If you are curious to the title of this post you will need to scroll to the bottom.

Last November, LAT’s Michael Hiltzik took our coverage of him to task:

Insider, in fact, once compiled a list of 30 days of the Golden State column, grading each one as business or not-business and concluding that most were not-business. I regarded this as an extremely presumptuous exercise, but in acknowledgment of Insider’s courtesy of joining my blog’s discussion I won’t repeat here some of the language I used to describe the exercise at the time. Nor will I pull rank by saying it’s my column and it’ll cover what I want; I concede that the reader has an interest in how I pick my subject matter.

He also questioned our (well, my) motives:

It seems to me that what Insider really objects to when I write a “political” column isn’t that it’s not strictly about business, but that it expresses a viewpoint with which Insider disagrees.

He couldn’t be more wrong as my critiques were focused on the fact that he took up valuable real estate in the ever-shrinking LAT Business Section with articles that had almost nothing to do with business and everything to do with his personal political viewpoints. (Independent Sources has had problems with the quality of journalism in the Business Section which at times appears to be not much more than reprinting company press releases. However we have never cited a column/article of Hiltzik’s in this regard and in fact would be surprised if he disagreed with our assessment of the articles that we did reference. (See: Keyword Search “Duh”; LA Times Business Section Hits Bottom)

Another comment from Hiltzik

Stated simply, this is an inane comment. Blogs have various areas of interests and focuses. For many, it’s politics and thus it is not surprising that they focus on political issues and political coverage. That’s like us criticizing him for never writing an article about arts or entertainment (as it is we criticize him for not writing about business and we only do that because he appears in the Business Section).

We’d like to note that we wrote about Robert Hilburn leaving the paper immediately after reading it in LA Observed.

(Of course we have on occasion criticized Hiltzik’s viewpoints, opinions or writings, for example here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and of course here.)

Enough about us. Let’s talk about the attention Hiltzik is paying to Patrick Frey (Patterico’s Pontifications). Here is what Patrick has to say about it:

Hiltzik sets the tone in the first post, in which he calls my entire post “propaganda,” compares me and other conservative critics of his paper to Stalinists (no, really! read on for the direct quotes), and says that I do not appear to be “genuinely interested in correcting factual errors” or otherwise improving the paper’s performance.

One of my favorite comments made by Hiltzik is when laments how his “critics”:

“…ascribe imaginary motivations to reporters and editors, which they then feel free to decry.”

If you look above you will see that while it is a Stalinist crime for others to do this it is perfectly okay for him to do so. ” As he said in his blog posting about Independent Sources:

I’d say that he has concocted a motivation to what we wrote and then decried it as well.

Note that Independent Sources postings on Michael Hiltzik have not been universally negative. See our “We Have Something Sorta Nice To Say About the LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik.”

Now for the title of this article “That’s gotta hurt: Hiltzik gets pounded in his own blog.” As of this writing, there were 33 comments on Hiltzik’s post. Hiltzik and Patterico each had two comments so we will cancel those out, as well as any multiple postings by the same person, and look at the remaining comments:

Jim Z was the first commenter and appears to be solidly in Hiltzik’s court. We’ll call that +1
Randy asked about liberal blogs that also question the media. We’ll call that neutral so the score is still +1
Unclesmrgol said “And what color is the kettle???” That’s a minus one so the score is back to zero
Michael Blankenship added “Keep guzzling the Kool-Aid there ace…” That’s a minus one. Score = -1
Jeff Miller weighed in with a sarcastic comment that frankly I don’t understand so I’ll give it a zero until he clarifies it. Score = -1
Mike Myers piped in with “There is a reason why your paper’s readership numbers are tanking.” Score -2.
Aeolus wrote “While this is part of the world, it’s getting worse, especially at the Los Angeles Times, which is following its competitors into the world of bland, insipid coverage.” Score -3
Publius tossed in “Mr. Hiltzik, you lack a little credibility when it comes to denying liberal bias.” Score -4
RakDaddy chimed in with “Dude, calling someone a Marxist as a put-down is so 1960s.” Score -5
RakDaddy added another dig but for the purposes of this exercise we’re only going to score one comment…Dude! Score still -5
Calvinst left this “Congratulations, you have now insulted the memory of the 20 million Soviet citizens killed by their own state.” Score -6
Calvinst then left another comment but as with RakDaddy, only one counts so score still -6
Brady Westwater dropped this bomb “No one is willing to take responsibility for the truth at the Times.” Score -7
Adam Rakunas retorted with “Numbers aren’t a measure of discourse” which was in defense of Hiltzik’s small reader response compared to Patterico’s. Give Hiltzik a point and we are at -6
Calvinist lobbed in another one but as we have stated above, only the first comment counts. Score still -6
Publius added a second non-scoring comment. Still -6
Jim essentially called the MSM a bunch of pussies for letting right-wing extremists push them around. Back-handed compliment perhaps, but supports Hiltzik point so score now -5.
RakDaddy. 3rd comment. We skipped it. -5
Bob Young wrote “Frey’s apparent inability or deliberate unwillingness to separate solid facts from opinion”. Score -4
Jerry Hurtubuse attacked Frey’s grammar. (Low blow but a point for Hiltzik). -3
Amadeo Silva considers Frey to be far more professional and civil than Hiltzik. -4
Billy Beck wrote “You are *so* fired, Hiltzik.” -5
katielenn wrote “As my Mammaw used to say ‘Bit dogs bark.’” I don’t know what this means so no score. -5
Tom Maguire hit Hiltzik with a gut punch “Wow - this is almost totally fact-free - that can’t be easy. ” Score is now -6
Maguire continued in a second post but does not affect the score which remains at -6
Lyndi said “You (Hiltzik) look petty and sniping…” Score -7
Steven Donohue added “…you could at least get the decade of the Stalinist show trials right.” Score -8
Katzxy left this “Your (Hiltzik’s) argument about the satellite, which was one of the few specifics you mention, doesn’t pan out.” -9

Hiltzik had the home court advantage and still got clobbered. Worse, in our opinion, he came off as trite, hypocritical and elitist. If he stuck to writing “business” articles we wouldn’t have a problem with him. Alternatively, if he was in the Editorial section of the paper where it appears he’d really prefer to be, we would also have no gripe with his right to editorialize to his heart’s content. We’re open-minded, he might even change our point of view on a particular topic. However to do that he’ll have to do a far better job than what he did in attacking Patterico and Hewitt.

Others on the story: Malkin Winds of Change Thoughts online Funmurphys Deans World

Update: More from Patterico here.

Technorati Tags: LA Times, LAT, Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik

This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2006 at 12:00 am by Insider and is filed under LA Times' Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.