The LA Times’ Media Columnist Tim Rutten unintentionally called out the LA Times for biased reporting in his article “For some, Jackson verdict is already in”

Once you obliterate the boundaries that [are] used to delineate journalism from advocacy, all sorts of other irritating barriers fall as well.

Rutten calls out by name other media organizations (Fox, CNN Headline News and Court TV) as no longer feeling:

 “constrained by even the minimal requirements of fairness, balance or dispassion required to practice American-style journalism.”

Rutten is absolutely right in both accounts.

However, Rutten’s big omission is not including his own paper in this list. Since he presumably reads the “Front Page” and “California” sections of the paper he writes for, he must be aware that the Los Angeles Times long ago lost its own status as an unbiased, independent reporter of the news.

Just look at Times coverage of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, which can only be described as “anti-Schwarzenegger advocacy” and certainly not the fair and unbiased reporting Rutten pines for.

Of course bias at The Los Angeles Times is not new and is certainly not limited to their coverage of Gov. Schwarzenegger. As reported here in Independent Sources and elsewhere, the Times even botched the relatively simple story of John Kerry’s records release.

 Not only did L.A. Times reporter and Kerry sycophant Stephen Braun fail even to mention the fact that Kerry’s grades were lower than Bush’s (a fact emphasized by the nation’s other major papers), he’s once again making it sound like the complete file has been released. (Patterico)

While we might be tempted to write off Mr. Rutten with the words “people in glass houses…” we like the fact that he is attacking bias in news reporting. We just wish he had listed the Times in his list — it certainly deserves to be at the top.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 11th, 2005 at 10:05 am by Insider and is filed under Los Angeles Times, California Schemin', Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.