Huh?

Angelenos and news-crits: Before you rush to agree with LAT columnist Tim Rutten's self-satisfiedly righteous denunciation of the evil, greedy absentee-owning Tribune Company: 1) Do you really think Dean Baquet couldn't put out a high-quality Los Angeles newspaper with a mere 800 editorial employees (instead of the current 940)? The Washington Post operates with about 800 editorial employees. It's pretty good! 2) If you are a reporter at the LAT, do you really want to work at a paper owned by Eli Broad, Ron Burkle, or David Geffen--three of the local billionaires you should be covering? They aren't known as people who like bad press. ...

P.S.: The LAT has become a much better paper under Baquet--better than it ever was under the Chandlers--while it's cut back staff. Does that bolster the argument against cutting?

--Mickey Kaus

Wow, where does one start? First, the metropolitan area of Los Angeles has a population of almost 18 million people, making it more than twice the size of the D.C.-Baltimore metropolitan area. Besides the fact that the Post isn't half the newspaper it was in the '70's, a good newspaper in Los Angeles should have quite a bit more editorial employees than one in D.C., especially one whose circulation is almost 20% higher.

Second, having a local billionaire sign your paychecks is going to represent no more of a potential conflict of interest than having a publicly-traded corporation do so, and its interest in the bottom line uber alles. At least having Eli Burke or Ron Burkle running things at Times-Mirror decreases the likelihood of having advertisers trying to censor unfavorable articles, an inevitable result of having a publicly-traded corporation in charge, where everything is constantly and monomaniacally geared towards maximizing profits for the shareholders. If the trade-off is not aggressively investigating your billionaire patron, I'll live with that.

Lastly, that the LA Times is better now than it was in the Chandler Era (and thus, the best that it's ever been; the pre-Otis Chandler Times was a joke) is not only news to those who continue to subscribe to it, and have to read the bare-bones sports and metro sections, but it's also news to regular readers of Mickey Kaus, who has been unsparing in his attacks on the paper the past few years (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), both before and after the promotion of Baquet in July, 2005.

In fact, as recently as last May, Kaus approvingly cited this reaction from one of his readers:

Alert and anguished L.A. reader "G"--not me! And not Brady Westwater neither!--writes:

Two more Pulitzers are going on the wall at the L.A. Times, which means the editors at Spring St. can delude themselves, for at least another year, with the belief they are putting out a decent newspaper.

Prizes, which award either prestige or cash, are meant to reward, and thereby encourage, good behavior. ... And, at their best, the Pulitzer Prizes encourage papers to pursue serious journalism. The possibility of a Pulitzer is a good reason for an editor at a small paper with a limited budget to let a reporter spend a lot of time investigating a local scandal. ... But at large papers ... the Pulitzers are reinforcing bad behavior. At the LA Times, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and every other large paper in the country, editors year in and year out mount big projects with Pulitzers in mind ... (Did you make your way through even one of the NYT's Pulitzer-winning Race in America series? I didn't think so.) Typically these projects are snoozes which have their largest readership among Pulitzer judges. ... But at the WSJ and NYT, that's okay. Both papers are excellent despite their Pulitzer pursuits.

But by continuing to hand out prizes to the LAT, the Pulitzer committee is complicit in the journalistic disaster in Los Angeles. This is not to say that it's King/Drew series or Kim Murphy's reporting from Russia weren't excellent. ... Or that the four Pulitzers it brought in last year were undeserved. Under [John] Carroll and [Dean] Baquet, the LAT does national politics and foreign reporting about as well as anyone out there.

But for some reason that high quality journalism seems to stop at the Los Angeles County line. Local coverage (that is the daily stuff that isn't in a prize-bait series) is shoddy. Anyone who actually lives in L.A. and is dependent on the local paper for news and analysis of L.A. will be sorely disappointed.

There's every reason to pop champagne bottles and give self-congratulatory speeches in the newsroom today. But tomorrow, please mull this thought over: winning Pulitzers may be the thing that the LA Times does best. Which is a kinder way of saying, no matter how many Pulitzers go up on the wall each year, from the vantage of your local readers, you still put out a lousy paper. [Emph. added]

I suspect declining circulation numbers and heat from the Chicago boys at Tribune Co. may get the message to Carroll & Baquet through the celebratory haze.

If Kaus' opinion of the Times has changed in the brief period since Baquet took over, it hasn't been evident in his writing. Is a front-page that now includes profiles of the Cannibis Babe Attorney really such an improvement? Since when has he liked the paper?