Patterico's Pontifications

5/15/2005

L.A. Times Sunday Opinion Section is Excellent Today

Filed under: Dog Trainer,Immigration — Patterico @ 11:26 am



Wow. Today’s L.A. Times Sunday Opinion section is worth a read. It’s packed with sensible commentary. If the editors could pull this off every Sunday, I might actually encourage some of you to resubscribe.

My favorite piece is titled Read My Lips: Hire Some Conservatives, by author Andrew Klavan. The piece begins:

Look, I’m really busy right now but, all right, I’ll take five minutes to solve the problems of the mainstream media. I mean, ratings for network news are at an all-time low, newspaper readership is falling off the chart, the public’s trust in journalists is steadily eroding — the least I can do is sacrifice one coffee break in order to sort things out. It doesn’t require internal studies or revamped formats. Just three little words of advice will fix every one of their troubles: Hire some conservatives.

I don’t mean hire a conservative. I don’t mean cover conservatives. I don’t mean allow conservatives to express a minority opinion on your Op-Ed page or argue at the top of their lungs on some yes/no, black/white, point/counterpoint debate program. I mean that at ABC, CBS, NBC, the Los Angeles Times et al, a substantial proportion of the reporters who cover stories, and the editors who assign and shape those stories, should be people with conservative beliefs. The rest can continue to be what they are now: left-wingers who live under the delusion that they’re moderates.

There’s a lot more gold in the piece, but I particularly like this bit:

By hiring some conservatives to balance such bias, news outlets may begin to restore the idea that they are, in fact, news outlets, instead of, say, elite would-be opinion-makers instructing us in right thinking by manipulating reportage and distorting facts.

This guy can guest-blog for me any time.

Also worth highlighting is a piece by Times contributing editor Gregory Rodriguez, titled Race Is His Magic Shield. It argues that Antonio Villaraigosa’s ethnicity “has shielded him from tough questions about his character.”

But it doesn’t end there. There is a thought-provoking piece by Victor Davis Hanson on immigration. Carol Platt Liebau has a piece advocating the revision of Special Order 40. There is the aforementioned Jack Dunphy op-ed on William Bratton. And there is a piece titled Note to You Liberal Weenies — Yes, the Right Really Can Write, by Brian Anderson, the author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias.

Don’t get me wrong. Today’s Sunday Opinion section is not a big wet kiss to the far right. There is a piece arguing for the eradication of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. There are excerpts from a 2004 speech by the late labor leader Miguel Contreras. There is a rather flip piece deriding President Bush’s Social Security proposals. Victor Davis Hanson’s piece on immigration is certain to offend those who are doctrinaire on the issue of illegal immigration. And there are always the predictably leftist editorials.

But there is some real balance this week, with a substantial helping of truly conservative (or just plain sensible) ideas that are well expressed by articulate and credible writers.

A job well done.

P.S. I also like the idea of having Mark Alan Stamaty’s cartoon begin on the front page of the section, and crawl along the bottom of the pages towards the back. It’s especially cute when the comic hits the editorial page.

7 Responses to “L.A. Times Sunday Opinion Section is Excellent Today”

  1. […] us sourcing. What’s the world coming to? The L.A. Times Sunday Opinion section was chock-full of sensible commentary. Noted: Jack Dunphy […]

    Patterico's Pontifications » The Weekend Roundup (0c6a63)

  2. Well, it’s a start. Now if they can apply this newly found balance to the reportage the Times may actually reverse the decline in their circulation numbers.

    Will (7ef8b4)

  3. Of course, after you wake up tomorrow morning and get out of the shower, you will realize that everything that had happened on Sunday, had all been a dream.

    Brady Westwater (72f6df)

  4. Zev Chafets’ piece is the first time I have seen my feelings about the baby boomers written in any paper or magazine. When generation X finally takes over control of the government I won’t shead a tear as we march the baby boomers into the ocean. Social Security, Medicare and the disctruction of certain job markets all for their gread and laziness. No generation has contributed so little yet taken as much as the baby boomers. Even after we cut off their early retirements, take away their lifestyle drugs and put them back to work it will be generations until their debt is obsolved. Even know when it is clear the system can’t be sustained they try to milk it for every last cent they can.

    Nate Ogden (852a30)

  5. Realignment at the LA Times
    Accident or realignment? What’s getting into them at the LAT Sunday Opinion? Patterico sums it up well. I’m not much of a fan of Mark Alan Stamaty’s cartoons, though. We would also observe that its op-ed page is now markedly more interesting than tha…

    Local Liberty (a8d754)

  6. It’s an excellent point that there is a distiction between writing about conservatives, and hiring people who just happen to be conservatives. It is still amazing to me how much mileage that Election Day poll has gotten. Voters responded to the question about what most influenced their vote with 20% saying “moral values”. All of the other stupid selections got a smaller percent.

    So for 6 months we’ve been hearing how this 20% who picked “moral values” is dominating the political landscape; and therefore Bush is in the puppet of Evangelical Christians (whatever that is). This theory doesn’t come close to passing the “milk flying out of nose” test. If LA Times had more conservatives around, they would realize such obvious things.

    Ladainian (91b3b2)

  7. […] Armed Liberal doesn’t recognize the name Andrew Klavan. But I do. He had a sensible and entertainingly written piece about media bias in Sunday Opinion last year, which I mentioned in this post. Here are some quotes from Klavan’s piece from last year: Look, I’m really busy right now but, all right, I’ll take five minutes to solve the problems of the mainstream media. I mean, ratings for network news are at an all-time low, newspaper readership is falling off the chart, the public’s trust in journalists is steadily eroding — the least I can do is sacrifice one coffee break in order to sort things out. It doesn’t require internal studies or revamped formats. Just three little words of advice will fix every one of their troubles: Hire some conservatives. […]

    Patterico’s Pontifications » Andrew Klavan Rides Again (421107)


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0725 secs.