questions. Should the Times fail, those who imagine LA would be a better place without it would find themselves bitterly sorry.
Posted by: Jack | March 22, 2007 at 06:24 PM
This comment was right:
"The Times editorial page rails constantly over not only actual conflicts of interest in politics but also excoriates businesspersons and politicians for the "appearance" of conflicts of interest - try the Getty and Eli Broad's Brentwood property purchase, or Harry Reid's dealings in Nevada real estate, for example - or maybe the innuendo with regard to just about every Republican politician in the country."
Karma is a bitch. Why do I think the cardinal will not be lighting a candle for your hypocritical souls tonight.
Posted by: retired | March 22, 2007 at 06:16 PM
"Current" section will live on if their sales people can generate enough column inch revenue; it will continue to be in a coma, otherwise. Nothing happens until someone sells something. Pull the plug. Put the Los Angeles Times out of our misery. They shoot horses, don't they?
Posted by: bg mendell | March 22, 2007 at 06:07 PM
Regardless of the conflict of interest, having Brian Gazer, the George Bush of Hollywood (i.e. the Stupidest Man in the Room), do anything, is beyond insane.
I wish I could cancel my subscription AGAIN.
Posted by: Shoes4Industy | March 22, 2007 at 05:56 PM
Just this morning, as I slipped the Times out of its plastic sheath, my wife and I discussed our growing disappointment in the paper we've subscribed to for thirty-some years. It was a close call, but we decided not to give up on the paper, despite its atavistic A-section redesign, despite the scarcity of hard news on page 1, despite the utterly useless innovation of an Image section, and despite the puerile concept of a "guest editor of the week" for Current. But then we hadn't gotten to the Business section and read about Grazergate yet.
As so many other commenters have asserted, the problem here is NOT any unethical relationship between editor and opinion-maker--nor even the appearance of such. (And most assuredly the issue is not any ultra-liberal political bias of the paper in general! That one doesn't even merit a serious denial.) Mr. Martinez let readers down when he cooked up the guest editor plan and didn't understand how bush league it is or how much this first try seems to pander to a particular industry in town, when the paper would very much like to avoid both impressions.
Whatever the excuses about timing, it is obvious that Martinez and Ms. Mullens were dating, that Mr. Grazer was playing Journalist for a Day at the Times on Martinez's sound stage, and that Mullens was promoting Grazer's featured role to the hilt--all at the same time. And no one told the studio chief until the middle of this week. Does that indicate the kind of judgment the position of Editorial Page Editor requires?
And while I'm here, let's look at Martinez's malicious accusation that he is being "lectured on ethics by some ostensibly objective news reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects, or who have suggested that our editorial page coordinate more closely with the newsroom's agenda..." As a resident of Santa Barbara, where in the past nine months we've had our daily newspaper of record stolen from us by a nut-case billionaire making these very same phony accusations about her own newsroom employees, I have to wonder if perhaps the Times wouldn't like to borrow Wendy McCaw for a year or two and sort those issues out in a decisive way.
Posted by: Chas. Clouse | March 22, 2007 at 05:44 PM
So there wont be a current section anymore? Ok name it something else and put in on Mondays.
Posted by: jonanepenthe | March 22, 2007 at 05:38 PM
The suggestion that those who might have some kind of professional interest in what the Times prints, that they shouldn't be permitted to edit the opinion page, it seems to me that there's an insult underlying that suggestion and that it's directed at every thinking person who might read the Times.
If you're suggesting that everyday people like me, that we're too dumb, that we believe everything the LA Times prints in its opinion page--that we're incapable of independent thought. ...that, with our tiny little minds, that we can't be expected to think for ourselves--not after we've read something edited by someone who may have an interest in what we read. If that's what's being suggested, then I don't know how to interpret it as anything other than an insult.
The LA Times should be free to take whatever steps it thinks are necessary to assuage those who can only tolerate opinions edited by certain people. I ask interested parties to note, however, that people like me will continue to find the opinion page interesting and persuasive or not regardless of who the editors are and the nature of their motivation.
Posted by: Ken Shultz | March 22, 2007 at 05:37 PM
Columbia Journalism Review? Columbia? Isn't that like, say, getting your information by reading, say, the Los Angeles Times? Columbia? Wasn't
that the place where Al Gore was a guest lecturer? That is so, say, heart
...er Global Warming.
Posted by: bg mendell | March 22, 2007 at 05:34 PM
I'm still laughing over "I will not be lectured on ethics by some ostensibly objective news reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects, or who have suggested that our editorial page coordinate more closely with the newsroom's agenda,..."
Dude, if you can't recognize how mind-bogglingly asinine that graf reads, it's a good thing you quit.
Posted by: LeatherPenguin | March 22, 2007 at 05:28 PM
I'm confused, Mr. Martinez. You say you're resigning because David Hiller's decision amounted to a vote of no confidence, but then you complain about cutbacks in the opinion section which you feel go too far and are short-sighted. Apparently those cutbacks were not enough to prompt you to resign in protest. What's the point of mentioning them as part of the explanation of your resignation?
Posted by: Rob C. | March 22, 2007 at 05:26 PM