What A Day, What A Day for an Auto-da-fe

At the Los Angeles Times, the self-destruction continues. The editorial page editor, Andres Martinez, was driven to resign yesterday over the discovery that his girlfriend works for a PR firm used by a Hollywood producer who was invited to be a guest editor for an opinion supplement called Current. (Got that?) The suspicion is that the producer, Brian Grazer, might have enjoyed some unfair advantage in securing this plum assignment. There is no evidence of that, and it makes no sense. My own suspicion would be the other way around: maybe the LA Times had some advantage in securing Grazer. Certainly the relationship is, or was, more of a coup for the paper than for the producer.
Naturally, the LA Times publisher says that the problem isn’t a conflict of interest. It is the appearance of a conflict of interest. This formula has irritated me for years, especially when used by the media. It is the job of journalism to bring appearances in line with reality, not to bring reality in line with appearances. The appearance of a conflict of interest is a self-fulfilling accusation. If the Los Angeles Times says there is an appearance of a conflict of interest—and you can always find some journalism professor or ethic bore somewhere to say that there is—why then, there is one. Usually, though, the “appearances” dodge is used to destroy the reputation of someone else. The genius of the LA Times is to turn this weapon on itself. The paper has spent seven years recovering from the notorious Staples Center controversy, in which an earlier publisher arranged to share revenue from a special supplement puffing the new sports arena. Analytically, there is no similarity between that and this, but of course they both involve a supplement and that creates an appearance….
And the folly looks to continue. A former LA Times city editor has called for “a beefed up team of top reporters” to examine past editorials and opinion pieces, looking for…well, I’m not sure what. “How deep and how wide was the corruption?” he blogs, leeringly. (The very notion of a “beefed up team of top reporters” shows that this man is living in the past.) Newsroom busybodies have expressed deep concern over the very idea of having guest editors. As Mickey Kaus says in Kausfiles this morning, God forbid that anyone should try anything interesting. The paper’s star political reporter, Ron Brownstein, has been removed from reporting duties and exiled to the opinion pages because his wife works for John McCain.
The martyred editorial page editor, meanwhile, has struck back, accusing the newsroom of attempting to influence editorials. Apparently a news editor once asked him to consider running an editorial in connection with some news-side series. Or maybe more than once. Heavens. It does sound like the Salem Witch Trials, or the later stages of the Cultural Revolution, there at the LA Times. Who next will be rousted from bed in the middle of the night, denounced for an “appearance” of some sort, and taken out and shot?
Anyway, here’s my own conflict (not just an appearance): I was the editor of the editorial and opinion pages of the LA Times (including Current) before Andres. I hired Andres and he got the job he quit yesterday when I was canned at an earlier stage of the ongoing auto-da-fe. He remains a good friend (and an excellent journalist), as do many others at the LA Times. The publisher who fired me later got fired himself, but that’s another story. Or a different chapter of the same one.