Notes

LA Observed Notes: Media, politics and place

By Kevin Roderick | October 17, 2016 1:45 AM

maywood-nbc4.jpgScreen grab from NBC4 Maywood story.

Our occasional column of media and politics notes, with other news and observations. From multiple sources and the LA Observed inbox.


At the top

Mess in Maywood: NBC4 produced a three-part investigation into a scrap metal recycling plant in Maywood, Panda International Trading Company, that blew up in June, displaced hundreds of residents, raised questions about inspections of hazardous materials sites across the state and prompted the US EPA to deploy a Superfund response team. There's an interactive story on the web. They key players seem to be reporter Lolita Lopez, photog Jorge Diaz and digital news producer Jason Kandel.


Amy-goodman-democracy-now.jpgJournalist in court: Democracy Now host Amy Goodman is in North Dakota for a Monday hearing on new charges that she participated in a "riot" while covering an attack on Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters. The local prosecutor had dropped an original charge of trespassing. "I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting," said Goodman. "I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters."


Good read: David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, comes out to profile Leonard Cohen, including an interview at his LA home about life, music, death and the passing this year in Norway of Cohen's dearest Marianne Ihlen. The news is that there is a new album, but little chance of seeing Leonard Cohen, now 82, on stage again.

Leonard Cohen lives on the second floor of a modest house in Mid-Wilshire, a diverse, unglamorous precinct of Los Angeles. He is eighty-two. Between 2008 and 2013, he was on tour more or less continuously. It is highly unlikely that his health will permit such rigors ever again. Cohen has an album coming out in October—obsessed with mortality, God-infused, yet funny, called “You Want It Darker”—but friends and musical associates say they’d be surprised to see him onstage again except in a limited way: a single performance, perhaps, or a short residency at one venue. When I e-mailed ahead to ask Cohen out for dinner, he said that he was more or less “confined to barracks.”


Over the line: After a Chicago Tribune columnist wrote a high school-level attempted jab at Los Angeles around the Dodgers-Cubs series, Steve Lopez responded with a reluctant column in the LA Times. Apparently he included a quip about the recent murder surge in Chicago, but the line was purged from the column after publication — and after the line had been repeated on the official LA Times Twitter account.

Dodgers break even: The Dodgers came back from Saturday's heart-breaking 8-3 loss in Chicago to beat the Cubs 1-0 on Sunday. The only run came on an Adrian Gonzalez home run. Clayton Kershaw and Kenley Jansen combined on the shutout and received better outfield defense than the Dodgers showed the night before. The playoff series now comes to Los Angeles for three games, with the teams tied 1-1.

 
 

Media notes

trumps-clintons.jpgDonald Trump's groundless claims that the election and "many polling places" are rigged against him are not just more of his crackpot desperation. They are his biggest lie yet and "a serious test for journalism," CNN's Brian Stelter said Sunday. Also this: "The country has not had a presidential candidate from one of the two major parties try to cast doubt on the entire democratic process and system of government since the brink of the Civil War," said historian Douglas Brinkley... Trump's finger-pointing at the media seems to be calculated to let his followers disbelieve all of the true stuff coming out about him. But it's getting more ugly to actually cover Trump events. "Even reporters long accustomed to the toxic fervor of Trump rallies were startled — and even frightened — at the vitriol of a Cincinnati crowd," a story last week said. "Criticism of the News Media Takes On a More Sinister Tone," the NYT's Jim Rutenberg says in Sunday's column... Tim Egan on the NYT Op-Ed page: "Detested and defeated, Donald Trump is now in a tear-the-country-down rage."... The Committee to Protect Journalists issued an unprecedented warning about Trump's verbal attacks... Also this: Trump now thinks that even 'Saturday Night Live' is part of a global conspiracy to bring down his presidential candidacy... The publisher of the Arizona Republic details some of the threats over its endorsement denouncing Trump... The NYT lawyer's letter saying Trump's reputation is beyond defamation by reporting on groping allegations is destined to be a classic of the form: "Nothing in our article has had the slights effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself."... Hillary Clinton says in the News York Times Magazine that "I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse"... Deadline wrapped up Thursday's Clinton funders on the Westside... Luckily, the final televised debate of this national debacle is Wednesday... Longtime Republican activist Jon Fleischman of The Flash Report wrote in Vin Scully for president.


Trump-free zone: A defamation trial opens Monday in federal court in Virginia seeking $8 million in damages over Rolling Stone's mistaken 2014 article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia... Emmis Communications, the owner of Los Angeles Magazine, announced a deal to sell Texas Monthly to the Hobby family for $25 million... Bob Miller, voice of the LA Kings for 44 years, spoke with KPPC's Libby Denkmann about longevity, heart surgery and connecting to a city... Miller will skip 17 Kings games this season. They will be handled by invited guest broadcasters, including original Kings voice Jiggs McDonald... HBO has entered into a first-look television deal with Nikki Finke for material from her fiction website Hollywood Dementia... Location filming in the Los Angeles region increased three percent to 9,795 shoot days in the third quarter. That’s a record number of shoot days for a July through September period, says Film LA... KTLA Channel 5 unveiled a new news set.


Inside the Timeses: An update on last week's Pulitzer banquet where the paper's reporting on the San Bernardino terrorist shootings was honored. The dinner also was a reunion of ex-LAT staffers. Among those attending were New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, top AP editors Marjorie Miller and John Daniszewski, Sacramento Bee opinion editor Dan Morain, and reporters T.C. Miller, Jodi Rudoren, Robyn Fields and Alissa Rubin... Great or groaner? Headline on an LAT editorial: Trump gropes for someone else to blame... LAT editorial writer Mariel Garza wants to thank Donald Trump for the candor of his taped comments about women: "No, really. He has done something amazing, albeit unwittingly, something no one else has been able to do. With his comments about women, he has inspired an overdue discussion about the regular and routine small “s” sexual assault that American women have endured since, well, forever."... The Journalism Shop, a website by Brett Levy to help connect former LA Times staffers with jobs and freelance work, has been rebuilt and relaunched.


Media people: The University of Missouri journalism school on Tuesday honors the careers of editor Janice Min and photojournalist Rich Clarkson... Elizabeth Aguilera has joined CALmatters as a reporter covering health and human services, from senior health reporter for KPCC... David Siders has joined Carla Marinucci and Andrew Weber on the team of Politico's California Playbook... San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius is leaving the paper Dec. 2, after 36 years: "I'm ready for a change and the idea of a last big leap into the unknown appeals to me."... William R. Hearst III joined the board of directors of the Center for Investigative Reporting... Former KTLA weathercaster Markina Brown is back on the local air with CBS LA... Former LA Observed video contributor Jacob Soboroff made his first appearance on the "NBC Nightly News." He is an MSNBC correspondent.


Planning ahead: KCRW is presenting a live version of "Left, Right & Center" this Thursday night at the Ace Hotel Theater downtown... A documentary, "Building Below Zero: The Net Zero Plus Transformation," debuts on PBS SoCal Wednesday at 10 p.m... The next Lit Crawll in the North Hollywood Arts District is Oct. 26... Culture Clash puts on "Vote Or Die Laughing: A Post-Modern Political Vaudeville," at the Valley Performing Arts Center on Nov. 1...Horror Stories from the Campaign Trail, a joint event of the Greater L.A. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Los Angeles Press Club, Nov. 2 at the Redwood Bar and Grill downtown... SPJ-LA will host its annual awards banquet on Jan. 26, 2017 at the Omni Los Angeles Hotel.


This: "When people tell you that print journalism is dead, just remember who it is that's broken every major political story of this campaign." Maer Roshan

 
 

Politics notes

Univision chairman Haim Saban is into Hillary Clinton's campaign for $10 million at least. A Bloomberg profile... Downtown LA developer Geoff Palmer has new competition for the title of biggest dollar donor to Donald Trump's campaign. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley mogul who funded the lawsuit that brought down Gawker, has gone in for $1.25 million... homeless-headshots-jj.jpgIn advance of the city ballot tax measure for homeless programs, the Jewish Journal has a package on the faces of LA homelessness and a look at what it calls LA’s boldest plan ever to help the homeless... Republican pollster and commentator Frank Luntz has built replicas of the Oval Office and the Lincoln Bedroom on his Brentwood property... Mayor Eric Garcetti and other suits will be at the Purple Line subway construction site at Wilshire and Ogden Avenue at 10 a.m. Monday to say the Wilshire & LaBrea station is ahead of schedule... Use of the Metro bike-share kiosks around downtown LA has been lighter than in other cities. Which no one should be surprised about.


Some politics is local: In LA's 5th supervisor district race, a newcomer campaigns for change over experience. They also debated Saturday in Northridge... DA Jackie Lacey speaks Monday night at a public event hosted by the ACLU of Southern California, All Saints Church in Pasadena, Amnesty International and other groups... Former city controller and mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel was named executive-in-residence for the Cal State Northridge business college... The current controller, Ron Galperin, released the city's preliminary financial report for the fiscal year 2015-16. Drill down... The Yes on M campaign began airing four Spanish-language TV ads for the transit tax measure... See Political says it will release new unbiased, animated explainers of the state ballot measures on Monday... Early voting has begun in Los Angeles County... Kerman Madox and Dakota Communications have moved downtown to 800 Wilshire.

 

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People are talking about...

going-going-gone-ed-krieger.jpgKen Levine, the TV writer and author who had stints as a baseball play-by-play announcer and Dodger Talk radio host, has a play called "Going... Going... GONE!,” in which four sports journalists reporting on a game from the press box of a Los Angeles baseball stadium discuss life and more, on weekends at the Hudson Guild Theatre in Hollywood through Nov. 6. Daily News... The Griffith Park Cookie Monster is really a 52-year-old "serial troublemaker" who has made trouble in New York and San Francisco: "He has been caught on video making anti-Semitic rants, got caught up in an extortion case involving the Girl Scouts and was accused of threatening to beat up another Cookie Monster"... Richard Alarcon's weird last-gasp attempt to get back into politics is sort of meh... Here's the trailer for December's upcoming documentary on photographer Harry Benson.
 
 

Books and authors

jlethem-larb.jpgNovelist Ryan McIlvain drives out to Pomona to sit down for a long interview with Jonathan Lethem. "Somehow, I forgot to mention the traffic." LA Review of Books... Bernie Sanders' memoir, “Our Revolution," and Megyn Kelly's memoir, "Settle for More," are both due out on Nov. 15.... Henry Holt acquired Elton John's autobiography for 2019 publication... “111 Places in Los Angeles That You Must Not Miss” by Laurel Moglen and Julia Posey is arriving in stores now... SoCal bestsellers this week: "Commonwealth" by Ann Patchett and "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen. Full lists
 
 

Place

The $350 million federal courthouse on First Street between Broadway and Hill has opened. The Downtown News gives a tour of the innards.
 

From zoot suits to Mexrrissey: LA's Latino youth subcultures get their respect. The Guardian

Johnny Thompson Music may be one of the last white-owned businesses to remain in Monterey Park from before Asian immigration began to transform the city four decades ago. LA Times

Billionaire investor Ronald Burkle sold a three-story penthouse in the downtown Eastern Columbia Building for $2.5 million, "among the highest prices ever paid per square foot for a residential unit in the Historic Core district." LA Times

The ornate Fine Arts Building downtown is for sale, reportedly for $45 million. Curbed LA

Tiny homes are a hit on HGTV and blogs, but in real life LA not so much. LA Times

"El Basurero" is a short film on using the city's 311 app to clean up the streets. YouTube

A Korean War-era HUP-2 helicopter was due Monday at the USS Iowa in San Pedro but has been delayed in Kingman, Arizona by high winds in California.

The Santa Monica History Museum has an exhibit on the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, the federal reservation established in 1887 that we know today as the VA campus in West LA. KPPC

The Jerry’s Famous Deli in Woodland Hills closed with a note on the door. Daily News

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has bet lunch from Langer's Deli on the Dodgers with his Chicago PD counterpart, who has put up Al's Italian Beef sandwiches.

 
 

Selected tweets


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