The title of Los Angeles Times Business Section columnist Michael Hiltzik’s new book pretty much says it all:  “The Plot Against Social Security : How the Bush Plan Is Endangering Our Financial Future.” 

Hiltzik was plugging his book on Janeane Garofalo’s Air America on June 15th, the day before his ridiculously-titled column, “The Cost of Buffing Governor’s Self-Image,” ran in the LA Times “Business” section.  
Perhaps it was his book-pluging engagements that kept him once again from researching and writing an actual business story.  Pressed for time, he must have just sat down and cranked out another quick anti-Arnold diatribe, which by now he is able to pretty much write in his sleep. As readers of Independent Sources know, Hilzik is not the only writer at the Los Angeles Times with this ability. Whenever columnist (and novelist) Steve Lopez doesn’t have time to research a subject, he too goes to the anti-Schwarzenegger well and pounds out another “I hate the governor” piece.

Why does the Los Angeles Times stick a politicial writer in its business section instead of on its editorial pages? I believe it’s because the Times has so many tenured writers at the paper who, when they are not working on their own political books and novels, want to write free form columns expousing their political perspectives. Unfortunately for these would-be editorialists, the Times editorial pages are already filled up with liberal thinkers, so with nowhere else to place them the Times puts them in the Business and California sections and then looks the other way as they deviate from the presumed purposes of these sections.

For those of you who do not read the Los Angeles Times, and it turns out there are more of you every day, you need to understand why it is such a big deal when a critical portion of the Business section is taken up by non-business topics such as one-sided political rants. Because of the shrinking that the Business section has endured this past several years, there simply isn’t that much business-oriented writing left in the paper. For example, last Tuesday’s Business section, the one with Hiltzik’s “Buffing the Governor’s Image” piece, the entire section was just 10 pages. Of that, 45% or so was dedicated to day-before stock prices. Once you take out the ads, you have just a couple of pages to cover local, state and U.S. business. Therefore when the section’s premier writer decides to write yet another tired politicial piece, it comes at the expense of a business article.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 19th, 2005 at 5:38 pm by Insider and is filed under California Schemin', LA Times' Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.