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Michael Lewis has been stricken from the online menu of Sunday Opinion columnists at the Times since I observed last Wednesday that his presence there was moot. The same day, I also noted Patterico's observation that no Outside the Tent columns had run since April 24. That too has changed. In today's Opinion, Gustavo Arellano of the OC Weekly and NPR writes from Outside the Tent about the Times' coverage of Orange County. Excerpt:
Don't let the landslide of news stories spilling out of Laguna Beach fool you: The Los Angeles Times usually — bizarrely — ignores a region of 3 million souls in its backyard, a 789-square-mile coastal empire that three television programs use to show the peculiarities of what USA Today once called the "capital of cool."Orange County is a Sutter's Mill for journalists, yet The Times, California's preeminent newspaper, treats us as an afterthought, a nuisance, a Cudahy.
In truth, our sliver of the Southland is infinitely more interesting than the entirety of Los Angeles County.
Also in Opinion: Elaine Showalter on the Jacko trial as "social drama...lurid in the extreme," and Michael Kinsley on the Downing Street Memo as "an encouraging sign of the left's revival. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes ideological self-confidence."