Hemorrhaging readership and staff for at least 15 years, the daily paper recently reeled from yet another gut punch: After letting 115 staff go in January of 2024, the Times just lost more than 40 further staff via a mass buyout on February 28.
The usual reasons continue to be served up, as they have throughout this century: rising costs, competition, the internet and more rising costs. But the truth is that less than a third of the public has confidence in news media anymore (a lowest ever) while 39 percent don’t trust it at all (a highest ever).
The Times looked everywhere for a solution. Everywhere, that is, except in the mirror, at the simple truth that they were no longer purveying news, but rather disseminating something slanted and warped that was failing to fool the public.
“The Los Angeles Times hasn’t had decent reporting in 20 years.”
Accustomed as it became to peddling falsehoods, the Times thus began lying to itself, imagining its decline had less to do with content and more to do with what the public would “buy.” Accordingly, over the past two-plus decades, it trotted out a conveyor belt of changes in ownership, rapid hirings and firings of editors, glossy features and weekend supplements that came and went—in short, anything and everything that could be thrown at the wall to see what might stick.
Nothing did.
The public’s detest for the paper only grew, as evidenced by reader commentary:
- “It’s an awful paper. Shallow, biased.”
- “The Los Angeles Times hasn’t had decent reporting in 20 years.”
- “People aren’t buying the trash you lot are peddling these days.”
But the rot of the paper wasn’t just pulp-deep, it extended into its DNA: Witness the damning testimony provided by Employee Number 40-Something of the more than 40 lately departed—this one, leaving of her own accord.
A veteran staff member and alumnus of two Pulitzer Prize-winning writing teams, assistant editor and reporter Paloma Esquivel loudly resigned on February 28—the same day over 40 of her colleagues were let go—after 17 years at the LA Times.
In true journalist fashion, her resignation detailed the reasons for her departure—in two words: “Hector Becerra,” who serves as managing editor of the LA Times. Esquivel included a February 3 letter she had sent to HR Manager Maya Dotson and Executive Editor Terry Tang regarding Becerra’s “inappropriate, highly personal and baseless assessments of his co-workers’ talent levels, work ethic, productivity and collegiality.”
Her letter noted that such disparagement was exclusive to “women and staffers of color.”
HR never answered the letter.
“I’m sharing the letter here now with the hope of a journalist who has always believed that shedding light is sometimes the only way to bring change,” Esquivel wrote. “I don’t want those of you who remain to have to continue dealing with what too many of us have already had to deal with. My hope for the LA Times is that it can one day be a place where workers feel respected and valued and where they can do their work knowing that those in positions of power won’t berate or disparage them.”
Esquivel isn’t the first LA Times staffer to complain of an environment of abuse. Five years ago, over 50 female staff were joined by more than 20 male employees in demanding change after Colin Crawford was allowed to abruptly retire once investigated for inappropriate touching, sexual harassment and toxic management over multiple decades. Crawford was deputy managing editor of the Times.
The demand said that the Times’ kid-glove treatment of Crawford violated the company’s “Code of Business Conduct,” which promises “an environment free of harassment.”
“The company’s reported handling of sexual harassment allegations sends a powerful message to women and all staffers at every level that complaints of wrongdoing will be swept under the rug and those who do come forward will be retaliated against,” the letter read.
The company’s cavalier handling of misogyny and abuse also sends a powerful message to LA Times readers that the publication stands behind harassers of all stripes—whether within its offices or outside on the streets of LA.
And the poster boy of that message is Hector Becerra himself.
Is it any wonder they’re tanking?
Under Becerra’s watch, the Times “reported on” a tiny group of anti-religious bigots screaming obscenities outside Los Angeles Churches of Scientology, blocking parishioners from attending services and hurling vicious epithets at police officers attempting to quell them.
You can watch videos of these incidents here, if you have the stomach for them—videos that also show the abusers disturbing neighborhood businesses and their owners and customers, as well as any and all members of the community—just more epithets, obscenities and screaming. That includes harassing a young woman on Hollywood Boulevard and ridiculing the shape of her buttocks; following a lady down the street screaming “dumb blonde b—tch” until she bursts into tears; stalking a Black man and shouting “[I’m] Anglo-Saxon, I would like harm to come to you”; and screaming orders through a bullhorn to “kill all the children” in the Middle East.
The evidence reveals lunatic-fringe thugs, pursuing no higher aim than provoking violence, attacking a religion and abusing women. But recognizing these bullies and bigots as kindred spirits, Hector Becerra dubs them “activists” lovingly, in the Times’ name. (What would you expect from a misogynist cad who would be on the street abusing right along with them were he not getting paid to do the same thing from an executive desk?)
There appears to have been neither accountability nor discipline for Hector Becerra, whether his verbal abuse of co-workers in the office or his in-print abuse of Angelenos via the stories hawked from his editor’s desk. But perhaps that’s because he isn’t an anomaly so much as a symptom of the pestilence that is the Los Angeles Times.
To wit, in 2023, the editorial leadership of the Times chose one August Brown to cover another article involving the Church of Scientology.
Did Brown have a background in theology? Had he any familiarity with the religion or its teachings?
What were his qualifications, anyway?
He had been the former sex columnist for his college newspaper—a publication from which he was fired for authoring a racist, pro-rape article for “April Fools.”
Not only did the university fire Brown, they fired the entire staff of the paper for failing to stop him.
They even changed the locks.
With such a résumé, it surprised no one that Brown hacked out a bigoted screed after ignoring 15 pages of hard evidence presented by the Church disproving his false story.
Meanwhile, they promoted Hector Becerra to managing editor in 2024.
Thus the continuing true story of how the Los Angeles Times violates journalistic ethics and the needs of its community to cudgel the innocent, coddle the violent and celebrate misogyny, bigotry and abuse.
Is it any wonder they’re tanking?
- “Trash paper.”
- “They’re not even trying anymore.”
- “No rational person would view it as a platform for honest journalism.”
- “Pravda West.”
Back in its infancy in the 1880s, Los Angeles Times co-founder and publisher Eliza Otis came up with a splendid motto for the newly minted paper: “Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True.”
Mrs. Otis’ husband, Times publisher Harrison Gray, loved it so much he commissioned a bronze eagle sculpture symbolizing the motto atop the Times building at First and Broadway. The words were later immortalized in stone in 1935 on the Times building at First and Spring.
It’s a lovely motto, it’s true.
But it’s rather hard to “Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True” on a quicksand of bigotry and abuse.
At least that’s what the public say.
