Patterico on the LA Dog Trainer Times

This is required reading for all media watchers. Patterico has compiled a litany of partisan hackery on the part of the LA Times for '04... and he's just getting started.



The LA Times: with all the credibility of Art Schlichter at the dogtrack... holding a Mastercard in the name of Pablo Rodriquez. I laughed, I cried, it changed my life.



Here's a quick taste:

...When CBS's "60 Minutes" program relied on forged documents to support allegations that Bush had been AWOL, the Los Angeles Times ran another front-page story, trumpeting the existence and content of the documents. But when the Washington Post (taking its cue from the blogosphere) ran a Page A01 story reporting that the documents were probably fake, the L.A. Times buried the news on Page A18. That's right: when documents damaging to Bush appeared authentic, that was front-page material -- but genuine questions about their authenticity were buried in the back of the paper. Worse still, the L.A. Times portrayed the controversy about the forged documents as a "partisan" issue, and quoted Col. Killian's daughter as saying that Killian's family knew nothing about the authenticity of the documents. This was false, as the paper's editors should have known. The Times didn't tell its readers that the previous day, Col. Killian's son and widow had both publicly questioned the documents' authenticity. When the Times finally put this story on the front page, no variant of the word "forgery" appeared in the entire piece, and the front page didn't contain even a hint that the documents might not be authentic. All the information showing the documents were probably fake was carefully buried on the back pages, on Page A18 -- the Page of Choice for embarrassing revelations about the forged documents. While the rest of the media slowly accepted the fact that CBS had relied on forged documents, the L.A. Times followed Dan Rather's lead, and kept looking for that partisan connection. The results were occasionally comical...

Patterico: Los Angeles Dog Trainer Year in Review '04 (and don't miss Part II)