Let’s say a newspaper publishes a blockbuster story based on anonymous sources. The story receives wide skepticism because it is not sourced. Then a named source steps forward, and the newspaper knows about it.

Why wouldn’t the newspaper publish that fact?

Chuck Philips was a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times. In 2002, he published a front-page blockbuster story that claimed to solve the most famous murder in rap history: the murder of Tupac Shakur.

Above: Tupac Shakur

Philips claimed the murder was ordered by the other biggest rap star in history: Biggie Smalls. According to Philips, Biggie provided the gun and the money for the hit, as part of a rivalry between East Coast and West Coast rappers.

Above: Biggie Smalls

But many people mocked Philips’s story, because he couldn’t get anyone to go on the record. People said: wait. Biggie Smalls was in Vegas and there are no named witnesses?

Then Chuck Philips ran across someone who said he was a witness: a man named Waymond Anderson.

Above: Waymond Anderson

In a deposition, made public on this site earlier this week, Anderson said he was on the phone at the time Biggie provided the gun. Anderson made these claims under oath — using his real name. As I recently reported, the L.A. Times obtained that deposition.

Think about it. For the first time in history, a man had stepped forward to corroborate, under oath, the most critical aspect of one of the most controversial stories of Chuck Philips’s career.

The L.A. Times knew this. But never reported it.

Why did this happen? I don’t know. But I have a theory.

But before you hear the theory, understand the facts. The facts are what make the theory plausible.

THE FACTS

Consider the following facts, which are all public record — and many of which were revealed for the first time in my recent post on Waymond Anderson’s deposition:

• Waymond Anderson was incarcerated for murder. (Full disclosure: my boss prosecuted him.) He claims he is innocent. He wrote Chuck Philips a letter. In that letter, he said something to get Philips interested in his claim of innocence of murder.

• Philips has long been fascinated with the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. He wrote a story about the murder of Tupac, and when he was laid off, he was working on a story about the murder of Biggie.

• In his deposition, Anderson says he knows who killed both Biggie and Tupac. He says it’s the same guy who framed him for murder.

• Anderson is the only person in the world who has stepped forward to corroborate Philips’s claim that Biggie Smalls paid for the hit on Tupac, and provided the gun. Anderson claims that he heard all this happen, on the phone, while he was in jail facing murder charges.

Do you think Waymond Anderson mentioned all that in his initial letter to Chuck Philips?

Above: Chuck Philips

• LAPD and the FBI investigated Suge Knight for possible involvement in the murder of Biggie Smalls. Biggie’s family believes that the murder was carried out on the orders of Suge Knight, with help from corrupt LAPD officers David Mack (now incarcerated for bank robbery) and Rafael Perez (who served time for stealing cocaine from the evidence locker).

• Chuck Philips has been accused of being overly close to Suge Knight. He has written numerous stories sympathetic to Knight, and has even been accused of taking money from Knight. He wrote numerous stories disparaging the theory that Suge Knight and LAPD officers were behind the murder of Biggie.

• Chuck Philips wrote a blockbuster front-page story claiming Waymond Anderson was innocent, and had an alibi for his murder. Philips left out numerous details that strongly suggest Anderson is guilty, and that his alibi is bogus. Philips never mentioned in the story that Waymond Anderson was a witness with knowledge about the Biggie or Tupac murders, or that Anderson claimed the guy who framed him is the guy who killed Biggie and Tupac.

• Before Waymond Anderson met Chuck Philips, Anderson had told authorities that he had heard Suge Knight was behind the murder of Biggie Smalls. Biggie’s family had him as a witness on their witness list.

• After Chuck Philips wrote that story for Waymond Anderson, Biggie’s family deposed Waymond Anderson.

• Waymond Anderson now recanted everything he had said about Suge Knight and LAPD being involved in the Biggie murder. He also made several claims that cast doubt on the credibility for several other witnesses who had claimed Suge Knight and LAPD were behind the murder of Biggie.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that Anderson first said Suge Knight was dirty in the Biggie murder — then took it all back after Philips, a Suge Knight partisan, wrote a story helping Anderson with his murder case?

Anderson now says it was no coincidence. He says Philips smuggled threatening messages from Suge Knight into prison, which frightened Anderson and caused him to recant what he had said about Suge Knight. The FBI has been looking into Anderson’s claims.

• In the same deposition, Anderson gave his wild-sounding stories about how he was framed by the guy who killed Tupac and Biggie — and how that person, having framed Anderson for the arson-murder, then confessed his guilt in the murders of Tupac and Biggie to Anderson in (presumably recorded) phone calls made to Anderson while he was incarcerated.

• The L.A. Times played up Anderson’s recantation (which helped Suge Knight) and did not mention the wild stories about the murder of Tupac and Biggie (which hurt Anderson’s bid for innocence and made Philips’s story look questionable).

Do you think it was an accident that the L.A. Times mentioned only the parts of the deposition that helped Suge Knight and the LAPD — but left out the stuff that made their own story about Anderson’s innocence look goofy and questionable?

MY THEORY

Based upon the above facts, here is my theory of what happened.

I believe Waymond Anderson wrote Chuck Philips and said: I know who killed Tupac. I know who killed Biggie. That story you wrote about Biggie providing the gun for Tupac’s murder? It’s true. I know because I was on the phone.

Oh — and the guy who killed them, also framed me for murder. Would you like to write a story about how I’m innocent?

There’s no way that Anderson wrote Philips a letter — which he admitted doing in his deposition — and didn’t mention those facts.

So Philips writes the story of Waymond Anderson’s innocence, leaving out several facts that suggest Anderson is guilty. Anderson wants to remain in Philips’s good graces, so Philips will keep writing stories for him. And he knows Philips thinks Suge Knight is innocent of any involvement in the Biggie murder.

So Anderson gives a deposition saying Suge was innocent — and that he had lied when he had previously said Suge was guilty. He also makes up a bunch of other stuff to undercut the plaintiffs’ case, discrediting several other witnesses.

Problem is, in that deposition, he also says he knows who killed Biggie and Tupac. And, he says, it’s the same guy who framed him for murder.

This makes him sound like a crackpot. So the L.A. Times omits any mention of the more crackpot portions of his testimony, and reports only the stuff that helps destroy the civil case implicating Suge Knight.

Did the L.A. Times consider Waymond Anderson’s claims to be credible? If so, why not report his claim to corroborate Chuck Philips’s story?

Did the L.A. Times consider Waymond Anderson’s claims to be incredible? If so, why publish a front-page article claiming he was innocent, when that claim of innocence rests on his claims of innocence (and an alibi theory that was inconsistent with Anderson’s own recorded statements to police)?

Either way, something is very wrong about all this. It stinks to high heaven. And it’s about time someone started asking questions about it.

So one of the top FBI guys investigating the Russia stuff for Mueller hates Trump, as revealed in several text messages published yesterday. Sarah Lee posted about them last night. My first reaction upon reading them was that many of them sound a lot like my own private (and public) statements about Trump:

“I just saw my first Bernie Sanders bumper sticker. Made me want to key the car,” Page wrote in an August 2015 exchange.

“He’s an idiot like Trump. Figure they cancel each other out,” Strzok replied.

Whoa. He thinks both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are idiots? Who doesn’t — besides fanbois who are super-impressed that a guy can inherit a lot of money?

In a March 2016 message, Page exclaimed: “God trump is a loathsome human….omg he’s an idiot.”

“He’s awful,” replied Strzok.

Someone thinks Donald Trump is awful? Get out!

Of course, Strzok went further than I ever did or would, actively wishing for the election of Hillary Clinton by saying “God Hillary should win 100,000,000 – 0.” But many of his rants about Trump and his idiocy are shared by, well, millions of people in the country. Including people who voted for the guy.

Andrew C. McCarthy says no biggie:

#Strzok & Page texts look like a big nothing – no hint of corruption in their jobs. Lots of people (me included) speak crudely in private about politics. If you’re ok w/ Trump’s outbursts, I don’t see getting whipped over this BS. https://t.co/RJPjXZMO48

— Andy McCarthy (@AndrewCMcCarthy) December 13, 2017

Well, I’m not OK with Trump’s outbursts, but I’m not sure I’m OK with this either.

I’m of two minds about this. Before the Strzok texts came out, but after their existence was reported, McCarthy made the case that people in law enforcement can work political cases while holding political beliefs:

People who work in law enforcement tend to be engaged citizens, well-informed about current events. Many of them are passionate in their political convictions. In the New York metropolitan area, those convictions tend not to jibe with mine — although rank-and-file FBI agents tend to be more conservative than their high-ranking superiors, and than prosecutors educated in elite American schools. Political differences are fodder for good-natured ribbing in the hallway or over beers after work. But they get checked at the courthouse door, even in political-corruption cases. Law enforcement is a straightforward exercise: Figure out what the facts and law are, then apply the latter to the former.

I actually agree with this. I have no specific reason to believe that Peter Strzok is anything less than professional at his job. I don’t do political cases, but I think if people could see how the day-to-day operation of criminal investigation and prosecution works, they would have more confidence in the system than they get from Big Media’s often unfair portrayals.

But here, there is an issue that goes beyond whether the work is actually getting done right: the public’s perception. And while having general political opinions should not necessarily render a prosecutor or an investigator unfit for prosecutions of political cases — again, like McCarthy says, they tend to be engaged citizens — a very strong bias against a particular person, as we see here, has a negative effect on the perception of the integrity of the investigation.

At this point, I would like to quote a question from a correspndent whom I respect, who wrote me an email asking in the subject line: “Isn’t Bias Good in a Prosecutor?”

Not corruption, bias.

Doesn’t our system demand an aggressive prosecutor who has a jaundiced eye for suspected criminals? The defense is lionized for doing most anything to get a defendant off. Don’t The People need an energetic/passionate person to prosecute?

I believe Mueller was corrupted as an FBI Director, and maybe before. I am not defending him. There shouldn’t even be an IC without hard and fast limits as to scope. If an IC learns anything outside that scope, they should/would be free to refer to DOJ just as any U.S. Attorney can.

What troubles me is the meme that a prosecutor (or defense counsel, for that matter) is somehow wrong for having a bias. Isn’t that a core trait necessary to the job?

I’d answer this with an unqualified “no.” Yes, you want an energetic and passionate person to be a prosecutor. But their zeal must be for justice —
and it must be tempered zeal. Having a strong pre-existing bias against the target is not the kind of zeal that promotes justice or that gives the public confidence.

So I’m fine with Mueller taking Strzok off the investigation. He should not have been on it. Even though I agree with many of his views of Donald Trump.

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]

If you’re the type of person who uses the word “cuck” unironically, then to you, MSNBC’s Sam Seder is the cuckiest cuck that ever cucked — because Seder hates the alt right. (Full disclosure: so do I.) Seder has consistently pushed a crusade against that gang of conspiracy nuts, including Mike “Pizzagate” Cernovich. If you know anything about alt-righters, their God is the God of Retaliation. Nothing else in life really matters to them besides getting back at their perceived enemies. So Cernovich took a break from his conspiracy theories about shampoo to dig up this old tweet from Seder:

And managed to get Seder fired:

MSNBC has decided not to renew its contract with contributor Sam Seder after an old tweet emerged in which Seder joked about Roman Polanski raping his daughter, TheWrap has learned.

Seder’s contract ends in February and he has no scheduled appearances between now and then, a spokesperson for MSNBC told TheWrap.

. . . .

A person familiar with the situation said the decision to sever ties with Seder was directly related to the Polanski matter.

“Internally there was disgust over the tweet,” said the individual.

The tweet was first brought to wide attention last month by the pro-Trump journalist and activist Mike Cernovich.

Idiots. Dupes.

To me, Seder’s tweet was a good and brave tweet. Was it shocking? You bet. But so is what Roman Polanski did to Samantha Geimer when she was 13 years old. Seder’s tweet is obvious satire, designed to mock the people in Hollywood who defended Polanski. The tweet is basically a Twitter version of what Ace of Spades wrote about Polanski in 2009:

And he drugged her, and even as she resisted, he raped her. And then, figuring, I guess, “Ah, what the hell, gone this far, might as well run the table,” he sodomized her.

13.

But he made The Pianist. So — no biggie.

You’d think someone who is actually disgusted by Polanski’s actions, and by the excuses Polanski’s supporters made, would applaud Seder’s decision to take on those supporters. But of course, Cernovich cares more about his feuds than about what Polanski did to a 13-year-old. Cernovich saw an opportunity to slam Seder and he took it. Cernovich pretended that the tweet supported Polanski, and rallied his mindless band of pearl-clutching fake opponents of political correctness, who predictably flew into an entirely phony outrage about the tweet. These Fierce Defenders of Free Speech took a tweet that attacked Polanski’s defenders, and screamed: Sam Seder defends Polankski! Sam Seder thinks rape is funny! Sam Seder thinks rapes of little girls are funny, including the rape of his own daughter! Blah blah outrage blah blah offended blah blah.

Seder explained last week what should have been obvious: it was a slam on Hollywood elites who defended the rape of a child because the rapist made some movies people like:

“This smear involves the willful misinterpretation of a tweet that I posted in 2009,” said Seder, who said Cernovich and his allies were deliberately misrepresenting him to silence his criticism of Roy Moore and President Trump. “I will never be ashamed of criticizing those who would excuse the predation of women or girls. And I certainly won’t be quiet about Roy Moore or a conservative movement that which would defend his actions so they could get his vote in the Senate.”

Seder said the tweet was satirical and was intended to show his disgust with liberals at the time who were attempting to apologize for Polanksi’s past behavior.

So now Mike Cernovich has managed to get the scalp of a guy who actually fought the left’s apologetics on Polanski.

Congratulations, I guess. The Phony Outrage Mob has claimed another victim.

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]

Our own Ed from SFV met Ted Cruz today. He asked Ted Cruz the second most important question I can think of. (The most important question, of course, would have been: “Do you read the Patterico blog?”) And he got a straight answer. Ed wrote up his experience for us, and what follows is his account. I thank him for writing it up and sharing it with us. — Patterico

I just had a profoundly American experience. I’d like to share some of it with you.

Ted Cruz was in town (South Bend, IN) and the public was more than welcome to come see him. The appearance was planned for the early news window (5 – 6 PM, ET). I decided to not miss this chance and to get there super early so that I might score a front row seat.

I was the first to arrive. Already there was a husband/wife team who were honchoing things with the folks who ran the venue and with local security and police. All I wanted to do was to bring a chair to the entrance to the hall so I could sit for the couple of hours until the event, and be assured of my line position.

They asked if I might be willing to help out a little and I said, “Sure!” So, I became a volunteer for Cruz. It turns out that this gentleman, with his own cash, fronted the campaign some resources and money to help establish a local Cruz campaign office, which had just opened. He’s a retired local policeman and his wife is a PhD in Psychology. They could not have been nicer or more appreciative.

A few minutes later, a very young man from DC, via South Carolina, arrived. He was an actual advance man for the national Cruz campaign. He was very nice and had a very few details he wanted to be sure we handled. The biggie was signage. While he loved that many folks would come out to support Ted with hand-made signs and such, he wanted to make certain that any messaging was well within certain approved parameters. To my knowledge, we had no need to alter or refuse any of the signs which were brought. Pretty basic stuff, eh?

Only a very few minutes before Ted and Carly arrived on site, more national staff appeared, and an obvious Secret Service presence made itself known. I had no interactions with any of these. Well, almost none.

The first thing to do was to figure out how to handle the lines of folks which were sure to develop prior to opening the doors of the hall. You see? It’s the everyday, mundane, that really matters. This wasn’t about high-level concepts or imagery, or highfalutin’ considerations. Or even donating money. It’s just a few folks deciding to help out a little bit, doing a little here, and a little there, to elect a president.

We decided where to place those who had printed off tickets which had been offered the night before. Anyone without such a ticket would be asked to sign in with a name and basic contact info. By NO means was it a requirement to sign in. All were welcome. Full stop. We arranged a couple of tables to facilitate this process. Rocket science, right?

A little while later came about a dozen young, fresh faces asking if they could help out. They were from Notre Dame, St. Mary’s, and Holy Cross College (Yes, the place Rudy first matriculated). The fellas came armed with those fun posters of Ted all tatted up with the cigarette hanging from his mouth, and some more conventional posters, as well. Did we have any tape they could use? Nope. So…we all went on a search for tape. Some was found and they went to town. The long entrance hallway and the environs just outside the hall entrance were soon festooned with Cruz posters.

We had a few of the young college ladies man the tables helping non-ticketed folks sign in, and to go out into the lines which were now growing and ask folks to sign a “Commitment to Ted” card, if they were so inclined. Their energy was very well received by everyone. Go figure, right?

The media started drifting in. We had no specific rules to offer them. There was a stage for them to set up, and an audio multi in which they could plug for direct audio from any speaker’s microphone. I took the chance to chat with the local guy I most respect. I mentioned how Nate Silver of 538 had written that despite the publicly-available poll numbers, he was giving Ted a 53% chance of victory here. [Now up to 58%! — P] He had never heard of this and appreciated the tip. All he knew was that Trump was looking pretty good to win. Well, now he knew otherwise. Because I was there and engaged him.

The doors opened and some care was taken to get various demographics of folks seated so that they might be seen by the cameras. The big concern was what to do with some open areas adjacent to the entranceway Ted and Carly would be using. We quickly confirmed with security that these spaces were meant to be occupied and we made darn sure they were full. Those folks were thrilled that they were assured to be within a very few feet of Ted and Carly. An easy and obvious win-win. But, nobody had really thought that one out in advance. Yet, again, pretty basic, common sense, made it happen.

Oh. Here was my contact with the Secret Service. Apparently, I went through an area which was supposed to have been secured. All I knew, as a brand-spanking new volunteer was that I was to find the local Cruz man so he could seat me. Ooops. An agent was NOT amused. He questioned me aggressively as to how I showed up in his space. I believe he was exasperated that I had so easily, albeit innocently, arrived there. He was going to take me by my elbow and escort me right back to the point I should not have entered. I called out to the local organizer, asking where I was supposed to be. He pointed to a spot. The agent relented, but was sure to escort me there, even if it was the “wrong way” to get there.

I ended up being placed in the very first row behind the stage. Since I had no thought that I was going to be seen on camera, I was dressed down. I looked like a giant blue popsicle. If you see footage from the speeches, you may see me upstage left, behind a big Secret Service dude (different guy).

A high ranking local State Senator came out to emcee. He quickly introduced another local pol who was a preacher. He gave a brief invocation and then led us all in the Pledge of Allegiance. My friends, this was as Norman Rockwell a moment as I have ever experienced. We were then treated to a video of Ted and of Carly. I found it to be inspiring and very well done.

Out came Carly. Her tone was one of gratitude and of awe for America. There was some verbiage attacking DJT and HRC, but her message was decidedly humanizing. She spoke of what it was like to be on the bus with Ted for weeks. She related how when the national championship basketball game was down to Villanova’s final possession, Ted threw down some cash on the table declaring that the Wildcats were going to make the winning basket. They did.

She increased the cadence and urgency in her speech to a rousing conclusion. She brought us to our feet and introduced Ted, Heidi. and their girls. Ted was first with his girls in hand and they stepped up to the stage. I was no more than 10 feet from them as they did. Heidi was right behind. The crowd is cheering wildly and some upbeat music was blaring. I focused on the girls. They were happy, and even started dancing with each other.

Then, Ted went to take the hand of the older one so as to hold it high with him as the crowd was cheering. She resisted, and then looked like she might start crying. A nanny swooped right in and picked her up and took her to the back area behind the curtains. In that moment, I fully felt the pressures and difficulties they must be facing every day. Why should they have to share their Daddy with all these strangers?! Forget laws and politics and governance and ideology. This was basic humanity playing out right in front of me. As much as I appreciate what Ted has been going through, and all the slings and arrows he has endured, it is the sacrifice of his family that I will forever recall.

Ted gave his basic stump speech, adding in a very humorous description of DJT wearing HRC’s blue pantsuit! To my ears, the strongest reaction he got was when he strongly declared his support for Israel. Here, in the middle of Christian Indiana, the most intense feeling was for Israel.

He ended his talk and immediately dove into the front of the audience rope line for pictures, autographs, handshakes, and so on. He gave each person a moment or two and verrrrrrry patiently waited as selfies were being set up. He had two agents, one on either side of him, and a lead campaign staffer right behind him who had a Sharpie pen at the ready when Ted needed it to sign something.

It seemed like forever until he could make his way around to the rear of the stage where I was. Then, oh no! He reversed his course and went right over to some college students who had brought a Holy Cross College sign. He delighted in talking with them. Again, he took a lot of time with them. Eventually, he started making his way around again. As he got closer to me, I was most interested in trying to pick up his vibe. Who was this guy, really? The thing that stood out, from a small distance, was how interested in US he was. An elderly lady was telling him some personal tale of woe, and he could not have been more solicitous. There’s only a few hundred folks who want to shake his hand, but Ted decided she was the important priority. I was later told by national staff that this is how he is at every stop.

So…here he is. I’m going to get a chance to talk to him! STOP. Huh? Oh. A young lady in a wheelchair had been brought up next to where I was standing. Just as Ted was about to grasp my hand, he saw her. (Imagine the sound of metaphorical screeching tires) Ted instantly whirls to the agents, instructing them to make it possible for him to come inside the line to be with her. They did not like this, but grabbed the line up and Ted hunched down under it. I helped him keep his balance. He got close to the profoundly mentally handicapped girl and thanked her for coming to see him. She visibly brightened but did not communicate verbally. Ted got closer and spoke some encouraging…No. Loving, words. Again there was no real response. Ted stayed there, just smiling at her. And he did not move.

Yes, the optics of his visit with the young lady were magnificent. But, I am telling you…that was the last consideration on this man’s mind.

A few seconds in a situation like that can seem like forever. It’s chaotic as heck. Ted had his family waiting for him so they could be together for the rest of the evening (this was the last campaign event for the day). Ted stayed with the wheelchair-bound young lady for at least a full minute altogether. It was a lifetime.

I helped him back up and over to “his” side of the rope and then I took his hand. With all the sincerity I could muster, I said, “Ted, I hope you will, win or lose the election, lead the fight for an Article V Convention.” I had his full attention. He looked me directly in the eye, keeping my hand, with body language indicating congruence with his words, replied that he would fight for “underlying amendments” to get us there. I repeated, “Article V?” He said again, his eyes still locked on mine, with a slight nod of his head, “I’ll fight for necessary underlying amendments.” He was careful to not say the words “Article V.” He did not accept my language by just saying “Yes/No.”

It was entirely clear to me that he had seriously contemplated what I was saying and he gave me a truthful answer. It was not exactly what I wanted to hear. Yet, there is no doubt in my mind that he recognizes the peril the Constitution is in and that it needs a lot of support/strengthening – the type that can happen under Article V.

Then Ted was on to the guy next to me. He stayed in that line until he had DOUBLED BACK across the entirety of the stage, giving everyone their moment or three. I was/am blown away.

Carly had also come back out and was very much the same with everyone. She was every bit as lovely and gracious as you can imagine. I chose to not try to take any of her time/energy. I did revel in the good feeling she was bringing. It could not have been more clear that she feels blessed and that she is still experiencing an afterglow at having been named Ted’s VP choice.

The biggest takeaway for me was Ted’s base HUMILITY. It’s of a sort that is unmistakable. It is genuine. It is from a very deep place within. He is extremely comfortable with who he is and he believes fully in this fight. My goodness, what a man.

With all that I am, I declare those who insist that he is creepy, or arrogant, or egotistical, or speak any number of other epithets as to his character, to be LIARS. Their yelps are not coming from a place of truth, nor of love. Most everything Ted says and does, and his very being, are from the very best place for both.

In the morning, I’ll show up at the nascent campaign office and see if some small thing I can do leads to something like the election of a president.

Ed from SFV

Because all of a sudden, they have to:

Spelling-bee champions have a lot in common with Scrabble players. They might not have the same command of all the three-letter words in the Scrabble dictionary, or have impressed on their memories the anagrams for all the common combinations of letters, but the purpose of the spelling bee has been the formal arrangement of letters in the right order, not the meaning of the resulting word.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee — the biggie of them all — is about to change that. In the elimination rounds, contestants also will be judged on their ability to define words, or at least pick out the definition from a multiple-choice question.

“It represents a deepening of the bee’s commitment to its purpose,” Director Paige Kimble told USA Today, “to help students improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies, learn concepts and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives.”

I have a theory, and I want to see how it plays out in the comments. My guess is a lot of people who are into writing in some form or another are spelling nerds who did fairly well in spelling bees as children. (And who would be only too happy to tell you just how well they did in those spelling bees.) And my guess is that those people have an affinity for spelling bees being about, you know, spelling.

Whereas probably other people either support the whole vocabulary thing, or (say it isn’t so!) just don’t care at all.

Where do my readers come down on this — and how do your feelings correlate, if at all, with your childhood success at spelling bees? Is my theory right or wrong?

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

We had a bunch of tornadoes over the weekend here in Virginia, leading to this story this morning:

Va. Nuclear Power Plant Shuts Down After Storm

Dominion Virginia Power reports that an apparent tornado touched down on the switchyard supporting the Surry Power Station and the facility’s access road Saturday. The storm cut off the electrical feed from the grid to the station, which is located in Surry County, Va.

Both reactors at the station shut down automatically as designed and backup diesel generators started immediately to provide the electricity necessary to maintain both units.

A spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says no release of radioactive material occurred beyond minor releases associated with normal station operations.

Oh noes!  We are Fukushimaed!  Run for your life!

Ah no, it sounds like no biggie, actually.  I mean one tornado is a lot less than the flood, plague of locusts, etc. we saw over in Japan.  But I did have a moment as I waited for the page to load, where I worried before any facts came in that it might be a big deal.

And incidentally tornadoes are rare enough here that when one hit the British in the War of 1812 it was considered a potential act of God, as Cracked points out with tongue in cheek:

While the Brits probably felt the burning of Washington was a righteous act of retribution, they definitely pissed off the wrong deity when they desecrated the U.S. capital. With the city in flames, God punished the redcoats with the sort of smiting usually reserved for characters straight out of the Old Testament.

A goddamn tornado touched down — which almost never happens in the capital — and plowed a path of instant terror right through downtown D.C., uprooting trees, lifting cannons and tossing the hapless redcoats around like maple leaves. The British were forced to flee the city after learning exactly whose side God was on — after all, he did nothing when the Americans torched Canada.

Hmm, you would think that if you were claiming that the battle turned on God’s smiting, you would ease off on the Goddamn’s.  You know, just to stay on the Big Guy’s good side.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by DRJ]

The Gulf Coast could be facing the greatest ecological disaster in its history — the BP Oil Spill:

“What makes an oil spill really bad? Most of the ingredients for it are now blending in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts tick off the essentials: A relentless flow of oil from under the sea; a type of crude that mixes easily with water; a resultant gooey mixture that is hard to burn and even harder to clean; water that’s home to vulnerable spawning grounds for new life; and a coastline with difficult-to-scrub marshlands.

Gulf Coast experts have always talked about “the potential for a bad one,” said Wes Tunnell, coastal ecology and oil spill expert at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

“And this is the bad one. This is just a biggie that finally happened.”

Experts and almost experts are already weighing in. The Wall Street Journal reports the well had a blowout preventer and a Deadman’s switch but didn’t have an acoustic shut-off valve like North Sea offshore wells. Other reports are already suggesting that BP is to blame:

“British Petroleum once downplayed the possibility of a catastrophic accident at an offshore rig that exploded, causing the worst U.S. oil spill in decades along the Gulf Coast and endangering shoreline habitat.

In its 2009 exploration plan and environmental impact analysis for the well, BP suggested it was unlikely, or virtually impossible, for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill and serious damage to beaches, fish and mammals.”

BP is an easy target on the Gulf Coast, especially after the March 2005 explosion at BP North America’s Texas City refinery. However, it’s not clear whether BP, Transocean — the owner of the rig — or perhaps another company was in charge of the rig at the time of the explosion. Other problems, such as a defective blowout preventer, are also possible.

The resulting investigations will undoubtedly tell us more. In the meantime, offshore drilling may be put on hold and the economic impact on the Gulf Coast will be severe. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

— DRJ

I once said of the L.A. Times‘s Steve Lopez:

He upsets you when you disagree with him, but when you agree with him, there’s nobody better.

I have whapped Lopez across the chops many a time on this blog, but today, he hits it out of the park with his column on Roman Polanski. As usually happens when I encounter an excellent Lopez column, I have to resist the illegal temptation to just cut and paste the whole thing, it’s so good. It should be required reading for Polanski apologists.

In the column, Lopez extensively quotes excerpts from the grand jury testimony — and while Patterico readers have read all these quotes in recent days and in the past, it is heartening indeed to know that these facts are going to be brought to the attention of Lopez’s much wider audience.

Here are some excerpts so you can see why you should read it all:

I wish the renowned legal scholars Harvey Weinstein and Debra Winger, to name just two of Polanski’s defenders, were here with me now. I’d like to invite Martin Scorsese, as well, along with David Lynch, who have put their names on a petition calling for Polanski to be freed immediately.

What, because he won an Oscar? Would they speak up for a sex offender who hadn’t?

To hear these people tell it, you’d think Polanski was the victim rather than the teenager.

. . . .

I’d like to show all these great luminaries the testimony from Polanski’s underage victim, as well as Polanski’s admission of guilt. Then I’d like to ask whether, if the victim were their daughter, they’d be so cavalier about a crime that was originally charged as sodomy and rape before Polanski agreed to a plea bargain. Would they still support Polanski’s wish to remain on the lam living the life of a king, despite the fact that he skipped the U.S. in 1977 before he was sentenced?

Indeed. I’d like to know one more thing, myself: what they would say if evidence emerged that Polanski had done this to other girls? (Yes, I have been sounding that theme quite a bit lately, haven’t I?) [UPDATE: I should make it clear that I have absolutely no inside information from my office about the handling of this case.]

The closing is a stirring helping of common sense:

Polanski stood in a Santa Monica courtroom on Aug. 8, 1977, admitted to having his way with a girl three decades his junior and told a judge that indeed, he knew she was only 13.

There may well have been judicial misconduct.

But no misconduct was greater than allowing Polanski to cop a plea to the least of his charges. His crime was graphic, manipulative and heinous, and he got a pass. It’s unbelievable, really, that his soft-headed apologists are rooting for him to get another one.

Well done, Steve Lopez. Well done.

*

UPDATE: Ace says it pretty damn well too:

Oh, and also incidentally — his legal team floated the defense that the girl wasn’t a virgin before he raped her, so he was willing to go full-on Whore Deserved Exactly What She Got on the little girl he raped.

His defenders don’t talk much about his artistry in that respect.

And he drugged her, and even as she resisted, he raped her. And then, figuring, I guess, “Ah, what the hell, gone this far, might as well run the table,” he sodomized her.

13.

But he made The Pianist. So — no biggie.

Well said. It’s just that, well, you expect that from Ace. So Lopez’s great columns have that prodigal son quality about them.

An L.A. Times story reports on last year’s lower murder rate in Compton:

[I]t came as something of a surprise when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which contracts to provide police services here, added up the community’s 2008 homicides. The total for Compton, including smaller, adjacent pockets of unincorporated county land: 38.

It was the lowest number in at least 25 years and a 50% drop since 2005. From 1985 to 2000, said Sheriff’s Capt. William M. Ryan, an average of 66 people were slain each year within the city limits; that number fell last year to 28. Gang-related aggravated assaults have fallen too in the city and the county pockets, nearly 25% over four years — “dramatic indicators,” Sheriff Lee Baca said at a recent news conference, “that we are doing the right thing.”

It was fun for me to see that the story features my pal Joe Sumner:

Late on a recent night, Det. Joe Sumner, part of the sheriff’s gang detail, rumbled through the narrow streets in an unmarked cruiser. Sumner’s knowledge of Compton gangs is encyclopedic; put him on any block and he can instantly tell you whose turf you’re on.

This night, though, many blocks were dark and empty; they’ve been that way lately. Amid a concerted law enforcement push, scores of gang members have been imprisoned, and more have given up and moved away — to Riverside, Fresno, Las Vegas.

“There has been so much pressure put on these guys,” Sumner said.

Suddenly he jerked his car toward the sidewalk and bolted from the car. Two young men, documented gangsters, raised their hands, almost instinctively. They knew the drill. They lifted their shirts to show that they were not hiding guns, then spread their legs and put their hands on the warm hood of Sumner’s car while he patted them down. Sumner found no drugs and no weapons.

“Take off,” he said. To the younger man, he added: “Say hi to your dad.”

(I feel like I have to say this, because if I don’t, everyone will scream “illegal search!” — there could be any number of reasons that the search described here could be justified. For example, the gangsters could be on probation with search conditions. I don’t trust the L.A. Times to give you the full picture on that, so don’t go making assumptions, please. I may ask Joe about this next time I see him.)

Joe and I recently had a case where we went to a gang stronghold and took some pictures and developed evidence that took a highly circumstantial case and made it a lot stronger. He’s a very hard worker and always did everything I asked him to.

And yes, Joe really does have an encyclopedic knowledge of gangs in the area — and he’s from the area, so he really knows what he’s talking about. He even knows about my pet interest: the Suge Knight/Mob Piru/Tupac Shakur/Biggie Smalls cases — and has told me interesting stories that have given me insight into that world.

Interesting article; read it all.

It happens every year: I read every post I’ve written over the past 365 days about the Los Angeles Times . . . and I think to myself: this is just unbelievable. There’s something appalling and eye-opening about seeing an entire year’s worth of the paper’s bias, omissions, and distortions gathered in one post.

This year, L.A. Times editors slammed Sarah Palin, John McCain, and McCain’s ally Joe the Plumber — while they protected Barack Obama and his allies, including unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers and radical Palestinian Rashid Khalidi. The paper described a 19-point margin in opposition to gay marriage as a “narrow margin,” and displayed the usual politically correct attitudes on race, abortion, and crime. We watched the paper overreach on the story about Judge Alex Kozinski’s porn collection that wasn’t. And the paper retracted a story by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips, in one of the most embarrassing incidents in the paper’s history. This year saw a campaign of relentless distortions on DNA evidence; the bankruptcy of Tribune Company; and a collection of errors like none we’ve ever seen before.

Yup, it was a fun year for liberal bias and incompetence at the local rag. So without further ado, here is my sixth annual review of the Los Angeles Times, otherwise known as the Los Angeles Dog Trainer. We’ll start at the logical place:

THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

THE PRIMARIES

The newspaper completely ignored some stunningly ignorant comments that Hillary Clinton had made about Pakistan and its elections. Then the editors ignored them again. Editors continued to ignore these statements even after Hillary was nominated to be Obama’s Secretary of State — on the strength of her alleged expertise in foreign policy.

But, as with John McCain, the editors showed no kindness to Hillary when she was posing a threat to their preferred candidate: Barack Obama.

Hillary got a taste of how Republicans are treated by the L.A. Times.

They even misquoted Hillary after Super Tuesday in a way that made her sound like she was making a concession far greater than the one she had actually made. I wrote the paper and obtained a correction. (Read on; you’ll see many similar instances of my correcting the paper’s inaccuracies.)

Hillary got a little taste of how the paper slams Republicans on a daily basis with the wording of an article. And then she got yet another taste, to the point where I was surprised that the editors hadn’t explicitly labeled her a “shrill and desperate bitch.” (Meanwhile, the articles about Obama focused on how Republicans loved him too.)

When the editors reached in their rhetorical bag of tricks and came out with the observation that there was a “growing consensus” that her presidential bid was doomed . . . well, you knew it was over then. You might be able to fight City Hall, but you can’t fight a “growing consensus” in Big Media.

Hillary had the last laugh, though, when she put reporters (including an L.A. Times reporter) in a restroom. I found it oddly appropriate, given the nature of what L.A. Times reporters generally produce.

As for the Republican primaries, the paper followed a strategy of propping up McCain, to set him up for a later knockdown.

The paper endorsed McCain in the primaries, causing Jack Dunphy to observe that this was a sign for true Republicans to support Romney. But the paper’s editors foreshadowed how they would treat McCain in the general election, when a story’s lede blamed McCain for a supporter’s capital crime of using Obama’s given middle name — something that McCain had expressly repudiated, as the story only later explained.

The newspaper has always claimed to care about substance vs. style — but when a candidate of substance came along (Fred Thompson), the paper focused on his dullness.

THE GENERAL ELECTION: OBAMA VS. McCAIN

Good

Bad

Love for Obama

The pro-Obama spin kicked in early.

The editors’ preferred candidate

When the Reverend Wright controversy hit, TV sets across the nation were looping clips of Wright screaming “God damn America” and saying that America’s chickens had come home to roost on 9/11 — yet the initial L.A. Times story on the Wright controversy, incredibly, omitted mention of both controversial statements. The paper finally gave prominence to these details . . . after Obama resigned from the church.

The editors weren’t quite sure what Rev. Wright had said that was so bad.

How much did the paper love Obama? Well, one story began, in a quote I am not making up, “Words helped get Barack Obama where he is today. Elegant words. Inspiring words. Words that swoop and words that soar.” This stuff mocks itself.

When Obama blatantly broke his pledge to accept public financing, the L.A. Times anticipated the decision by spinning it as a positive — just as I had predicted they would. After Obama’s rejection of public financing was official, I was briefly shocked when the initial L.A. Times story actually took Obama to task. But, true to form, the editors got their hands on the story and fuzzed it up for the print edition.

After the Heller gun rights decision was announced, legal affairs reporter David Savage allowed Obama to pretend he had always supported the principles enunciated by the decision, when in fact, Obama’s campaign had supported the D.C. law struck down in that case.

The paper also protected the image of Bill Ayers, and minimized the extent of Obama’s contacts with Ayers. The paper gave Bill Ayers a little puff piece in April, allowing him to falsely whine that he had been misrepresented in the media. Not mentioned: Ayers’s expressed lack of regret for setting bombs.

To the editors, Bill Ayers was a nutty, nutty radical whom Obama barely knew.

On Ayers, the paper asserted: “McCain alleged that Obama launched his political career in the former Weatherman’s living room, an assertion for which there is no recorded basis.” I proved that this was not true, with a link to a blog entry written by someone who was there who had claimed exactly that. (Shortly after my post, that blog post disappeared down the memory hole, but I had, of course, saved the evidence.) Evidently the blogger thought that the post had showed the critical Obama-Ayers tie for which the paper claimed there was no evidence. But the paper refused to issue a correction.

The paper also covered for Obama when it emerged that the newspaper possessed a tape of Obama at a dinner honoring Palestinian radical Rashid Khalidi. The paper said it had made a promise to a source not to release the tape, which made some sense, but it made no sense that the paper wouldn’t release any additional information. Former L.A. Times reporter Evan Maxwell wrote me to argue that the paper should release the tape, but that never happened.

I’ll give editors credit for this: they did run an article in July saying that Obama can’t pay for everything he promised to do when elected.

But for the most part, we learned about Obama’s shortcomings only after he was safely elected. Only then did editors fully reveal some issues that the paper had previously downplayed or completely failed to disclose — like the fact that Obama oversimplified the foreign policy challenges he faced, or the fact that his economic policies are terribly worrying to some investors, or the fact that he is unlikely to chart a centrist course. After the election, a blog at the paper’s web site also revealed that Obama’s small donor base image is a myth — shocking news, except that I had revealed it before the election.

Anti-McCain Bias

Once McCain clinched the nomination, the paper started in with the hit pieces, beginning with one that revived a set of hoary old howlers regarding ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda — including a misquotation of the 9/11 Commission Report. I wrote the Readers’ Representative and obtained a correction, which was inadequate.

The L.A. Times liked John McCain . . . until he got nominated.

In August, the L.A. Times published an article describing six major issues where McCain had taken on his party, and zero issues where Obama had done the same. The theme of the article: McCain is not a maverick.

Without any context, the paper claimed that after the economic crisis hit, McCain “declared that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong'” — an utter distortion of McCain’s initial reaction to the crisis. And the paper grievously distorted the record on responsibility for the mortgage crisis — leaving out scads of facts pointing to significant Democrat culpability.

McCain finally responded to the economic crisis by giving a speech that hit hard on the Democrats’ responsibility. The L.A. Times cut out the portion of the speech relating to the economy — and then quoted Obama saying McCain was scared to talk about the economy. George Orwell would have been proud.

Then, after I wrote about it, they sent that story down the memory hole.

I don’t make this stuff up, folks. I just report it.

The paper quoted a voter implying that Obama cared more about gas prices because he mentioned them first in the conventions — omitting the rather obvious point that Obama mentioned gas prices first because the Democrats had their convention first.

When McCain got a serious bounce after the convention — 10 points in one poll — the paper did its best to minimize it.

After John McCain talked about firing the SEC Chair, the L.A. Times jumped on the Media Conventional Wisdom Bandwagon and repeated the canard that a president can’t fire an SEC Chair. Of course, he can — as the paper finally admitted in a correction prompted by my complaint.

The paper went on and on and on about the anger at the Republican rallies, to the point where a friend who is an Obama supporter thought the article was an opinion piece.

A news article called a debate “a perfect distillation of McCain’s general election campaign, with all of its inconsistent messages.” Now that’s objective!

Just as the paper protected Obama ally Ayers, it attacked McCain ally Joe the Plumber. When the Joe the Plumber phenomenon hit, the L.A. Times found it very important to note that Joe, a citizen who had dared to asked Obama a question, had tax liens. The fact that Obama’s treasurer had tax liens? Not so important. After I pointed this out, and Howard Kurtz picked up my observation, the L.A. Times story that had generated the criticism disappeared down the memory hole — re-emerging in a different form at a different Web address.

As we have seen (and will continue to see), the editors are really fond of that little “memory hole” trick.

Anti-Palin Bias

The paper found it important to report the silly rumors that Trig Palin was not Sarah Palin’s son, but rather the son of her daughter Bristol. The paper also helpfully included a picture of Bristol holding Trig in a motherly fashion, just to ensure there was visual proof of this nonsense.

Above: The editors never liked Sarah Palin.

Some of the paper’s reportage on Palin was at least halfway fair, mixing some deserved praise in with the cheap shots. And to their everlasting credit, they criticized Charlie Gibson for mischaracterizing a prayer of Palin’s — even if the article had some silly and misplaced criticisms as well.

Of course, not all the staff writers got the message. Even after the paper caught Gibson’s distortion, the phony charge was repeated by staff writer Mary McNamara, in a column (rife with misspellings and bad writing) that was sent down the memory hole. (I told you: they do a lot of that at the L.A. Times.) Then columnist Steve Lopez flew all the way to Alaska on the newspaper’s dime, just to repeat the exact same canard. I guess not even Steve Lopez can be bothered to read the L.A. Times.

The paper not-so-subtly compared Sarah Palin to Dan Quayle, with a story titled Before Sarah Palin, the GOP Had Dan Quayle.

The paper published an article saying that Palin said “yes” to a “road to nowhere” — and saved for the 31st paragraph out of 33 the news that it might actually be a road to somewhere. Whether it was or wasn’t, the idea that Palin’s justification for the road — a central fact of the story — could be relegated to the end of the story is truly unbelievable . . . or would be, for a more responsible and less biased paper.

The Times quoted a Fox News transcript of a quote from Sarah Palin about Bill Ayers. As I wrote in a letter to the Readers’ Representative, the quote was obviously garbled, but apparently the paper felt no need to watch the show to see if the transcript was accurate. After I called them on it, the paper issued an elliptical correction and set forth an accurate version . . . on page A2. By the way, the initial story on Palin’s quote left out a bunch of facts that supported what Palin was saying. Par for the course.

The coverage of Palin just got more stupid and more insulting as time went on, until the paper was literally doing entire stories about her winking.

The paper did manage to do a puff piece on the vice-presidential candidate . . . the one on the Democrat ticket, that is.

The only VP candidate meriting a puff piece from the L.A. Times was the Democrat.

The paper’s coverage was very often in lockstep with Democrat strategy. For example, before the vice-presidential debate, Democrats tried to lower expectations for Biden and heighten them for Palin . . . and so did the L.A. Times.

Double Standards

The paper did a big expose on Palin’s college years, even though she was merely the Republicans’ vice-presidential candidate. But I found no evidence that the paper ever bothered to do a story on presidential candidate Obama’s mysterious Columbia years, which (according to the New York Times) Obama had misrepresented and refused to discuss.

The paper said that Obama was more honest than McCain — overlooking a huge bounty of Obama falsehoods to reach that conclusion.

PRO-DEMOCRAT BIAS IN GENERAL

Pro-Democrat bias didn’t stop with the election of Obama. The editors falsely told readers that Democrats didn’t have 10 Republican votes necessary to pass the auto industry bailout. The paper eventually corrected the error after I brought it to their attention.

The paper did a great job suppressing the story that John Edwards was having an affair with Rielle Hunter. Mickey Kaus revealed that blog boss Tony Pierce had e-mailed a gag order to Times bloggers asking them not to mention the affair. One blogger wrote me and denied feeling gagged, citing as evidence a blog post written by someone else and published before the gag order was circulated.

A blogger eventually interviewed Pierce, who explained that he simply felt that one item was enough if there was no new hard news. (Because when Republicans get in trouble, the paper always runs just one story and leaves it at that. Right?)

When the Readers’ Representative asked readers if they considered the paper to be biased to the left, I encouraged readers to (politely) let her have it. In July, the paper attempted to refute claims of liberal bias, using laughable and easily refuted arguments.

ANTI-REPUBLICAN BIAS IN GENERAL

One of the ugliest episodes at the paper this year occurred when Tony Snow died. At the L.A. Times Top of the Ticket blog, which says that comments are moderated, a steady stream of ugly vitriol appeared in the comments, reveling in Snow’s death, and hoping that he suffered.

The ugliness spread to comments on Snow’s obituary. Blogger Andrew Malcolm wrote me to defend the publication of the ugly comments — which he told me he found “vile and despicable” — arguing that he shouldn’t engage in viewpoint censorship. But I couldn’t understand why he didn’t criticize them on the L.A. Times blog. Criticism isn’t censorship, after all.

The L.A. Times actively approved comments hoping Tony Snow suffered before he died.

The paper doesn’t censor hateful comments, but it does censor profanity — meaning that it approved comments saying “I hope [Tony Snow] suffered at the end [of his life]” but refused to approve my comment saying that “[a]nyone who would say they hope Tony Snow suffered is a dick.” (Oddly, a comment was approved for a period of time that said Snow looked like a “dick.”)

The year’s bias started on January 1, when a year-end political quiz falsely claimed that George W. Bush “[e]rroneously said Nelson Mandela was dead.” Bush had clearly been speaking metaphorically. Over a month after the item appeared, the paper wrote me to say that editors refused to correct the error.

An assassination plot against Obama got big play — but I noted that plots against Bush had gone unreported.

The paper erroneously claimed that the Supreme Court “determined” Bush won the presidency in 2000.

CHUCK PHILIPS RETRACTS A STORY BASED ON FORGED DOCUMENTS AND IS LAID OFF

Other than the election, the big story of the year began in March, when The Smoking Gun revealed that a story written by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips appeared to have been based on forged documents. Later that same day, the newspaper admitted that the documents relied on by the story were, in fact, forgeries. I urged the paper to take a closer look at the entire body of Philips’s work, and predicted (to derision from my commenters) that Philips was not long for the paper.

Chuck Philips wrote a story based in part on forged documents.

It turned out that the paper had been warned in advance of the story that Philips had relied on anonymous sources with shaky credibility — but the paper had ignored the warning. What’s more, Philips had overlooked a series of red flags that made his story sound . . . peculiar.

The article earned the “Error of the Year” award from a web site that keeps track of newspaper corrections. It made Gawker’s list of the Top Ten Worst Media Moments of 2008. And local notable Kevin Roderick called it “one of the most embarrassing mistakes in [the L.A. Times‘s] history.”

How bad was it? So bad that — I swear I’m not making this up — even Mary Mapes was making fun of Philips.

Even Mary Mapes thought Chuck Philips had really screwed up.

Some argued that if Philips had been scammed, he should disclose his sources — something he has not done to this day. L.A. Weekly editor Jill Stewart observed: “Take away the anonymous sources, and Philips’ entire story turned on a bogus document.” The question of the day was: who gave him the phony documents?

Finally, on April 7, the paper formally issued a stunning retraction of the entire story, making it clear that the problems with Philips’s article went beyond a reliance on forged documents. It was an utter rejection of the story in its entirety. The announcement came on the very same day the Pulitzers were announced — and not only did the paper come up empty, but editors were no doubt worried that Philips would have to give his back.

The paper gave Philips temporary cover, saying he would remain at the paper even as critics were ticking off the story’s multiple failures of fact-checking. But when the publisher compared the retracted story to a plane crash, Philips’s days seemed numbered.

Why was Philips so sloppy? Had his editors required him to cut corners and produce stories too quickly? Not hardly: I calculated that in a 41-month period, he had done only 43 articles . . . barely over one a month.

Philips was finally let go in July, in the middle of a massive round of layoffs, which I believe the paper used to mask the fact that Philips was simply being fired — and would have been fired anyway. He hadn’t published a single story in the four months since The Smoking Gun had destroyed his retracted story.

In July, I learned that James Sabatino, the guy who allegedly hoaxed Philips, is a reader of this site.

THE L.A. TIMES SIDES WITH A SHADY PRIVATE EYE INSTEAD OF ITS OWN REPORTER

Chuck Philips

Anthony Pellicano

Anthony Pellicano, who stands accused of trying to intimidate former L.A. Times reporter Anita Busch with a Mafia-style threat left on her windshield (a fish, a rose, and a note saying “Stop”), was convicted of dozens of federal felonies this year. After the verdict, I interviewed Busch, who told me how the paper had mistreated her after she was threatened. The paper’s top lawyer and Chuck Philips had even tried to enlist the aid of Pellicano . . . the very person who, as it turned out, was fingered by law enforcement as being behind the threats.

Although it is now known that she had truly been threatened, L.A. Times employees mocked her, calling her the “Tawana Brawley of the newsroom.” Chuck Philips rolled his eyes at her. (In an odd side issue, even after it was announced that Pellicano was suspected of having been behind the threats, an editor continued to display a paperweight from Pellicano that said “Sometimes you just gotta play hardball” — although he claimed there was nothing to it.

Anita Busch was mocked at the L.A. Times for reporting death threats that turned out to be genuine.

Although Pellicano turned Busch’s life upside down — tapping her phone, listening to her most secret conversations, and ruining her journalism career — an L.A. Times staff writer still found it appropriate to ask: “[W]here’s Anthony Pellicano when you need him?” and said almost admiringly that “there could be a cool efficiency to how he operated.” Not surprisingly, Pellicano’s victims objected to this insensitivity.

The paper seemed very tight with Pellicano, and after Pellicano was charged, Chuck Philips wrote a series of pro-Pellicano articles. After the conviction, Busch called for an independent investigation of Philips’s reporting on the Pellicano case. Local news legend Pete Noyes served up a rebuke to Philips when he said that a journalist should recuse himself from covering the criminal case of a long-time source — something Philips hadn’t done with Pellicano.

Pellicano did seem to share the paper’s disdain for bloggers; he reportedly said of one that he deserved “a good beating.”

Philips wrote letters to a prison inmate who was a witness in the Pellicano case. In the letters, Philips said he believed that the government had engaged in misconduct — even as he was reporting on whether the government had engaged in this misconduct. Also, he repeatedly ran a particular factual scenario past the witness — one that would benefit Pellicano. In an interview with me, Philips admitted writing the letters to Proctor and defended their content.

Above: An objective reporter writes a witness.

Now that Philips is gone, the paper has been doing good reporting on the case. After it was learned that Pellicano had a man inside the FBI feeding his defense team an FBI report through an intermediary (reportedly actress Linda Fiorentino), the paper caught Pellicano’s lawyer in some contradictory statements regarding where he had gotten the report.

Above: Linda Fiorentino
Source: RadarOnline.com

When Pellicano was finally sentenced, Anita Busch read a statement at his sentencing that was an utterly damning indictment of the paper and its treatment of her. The paper didn’t quote any of Busch’s cutting references to The Times — or even acknowledge that she had been an L.A. Times reporter when threatened. An editor wrote me to defend the omission, saying Busch’s statements were “neither true nor new” — a defense that ignored mountains of evidence supporting Busch’s claims.

CHUCK PHILIPS FAILS TO REPORT FACTS UNDERCUTTING A MURDERER’S CLAIM OF INNOCENCE

In January 2007, Philips wrote a front-page L.A. Times article asserting the innocence of an inmate named Waymond Anderson in a 1993 arson/murder. The article claimed Anderson had a solid alibi, asserting that Anderson was in Jackson, Mississippi on the date that the murder had occurred in Los Angeles County in California. Philips believed that Anderson’s alibi was valid; he has told an interviewer that he believes Anderson is innocent. Philips also told me: “I helped him out doing legal things for his case.” (Full disclosure: my boss prosecuted Anderson.)

Waymond Anderson contradicted his alibi and told tall tales about the “real killers.”

As it turned out, however, Philips knew a lot of evidence that undercut Anderson’s claims of innocence, but didn’t publish it.

For example, Anderson had repeatedly contradicted his alibi in recorded statements made to police. He admitted this year under oath that, on dates that Philips claimed Anderson had been in Mississippi, Anderson had told police that he was in fact in Compton, California — listening to the murders being planned. Philips admitted to me that he had known this fact, but hadn’t reported it.

Philips also knew Anderson had credibility problems. In a deposition, Anderson told tall tales about the “real killer” — who (Anderson claimed) had also killed legendary rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. According to Anderson, the “real killer” had phoned Anderson — while Anderson was incarcerated, facing murder charges — to keep Anderson apprised of his every step in planning these murders . . . and to confess his guilt afterwards. It was a bizarre and utterly unbelievable story.

Above: Tupac Shakur

Above: Biggie Smalls

If Anderson’s stories had been true, Philips would have had the biggest story of his career — but he didn’t publish a word of it. Why not? I theorized that Philips didn’t believe Anderson. Philips later confirmed this in an interview with me.

So why didn’t Philips tell readers that Anderson had said unbelievable things about the man who had supposedly framed him for murder? Philips told me he didn’t report these facts because they “muddied up” the story too much.

Well, the truth is sometimes messy — but that doesn’t justify concealing it in the name of simplicity.

It turned out that the facts that Philips and his editor withheld from readers were some of the very same facts that caused a judge to reject Anderson’s claims of innocence in court.

In August, Philips got his reward for championing Anderson’s cause: Anderson accused Philips of conspiring with Suge Knight to suborn perjury and threaten the inmate with messages smuggled into prison. Philips had regularly written pro-Knight articles, but this was going a step further, if Waymond Anderson was to be believed.

Did Chuck Philips smuggle threatening messages for this man? Waymond Anderson said he did.

Of course, Anderson was not believable and never had been — but Philips only recently figured that out, even though the evidence had been staring him in the face from the beginning. In his interview with me, Philips claimed: “Waymond Anderson is a liar.” It would have been nice to have had that point of view when Philips was advocating Anderson’s innocence of murder.

THE KOZINSKI SCANDAL THAT WASN’T

In June, the paper said that the chief judge of the 9th Circuit, Alex Kozinski, had published pornographic materials to a web site. This was seen as ironic because Kozinski was presiding over an obscenity trial.

Alex Kozinski came to be in the editors’ crosshairs. (HO/AFP/Getty Images)

That evening I read that the paper’s tipster was Cyrus Sanai, who had battled with Kozinski previously over issues relating to Sanai’s parents’ divorce litigation. Sanai left a comment on my blog; I phoned him and spoke with him. By early the next morning, I had obtained and published actual images from Kozinski’s “web site” (a private web server that Kozinski used to share odd items with friends). I followed this up later with a second set of images and videos.

It soon became clear that the L.A. Times had overreached. The paper had described a twisted porn collection, when in fact, Kozinski mostly had assembled a collection of humorous or offbeat items that sometimes had a pornographic aspect. There was some questionable and offensive material, as even the judge admitted. But overwhelmingly, my readers said that the actual images themselves were far more innocuous (and often more humorous) than they had been led to believe by the L.A. Times.

The paper stretched to find a parallel between Kozinski’s material and the material produced by the man on trial in Kozinski’s court for obscene images of bestiality and defecation. For example, the paper described a video in Kozinski’s collection as “a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal.” It turned out to be a humorous video of a man running away from an aroused donkey. It was on YouTube and had been on television.

The paper also referred to “themes of defecation and urination” — but vastly understated the humorous context of any such themes. Rather than graphic depictions of bodily functions, material with themes of urination turned out to be stuff like this:

The L.A. Times described images like this as material with “themes of defecation and urination” — failing to adequately convey the humorous context.

The turning point came when Judge Kozinski’s wife harshly criticized the L.A. Times in a letter posted on my site, saying that the paper’s article had been “riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies.” The Associated Press quoted liberally from the letter, which was eventually quoted in the L.A. Times itself.

I went on local radio with the reporter, Scott Glover, and had the pleasure of criticizing his story directly to him.

I also dug deeper into the background between Sanai and Kozinski — an angle that the paper had never even mentioned. Tipster Sanai admitted to me that his misconduct complaint against Judge Kozinski was part of a “litigation strategy.”

Critics started to notice the difference between the descriptions and the images. One critic said that “the subsequent revelations of the actual content of his site and how greatly it differs from what Glover describes is in many ways more disturbing than anything Kozinski had in his stash.” Critics also noticed the unsavory goals of the lawyer who had tipped off the paper. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed titled “Smearing Judge Kozinski.” There was even an op-ed in the L.A. Times that opined that the story had been overblown.

Remarkably, the very same paper that had put the story on the front page editorialized that Kozinski should respond by saying: “So what?” Less than a month later, the schizoids in charge of editorials opined that “it’s alarming that he would have taken on such a case given his appreciation for squalid pictures and videotapes.” Let me get this straight: according to the editors, Kozinski’s material was alarming . . . yet Kozinski’s attitude toward the issue should be “So what?” Hoo-kay.

I interviewed ethics expert Stephen Gillers, who had been quoted in an early L.A. Times story on the Kozinski controversy, and who told me that he thought Kozinski should not be disciplined.

After the paper failed to bury Kozinski with the “porn web site” story, it put out a nothing story about Kozinski’s private e-mail list of people to whom he sends off-color jokes.

THE WAR ON TERROR

This year we got to see how an Arab terrorist’s obituary reads in the L.A. Times: like Arab propaganda.

When computers were seized from FARC terrorists, and their content showed Venezuelan assistance to the terrorists, the paper reported: “No independent confirmation of the laptops’ content has been made . . .” — even though the AP had independently confirmed the laptops’ content. What’s more, information found on the laptops had been successfully used in a raid on a FARC safe house.

The paper’s headlines screamed about Palestinian civilian casualties from an Israeli attack, but saved the context for the 14th paragraph: that civilian casualties were reportedly caused by Hamas’s placement of targets inside civilian areas.

THE IRAQ WAR

When President Bush made a farewell trip to Iraq, the paper predictably emphasized the loss of life there, and downplayed our successes.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

The paper published an unsubtle picture of a young Latina girl crying over a headline: “The Effects of Immigration Raids.”

Subtle social commentary from the editors.

But the paper largely ignores the rampant stories of people killed by illegal immigrants who should have been deported, complete with pictures of the victims’ crying survivors.

When examining local issues that relate to overcrowding, the paper never mentions illegal immigration. The paper ran an entire article speculating on the reasons for Los Angeles’s overcrowded emergency rooms — but somehow never mentioned the elephant in the room: illegal immigration. Similarly, an article on the cost of prisons failed even to mention the cost of housing illegals. Another article portrayed deep thinkers thoughtfully scratching their heads as they labored in vain to determine why traffic sucks in Southern California — again never mentioning the obvious factor of millions of illegal immigrants.

Top editors carefully consider the effects of illegal immigration on overcrowded hospitals, prisons, and freeways.

The paper noted that Obama won Western states with help from a large Latino turnout — but editors seemed remarkably incurious as to whether illegal immigrants had played a role in this victory.

At times, it seems like the editors truly don’t understand that illegal immigration is, well, illegal.

The paper tried to convince readers that the federal government was really cracking down on illegal re-entry cases, because the Central District had doubled a miniscule number of prosecutions, making the new number . . . still miniscule.

I was asked by the paper to give a quote on immigration, as part of a feature quoting 40 “prominent Angelenos and Southern Californians.” (That word “prominent” . . . I do not think it means what you think it means.) And the paper interviewed Jack Dunphy on Special Order 40, which interferes with officers’ freedom to target illegal alien criminals.

The paper decried a movement to take DNA from [i]mmigration detainees and others arrested for federal crimes,” quoting a lawyer who said: “A lot of these folks don’t have any crimes other than the fact that they’re here unlawfully.” Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

HOMOSEXUALITY AND GAY MARRIAGE

An anti-gay marriage measure was leading in polls by 19 points. (It later passed.) The L.A. Times told readers that voters “slimly reject” gay marriage; voters “narrowly reject” gay marriage; that voters reject gay marriage by a “small margin” or a “narrow margin” or “a bit”; and that a “bare majority” oppose gay marriage. It took the New York Times to report the gay marriage poll properly.

Above: editors said these percentages were basically the same.

David Savage didn’t get the memo, and described this 19-point margin as a stable majority.

But then, the size of a lead is in the eye of the beholder. There were no such qualifiers when Obama led McCain in California by a mere 7 points — and when Obama led McCain nationally by 12 points, that was described as a “sizable lead.”

(In fairness, the L.A. Times was not alone in misrepresenting statistics this way; TIME Magazine later said that McCain “edged out” Obama on national security when the gap was 20 points.)

The paper lobbied for gay marriage in news articles in other ways, going so far as to publish a piece arguing that gay marriage would be a boon to a slowing economy.

The paper claims to care deeply about precedent for the sake of precedent, when the precedent is Roe — but when it’s an anti-gay precedent, precedent is suddenly less important.

This all revealed bias, to be sure . . . but there were times when incompetence trumped bias — such as when the paper completely failed to report a key court decision declaring “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” unconstitutional.

An article about bias based on sexual orientation bore a headline talking about “sex bias,” which Eugene Volokh called “an outright mischaracterization of what’s going on.”

RACE/POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

It’s seemingly standard policy at many major newspapers to withhold the race of criminal suspects who are black, even if a physical description would help catch the criminals. The L.A. Times proved that it also follows this politically correct and dangerous policy — although it claims not to.

The editors seemed worried that Obama’s election would cause people to think there is no racism. Of course, there still is . . . but the examples they gave to prove it were lame.

I have discussed in previous year-end reviews how the paper tried to lend credibility to the Tennie Pierce case — a lawsuit brought by an Los Angeles firefighter who claimed he had been pranked due to racial discrimination. When a jury found that Pierce had in fact been pranked because he had pranked others — and awarded $1.6 million to two white supervisors who had been scapegoated — the paper refused to take responsibility.

Tennie Pierce pranks another firefighter, before getting the L.A. Times to support his lawsuit for being pranked himself.

An op-ed told us that most Muslims love women’s rights and hate terrorism, ignoring a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

An L.A. Times blogger thought it was racist to use the phrase “Barack the Magic Negro” — but neglected to mention that the phrase had first been used by a black man . . . in the L.A. Times.

ABORTION

As he does virtually every year, David Savage cried “wolf!” about the highly unlikely prospect of Roe being overturned if McCain were elected.

Above: A little-known portrait of David Savage

When you cry wolf, you have to do it again and again, and Savage was no exception.

THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY

Ed Whelan had an excellent critique of a David Savage article on Bush’s judicial legacy.

The prison crisis in California (caused in part by illegal immigration, as we have seen) is being overseen by three of the most liberal judges on the planet. But the paper couldn’t be bothered to tell readers that all three judges had been appointed by Jimmy Carter.

CRIME

In early January, the paper decided to scale back the Homicide Blog, which also changed hands from the tireless Jill Leovy, who wrote a moving Column One piece about the experience of covering every homicide in L.A. One story covered only in the blogs was a heartbreaking story of a man gunned down as he was bringing home a teddy bear for his two-year-old daughter.

Luis Albert Leon died getting a teddy bear for his daughter. He was remembered in a blog entry.

There is a war going on in our city, and the paper largely ignores it. So when Hillary Clinton visited Compton — just down the street from where I prosecuted a guy for shooting four kids — she mentioned nothing about the rampant violence in the area, and nobody (including the L.A. Times) said boo.

At least they reported the story when, in March, there were fatal shootings within a block of the Compton courthouse where I work. (Full disclosure: I’m now handling one of those cases.)

Meanwhile, if Britney Spears has so much as a minor fender-bender, it warrants a mention on the paper’s main web page. You couldn’t make up better stuff than this.

Stop the presses! Britney had a fender-bender!

The paper ran a front-page story on Roman Polanski’s bid to have his child molestation case dismissed — but managed not to mention the fact that the 13-year-old victim had alleged that Polanski had sodomized her.

There has been one bright spot in the paper’s crime coverage: the paper has done a good job covering the violence in Mexico relating to turf wars between rival drug cartels. If only the paper could do as good a job covering local crime . . .

ANTI-POLICE AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ATTITUDES

In a perfect example of how the paper reports police uses of force, the paper gave headline space and the lede to the anti law-enforcement view of a suspect’s friend, leaving for later in the story the fact that two disinterested bystanders corroborated the police version of events.

Other newspapers’ reporters might quit to become cops, but at the L.A. Times, they quit to work for the Public Defender. And the paper is quick to attack police mistakes or misconduct, but is stingy in identifying examples of police valor.

In 2004, when an LAPD officer was caught on tape hitting a suspect with a flashlight at the end of a pursuit, Steve Lopez wrote three snarky columns and never tried to get the officer’s side. Years later, in 2008, Lopez finally talked to the officer, and found out that he is actually a good guy. Unfortunately, the officer had long since been fired by LAPD brass responding to a hostile climate that had been fueled in part by Lopez’s one-sided columns.

Steve Lopez: What? You wanted me to do research the first time around??

Lopez was hardly the only anti-law-enforcement offender; Jack Dunphy slammed Tim Rutten on his column about mandating financial disclosure for officers assigned to anti-gang and narcotics units. Jack wasn’t willing to say Rutten didn’t care about the truth — but I was.

Rutten apparently dislikes cops so much that he got angry at the mayor for praising their bravery. Rutten was hardly the only columnist who insulted cops; so did the perennially insipid Al Martinez.

The paper wrote about a case involving an employer’s right to dismiss an employee for physician-recommended marijuana use; Jack Dunphy called the paper’s news story “little more than an editorial slamming the Court’s decision.”

All this anti-law-enforcement sentiment was odd, given that people need police to make the streets safer. After all, the L.A. Times is scared to deliver the paper in Boyle Heights because of the gang problem there.

Oddly, though the editors seem to hate the cop on the street, they love Chief Bratton. Jack Dunphy couldn’t find a story about Bratton’s threatening his enemies by comparing himself to the Mafia chieftain in “The Godfather.”

In an obituary for a federal judge, the paper quoted criticism from anti law-enforcement jerk Stephen Yagman — while omitting several salient details, including the fact that Yagman was a recently convicted felon who was entering prison that very day.

The editors had what sounded like a damning video showing police misconduct. So why didn’t they post it?

DISTORTIONS IN THE EDITORS’ JIHAD AGAINST DNA EVIDENCE

All year, the paper’s editors have been engaged in a holy war against the use of DNA in criminal cases. It started in May, when the newspaper ran an article about statistical probability in cold hit DNA cases, and it was immediately clear that some of the assertions didn’t make sense.

The editors don’t seem to like DNA when it’s used to convict.

For one thing, the article seemed to assert that larger databases made cold hits less reliable, when it would seem that the opposite would be true — at least in cases where the search revealed only one hit. A statistics professor named David Kaye agreed with me on that point. In addition, he told me, the article had falsely portrayed an anti-prosecution view of the statistical question as the consensus view — when, in fact, there is a competing view more favored by peer-reviewed articles. (The author of the L.A. Times article wrote me to claim that he had acknowledged there is a lack of unanimity of opinion, but the article didn’t clearly express this.)

But the biggest error was a flat-out statistical misstatement in the article. Professor Eugene Volokh outlined the problem. I drafted a letter to the article’s authors, and ultimately sent this e-mail about the misstatement. Then I noticed yet another error in the article, again having less to do with the math, and more to do with how the math was expressed in English. Of the three errors I identified, the paper corrected only a trivial arithmetical error, leaving the more significant misstatements standing.

The editors denied they’d made a misstatement, even though they admitted that it would be wrong to make a different statement that my readers overwhelmingly agreed was identical.

Although editors denied that they had described the statistics incorrectly, they did start describing them correctly — which I took as a silent concession that I was right.

But true vindication came when a statistics expert — one whom the paper had previously quoted as an expert — claimed in a scholarly article that the paper had “mischaracterized” the statistic that I had complained about. I once again wrote the Readers’ Representative, citing the expert’s opinion. She didn’t give me the courtesy of a reply.

A second DNA kerfuffle began when the paper ran a front-page story portraying certain matches in an Arizona database as shocking. Why, the paper suggested, the results defied the laws of statistics! Only on the back pages were readers told that most of the matches “were to be expected statistically.” One of the authors of “Freakonomics” later pronounced himself surprised that the matches were largely to be expected; apparently, like many readers, he had been misled by the article’s initial spin.

A local jury freed a clearly guilty man accused of rape; the foreman was heard expressing concerns about the case based on “recent controversies” about DNA — a clear reference to the L.A. Times‘s misleading series of articles.

In discussing a technique called familial searching, the paper did its usual shtick with DNA: it played up phantom privacy concerns, and buried the fact that the technique has been used to free wrongly convicted individuals.

OP-ED AND COLUMNISTS

MICHAEL HILTZIK

Guess who got his column back? That’s right: sock puppeteer Michael Hiltzik. In 2006, the editor had taken it away, saying that Hiltzik’s sock-puppeting dishonesty meant that he could no longer credibly write about corporate duplicity. Guess the new editor disagrees . . .

Above: Michael Hiltzik

In making the announcement about Hiltzik, the Readers’ Representative blog mentioned that Hiltzik had been reassigned to Sports in 2006, but never mentioned exactly why. When my commenters tried leaving comments on the Readers’ Rep blog, to explain the mystery, those comments didn’t get approved. [UPDATE 1-3-08: I have since learned that Gold, apparently prompted at least in part by commenters coming from my site, wrote a subsequent post that explained that Hiltzik has “redeemed himself” by writing some articles since his sock puppetry.]

TIM RUTTEN

Tim Rutten — or, as Tim Cavanaugh calls him, the sanctimonious endomorph — continued his past pattern of periodically telling outright lies to readers.

Dick Cheney told an audience: “We do not torture — it’s against our laws and against our values.” Writing about Cheney’s speech, Rutten told readers: “[Cheney] told them that he was glad the administration had tortured people and that he’d do it again.”

Although I agree with the editors about the legal dangers posed by waterboarding, I don’t believe in lying to readers about what a public figure like Cheney has said. I wrote an impassioned and angry letter to the Readers’ Representative, but I knew from past experience that editors would never issue a correction to a Rutten column.

Rutten never seems to understand that such falsehoods are free propaganda for the enemy.

A Patterico reader was motivated to write a letter to the editor about Rutten’s dishonesty. Naturally, the excellent letter was selectively edited to remove the most pointed comment.

I got so fed up with the newspaper’s distortion of the truth that I wrote a satirical column about Tim Rutten in which I employed the paper’s favorite techniques of trickery. The deceptive techniques were explained in detail in this post.

I continued the ridicule later that month, imagining how the paper might use Rutten-style techniques to misreport a Saturday Night Live skit as serious news.

DAVID LAZARUS

The UAW pays people not to work. But at the L.A. Times, columnist David Lazarus was upset that the UAW made any concessions at all — while Dan Neil actively wants the federal government to buy General Motors.

JOEL STEIN

Joel Stein continued his ridiculous series of cries for attention with a column about how he doesn’t love this country.

AL MARTINEZ

Al Martinez, the paper’s most inane columnist, became the paper’s most inane blogger as well. Martinez’s achievement as most inane columnist is quite a feat, given that he works at the same paper as Joel Stein.

Al Martinez: Did you read his blog entry about his bunions?

STEVE LOPEZ

Steve Lopez continued a career seemingly driven largely by columns deriding the Hummer driven by a local government official.

ROSA BROOKS

Rosa Brooks ignored Democrat complicity in enabling excesses by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and blamed it all on Republicans.

JAMES RAINEY

James Rainey told readers that “nobody” was seeking the re-introduction of the “Fairness Doctrine.” Uh, not quite nobody.

OTHER OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

Bloggers besides myself had good fun at the expense of some of the paper’s op-ed contributors. The paper had a silly and superficial op-ed mocking General Petraeus’s medals as unfashionable, and iowahawk saw a satire opportunity. And an op-ed about how women are allegedly patronized and silenced by men was ripped apart by Amy Alkon.

JACK DUNPHY

In February, NRO columnist (and occasional Patterico guest blogger) Jack Dunphy returned to the pages of The Times.

PATTERICO

To the paper’s credit, the editors let me participate in a week-long online discussion about the future of the paper, on the paper’s web site. I pulled no punches; the links to the five entries are collected here, complete with some choice quotes.

FINANCIAL WOES AND TRIBUNE’S BANKRUPTCY

In March, Kevin Roderick reported: “The Los Angeles Times has lost more subscribers in the past four years than any U.S. newspaper and it isn’t even close.” But never fear; even if you don’t read the paper, it works great as rabbit bedding.

Tribune’s stock performance in better days

As circulation has dropped, the paper itself has gotten smaller and smaller.

And so has the paper’s staff.

In January, editor Jim O’Shea was fired for refusing to make budget cuts. It didn’t change a thing. Massive layoffs happened in July, and the publisher was also dismissed. (The paper lost a good man when Tim Cavanaugh appeared in the list of names of people laid off.) News of the bloodbath continued over several days.

Then, in October, before the paper had a chance to recover from these deep cuts, the paper had more of them. And then more still.

At least editors kept their priorities straight. As the paper was crashing, editors were said to be focused on unearthing the author of the critical web site “Tell Zell” — which, as it happens, hasn’t published anything new since October.

The paper was so financially desperate it started spamming people on behalf of a foreclosure auction service.

The paper is turning to the Web for its future . . . but in October, HotAir.com (a site put out by two bloggers) had almost 1/3 the page views of latimes.com (the Web site of a major newspaper employing hundreds of people).

In December, the paper’s parent company Tribune Corp. filed for bankruptcy, and its stock price lost 94 percent of its value in a single day. The paper soon began discontinuing payments to former staffers.

MISTAKES, WE MAKE MISTAKES

There are bound to be errors in any piece of writing, including this blog post. But the paper’s writers and editors have repeatedly boasted that their standards are far superior to bloggers’ standards, so it’s only fitting for a blogger to point out when they have fallen short.

Certain media outlets were fooled by a phony Facebook entry for Bilawal Bhutto. Some bloggers caught it, even before L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks got taken in.

An L.A. Times staffer wrote that George Washington served only one term. The staffer later corrected the error with humor and class.

Ten days after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, the paper published a Parade Magazine insert asking “Is Benazir Bhutto America’s best hope against al-Qaeda?” Many readers were outraged; apparently they had missed the tiny note on Page A2, where the paper buries all its corrections.

An editorial falsely (and outlandishly) claimed that 60 million people in America survive on $7 a day. This turned out to be propaganda from the World Socialist Web Site.

The paper got fooled by some Iranian fauxtography (with a Photoshopped rocket) and had to issue a correction.

If you have personal familiarity with any aspect of a story that appears in Big Media, you will find an inaccuracy in that story — as I found out in a story about a crash near a Compton airport, which shortened the traditional mile to about 1/6 its usual length. I wrote the Readers’ Rep and obtained a correction that was still wrong — but was closer than before . . .

The paper has a recurring problem with words that sound alike. The paper confused “acclamation” and “acclimation.” Editors also said that an engineer in a train crash had never hit his “breaks.” The paper also made a reference to a “Noble prize-winning” economist.

In a lead article on the front page, the paper spelled the Republican nominee’s last name as “MCain.”

MISCELLANEOUS

The paper published an embarrassing front-page article criticizing Silda Wall Spitzer for standing next to Eliot Spitzer after he was caught whoring around.

The paper amusingly panned Gladstone’s — a local restaurant that people go to for the view, and not the food — by saying that the food is not good. Duh.

Funnyman Roy Rivenburg mocked the paper with a satirical edition of the paper called Not the L.A. Times. In one entry he claimed that the paper had become a parody of itself — that is, more than usual.

In an e-mail printed on my site, an attorney accused the paper of giving favorable treatment to its former editors, in the paper’s coverage of a scandal involving alleged overbilling by a public relations company. These claims were undercut to some extent by information provided by one of my commenters, but questions remain.

Throughout the U.S. Attorney scandal, I had criticized portions of the L.A. Times coverage of the scandal, while acknowledging problems with the Bush administration’s handling of the matter. A report came out that substantially supported my criticisms of the paper’s coverage.

A review of a book by Sandra Tsing Loh said — again, I swear I’m not making this up — “Loh is a cunning linguist who’s honed her craft over 20 years, and it shows.” Who wrote this review — Seymour Butz? Riffing off an iowahawk bit, I found and published the first draft.

IN CONCLUSION

I hope you enjoyed the post. If you’re interested, I have done five previous annual reviews of the newspaper. The previous annual reviews can be found at these links:

• 2003

• 2004 — Part One

• 2004 — Part Two

• 2005

• 2006

• 2007

UPDATE: Thanks to Hot Air, Ace, Instapundit, and others for the links.

For posterity, I’ll note that I just added a line about Chuck Philips admitting to me that he had done legal work for Waymond Anderson. I also added the bit about the Sandra Tsing Loh “cunning linguist” book review. Somehow I had missed both points initially.

UPDATE x2: Thanks to Jonathan Adler at The Corner for the link.

UPDATE x3: Thanks to Kevin Roderick and Pejman at Red State for the links.

UPDATE x4 1-3-08: I added a reference to Jamie Gold’s post explaining Hiltzik’s alleged redemption — and also a line about the L.A. Times blogger who thought “Barack the Magic Negro” is a racist phrase, but neglected to mention that it had first been used in the L.A. Times. These happened in 2008 and belong in this Year in Review, even though I learned about them today.