Follow LA Observed on Twitter here
Notable stuff (to me) in or about the local media this Memorial Day weekend:
• Tim Rutten calls the New York Times' admission that its pre-war coverage of Iraq was sloppy and hyped by bad sources worse than the Jayson Blair scandal: "The most serious of the credibility crises that have afflicted America's mainstream news media over the past two years." [LAT Calendar] Also, NYT Public Editor Daniel Okrent: "The failure was not individual, but institutional." [NYT]
• Last week's NYT Editor's Note on Iraq coverage parodied, with gratuitous side mention of the Santa Monica Daily Press. [low culture, hat tip to Bob Patterson of Just Above Sunset]
• Eli Broad wants to be the guy who brings the National Football League back to the Coliseum: "I think I would be a logical person to be involved. I have the resources..." That he does, but does anyone in L.A. care about having football in Los Angeles? USC, it seems, is not so happy about the whole idea. [L.A. Daily News]
• City Hall power broker Ted Stein's early dabbles in wielding influence, a Times investigative story diluted with a question-mark headline: "Did Stein 'Pay to Play' at Start of Civic Career?" Let us know when you decide... [LAT]
• New books coming from Walter Moseley (Little Scarlet, an Easy Rawlins novel set after the Watts riots), love-him-or-loathe-him historian Mike Davis (Heavy Metal Freeway: California's Season in Hell, about last year's recall election), and the LA Weekly's John Powers (Sore Winners: [And the Rest of Us] in George Bush's America), called by David L. Ulin "a book that takes on icons of both the left and the right [Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Ashcroft], decoding the through-the-looking-glass landscape of contemporary American culture with the same clear-eyed intelligence that makes the author's column "On" such an essential read"). Also, the L.A. Times Magazine's Martin Smith and Patrick Kiger have sold a follow-up to Poplorica to Harper-Collins, and the original book has been optioned by producer Mark L. Wolper. [LAT Calendar, Publishers Lunch]
• Santa Monica gets tough on yard shrubbery that's too tall, threatening fines of $25,000 a day. Bobby Shriver, the Deputy Governor's brother, is mad as hell. [LAT]
• The Grand Avenue beautification and park project — the latest scheme to try to make downtown inviting, like it or not — will cost $1.2 billion. Retired former councilman Ernani Bernardi pshaws. [L.A. Daily News]
• Jillian Barberie loses half her gig at "Good Day L.A./Good Day Live." She'll stay on the local show, exit the national show. [RonFineman.com]
• Charles Johnson says Newsweek magazine reads "more and more like the farthest left of the leftist rags." Its crime: Running a gallery of Abu Ghraib abuse photos under the headline "Abu Gulag." I guess he's never seen any actual leftist mags. [Little Green Footballs]