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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Los Angeles Times

1. January 4, 2011 12:10 PM

   “There is no ‘The Tea Party’”

   East and West Coast Times’s different approaches to the movement

   By Joel Meares

   Tea Party Patriots co-founder and national coordinator Mark Meckler was the lead quote-giver in major New York Times and Los Angeles Times stories this weekend. The themes of both pieces are near identical: the Tea Party is displeased with what it views as GOP capitulation in the lame duck session that ended 2010, and, as such, will be keeping its...

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2. May 11, 2011 02:49 PM

   L.A. Times Examines Trump’s Gold-Plated Corporate Welfare

   By Ryan Chittum

   How do you handle covering a candidacy that's primarily a publicity stunt by a crazed ego and presshound—one with approximately zero chance of success—without lending undue credit to it? The Los Angeles Times shows one way today with a smart angle: Donald Trump's rich history of milking taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars for his gold-plated skyscrapers. This is...

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3. November 15, 2010 06:57 AM

   L.A. Times Quantifies the Dominance of the Finance Lobby

   No "obtained" records here or even FOIAs; this info was in plain sight

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Los Angeles Times drops some good reporting this morning on regulation and the financial lobby, aggregating publicly available records to give a glimpse at how the sausage is made (with white shoes and cufflinks, apparently). Nathaniel Popper gets this story by combing the websites of the Federal Reserve, FDIC, SEC, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which have for the...

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4. April 11, 2011 07:54 PM

   LAT on the U.S. As Low-Wage Offshoring Destination

   By Ryan Chittum

   Where does Ikea build a plant when it wants to offshore work to pay poverty wages, bust unions, force mandatory overtime, and generally slave-drive their workers? The quote of the day goes to Bill Street, a union organizer in Danville, Virginia, on that: "It's ironic that Ikea looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the...

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5. September 26, 2011 06:23 PM

   LAT On Why Solyndra Dazzled the Private and Public Sectors

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Los Angeles Times has a really good look at the failure of Solyndra, the solar-power company that went bankrupt earlier this month despite a $528 million Department of Energy loan two years ago. This isn't a story about the machinations of the Obama administration or an investigation into why the FBI raided the company as it was failing. It's...

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6. November 16, 2010 01:03 PM

   LAT Watchdogs Wall Street on the GM IPO

   The banks just can't help themselves, and if shares soar, political problems await.

   By Ryan Chittum

   The L.A. Times takes a smart tack on the General Motors IPO story, reporting that it shows how Wall Street is up to old tricks. The thing is, both GM and Wall Street owe their very existence to the taxpayers. We bailed them out, else they'd now both be relics. So you'd hope the Street might show a little more...

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7. July 18, 2011 02:33 PM

   A Medicare Miss at the LA Times

   Some fact-checking, please

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Medicare is a bear to write about. It’s tough for beneficiaries to understand, and unclear news stories only serve to compound their confusion. That’s what last week’s LA Times story on Medicare costs did. The paper’s thesis was that seniors’ medical bills “could jump hundreds or even thousands of dollars,” and the top supported that storyline. A Medicare expert from...

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8. September 6, 2011 02:37 PM

   Amazon’s California Tax Battle

   Fighting to delay the end of its unfair advantage

   By Ryan Chittum

   While billionaire Jeff Bezos is off crashing spaceships (or wannabe spaceships, anyway) in the West Texas desert, his company's unfair tax advantage is disintegrating too. In July, a new California law forced online retailers like Amazon to collect sales taxes if they have a physical presence in the state, but the Los Angeles Times reports that Amazon is still refusing...

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9. May 31, 2012 11:18 AM

   Amazon’s California tax squeeze

   A WSJ follow story waters down an LAT scoop from two weeks ago

   By Ryan Chittum

   Amazon's long run of not paying collecting state and local sales taxes is coming to an end as legislatures finally force the Internet retailer to compete on something of a level playing field with everyone else. But that doesn't mean the company isn't trying to squeeze every last drop out of the struggling communities whose infrastructure enables its profits. The...

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10. March 29, 2011 07:58 PM

    Audit Notes: Banks Mislead, The South and Unions, Shareholder Capitalism

    By Ryan Chittum

    Adam Levitin of Georgetown Law and Credit Slips calls out the banking lobby for an "incredibly dishonest" attempt to mislead people into thinking debit-card interchange fees haven't been going up: Here's the slight-of-hand (sic): while the text of the ABA report make very clear that it is referring to debit cards, the graph shows average debit + credit interchange rates...

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11. October 9, 2012 12:15 PM

    Audit Notes: BLS BS, another print turnaround forecast, deficits

    The LAT and CNBC let Jack Welch frame the jobs numbers

    By Ryan Chittum

    Don't miss Brendan Nyhan's excellent review of coverage of the unemployment-numbers conspiracy theory kicked off by Jack Welch on Friday. And I've got two more examples of poor press coverage to point out on this issue. The Los Angeles Times gave the nutty, evidence-free assertion the he said/she said treatment on the front of the business pages. Here's the lede:...

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12. August 5, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: California’s Enron echoes, Sox toolbox, the Dow’s decade

    LAT on allegations that JPMorgan manipulated markets

    By Ryan Chittum

    — Michael Hiltzik had a good column two weeks ago on allegations that JPMorgan Chase manipulated California energy markets: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the regulator of the ISO and its trading markets, has started a formal investigation into Morgan's allegedly manipulative energy deals in California and with the Midwest ISO, which covers 11 states from Michigan to Montana. Forget...

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13. February 24, 2012 08:37 PM

    Audit Notes: Daisey vs. Pogue, American Banker, LAT Paywall

    By Ryan Chittum

    Mike Daisey, of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and the recent This American Life exposé of Apple's outsourced China factories, shreds The New York Times's David Pogue over his apologia for Apple's labor practices (I criticized Pogue for an earlier post on the Apple controversy). In a mostly excellent rant (apart from questioning whether Pogue is being "manipulative"...

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14. January 20, 2012 09:43 PM

    Audit Notes: Justice’s Revolving Door, GE Probed, iBooks Author

    By Ryan Chittum

    Reuters's Scot J. Paltrow reports that Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder and the head of his criminal division worked for a law firm that represented a "Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud" (emphasis mine): The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and...

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15. December 28, 2010 09:23 AM

    Best of 2010: Dean Starkman

    CJR's Kingsford Capital Fellow picks his top stories of the year

    By Dean Starkman

    The Hamster Wheel. Why running as fast as we can is getting us nowhere. The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics, it’s live-blogging the opening ceremonies, and matching...

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16. August 31, 2012 06:50 AM

    Don’t posit ‘what women think’ without quoting any

    Coverage of Ann Romney's RNC speech said she connected with women, but no female voices in the stories verified the claim

    By Jennifer Vanasco

    In her column, Minority Reports, Jennifer Vanasco analyzes how the mainstream media covers social minorities. Immediately after Ann Romney’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, some major media outlets reported the GOP plan had worked: Ann Romney connected with women. Why did they think that was the case? A male Republican strategist told them so. Reuters, discussing Romney’s...

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17. November 15, 2012 03:10 PM

    Factchecking the ‘gifts’ theory of politics

    LAT, NYT break news on Mitt Romney's remarks—and also offer a skeptical look

    By Greg Marx

    The big electoral politics story of the day (well, ok, of late Wednesday) is the news that Mitt Romney, on a phone call with contributors to his campaign, attributed his loss to the Obama administration’s strategy of giving “gifts” to groups of voters. As Maeve Reston of the Los Angeles Times tells it: "The Obama campaign was following the old...

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18. January 6, 2011 03:53 PM

    Hiltzik Takes on the FCC on the Comcast-NBC Deal

    By Ryan Chittum

    John Dunbar has a must-read piece in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review on why the Comcast-NBC Merger is a bad deal. Go read it. And then go read Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote an excellent column in the Los Angeles Times yesterday eviscerating the logic of the FCC approving Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal...

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19. April 18, 2011 03:31 PM

    Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced—and the Journal’s One of Them

    By Joel Meares

    The Wall Street Journal has won its first Pulitzer since Rupert Murdoch took over the paper in 2007. The award went to Joseph Rago in the category of Editorial Writing “for his well crafted, against-the-grain editorials challenging the health care reform advocated by President Obama.” Other major winners included the Los Angeles Times in the category of Public Service, for...

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20. October 5, 2011 12:19 PM

    Pulitzer Winners Go Behind the Scenes of Their Stories

    Reaching for the high-hanging fruit

    By Alysia Santo

    Four of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners visited the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism last night to discuss their winning stories, which they found “hiding in plain sight.” Moderating the discussion was three-time Pulitzer winner Walt Bogdanich, who opened the talk with Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives of the Los Angeles Times. Winners of the Public Service prize for...

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