Michael Hiltzek Comes Out

....as a partisan hack.

Quite a while ago, I criticized him here and here for his belief that the sole remedy to the structural fiscal crisis in California - caused by legislators who spend like drunken sailors and taxpayers who want services but no related costs - was to raise taxes, as he suggested in two columns.

We corresponded, and I appreciated the notion that a journalist was reaching out to critics, and I resolved to look at his efforts with a more open mind.

He's recently begun a blog for the Times, and reading it moved my opinion of him back to Square One. He's a reliable source of Democratic talking points, which ought to be OK with me (I'm a Democrat, after all) but isn't because the Democratic Party as constituted in California is headed off a cliff. The only thing saving it has been gerrymandering, the huge amounts of money available from the blue regions on Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and the fact that the California Republican Party is functionally retarded.

A few weeks ago, I popped over and read his blog; I don't recall the post, except that it - as noted - kicked me back to "he's a press agent for the Teacher's Union."

I did note his blogroll with amusement (here it is as of today)...

Blogroll

* Political Animal
Washington, D.C., meets Irvine, CA: Progressive reporting and analysis from the indispensible Kevin Drum.

* Talking Points Memo
Joshua Micah Marshall assembles the goods on Social Insecurity, Plamegate, and the infamous Gulf Coast Wage Cut.

* L.A. Observed
Kevin Roderick. Can't say it better than this: “Los Angeles media, news, and sense of place.”

* James Wolcott
Vanity Fair’s best writer: Edgy, direct, hilarious take on media, culture, and politics.

* California Stem Cell Report
The go-to site for the latest on California’s boondoggle-in-the-making.

* Brad DeLong
From Berkeley, first-class economic and political analysis, and proof that I didn't take his negative review of my PARC book personally. (See below.)

* Radosh.net
Found items from all over.

And today, he takes on Patterico, and by extension, defends the Times.

I'll let Patrick handle the heavy lifting, but I'll suggest two framing points in response to his:

Hiltzik says:

None of these critics appears to be genuinely interested in correcting factual errors or improving this newspaper’s, or any newspaper’s, performance as a journalistic institution—which are certainly legitimate goals. Their main purpose is to hunt down deviations from a political orthodoxy that they themselves define.

That - in the case of Patrick - is simply not true.

Patrick offered (and I'm talking off the top of my head, so I'm sure there are others) substantive corrections to factual errors by the times as regards - among other things - the three strikes law, "imminent threat", the Sgrena shooting, and local stories such as the shooting of Devin Brown.

I'll note in passing Michael's attempted takedown of Patrick's criticism of the Sgrena shooting, and suggest that he misses the core point - yes, all the later information suggests that the car was approaching the checkpoint at ~50mph. The point of the controversy over incident was that the car was approaching the checkpoint at high speed - hence the shooting - and the only point of information that suggested that in the original story was the excised line. So yes, cutting that line did change the entire sense of what happened, and the culpability for it.

Patrick wrote one of the first (and few) "Outside the Tent" pieces - and what was it about?

The Correct Way to Fix Mistakes

Has anyone ever said something about you that wasn't true? Something that, if people believed it, would significantly damage your reputation? How would you feel if you saw that falsehood printed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times? Would it make things right if the paper later retracted the false statement — with a brief correction buried inside the paper?

In this published piece (disclosure: I looked it over when he was writing it), Patrick takes the Times to task for its reluctance to publicly correct what it acknowledges are errors, and for the manner in which it does so when it finally decides it has to.

So, Michael - how is Patrick not "interested in correcting factual errors or improving this newspaper’s, or any newspaper’s, performance as a journalistic institution"?

I've criticized the Times as well, during the recall elections:

And here's my point. As someone who reads the Times every day, along with a lot of other media, the clear tilt of the paper couldn't be more transparent to me.

I'm not going to go too deeply into the news portion, although I've started saving clips. But it took me about 30 minutes last night to go through all the columns available on the Web. I've got links and clips below, but let me give you a summary count (methodology was simple: I went to the Times web site, clicked on 'columns' in the left bar, and went through each of the listed columnists and pulled anything that had to do with Davis, Arnold, or the recall. Note that 'balanced' doesn't mean pro-Arnold or pro-recall; it means looks at both sides and tries to present analysis):

Al Martinez: 1 column, violently anti-Arnold and recall.

Ronald Brownstein: 1 column, balanced.

Patt Morrison: 10 columns, 8 violently anti-recall and anti-Arnold, 2 moderately anti-recall and anti-Arnold.

Dana Parsons: 1 column, mildly anti-Arnold

Tim Rutten: 7 columns, 6 mildly anti-Arnold, 1 anti-Bustamente

David Shaw: 4 columns, 2 mildly anti-recall and 2 mildly anti-Arnold

George Skelton: 10 columns, all balanced

Steve Lopez: 9 columns, 4 violently anti-Arnold, 1 moderately anti-Arnold, 3 anti-recall.

In my same post, I talked about another encounter that was eerily preminiscent of Hiltzik's column:

Then I went to Brian's party, and met a journalist (sadly didn't get his name or affiliation).

I'll skip over his arrogance and rudeness; he was in a hostile environment, and maybe he was nervous. But watching the discussion, I realized something that brought the Times issue into clearer perspective for me.

In the discussion, I had substantive issues with his points, which were essentially that journalism is superior to blogging because it has an editorial process which drives it toward 'fairness' (he felt that objectivity was impossible and not necessarily even desirable), but a fairness informed by the moral sensibilities of the institution (I'm pulling a short argument out of a long and somewhat rambling discussion). Bloggers obviously don't.

I tried to make the suggestion to him that individual blogs weren't necessarily good at driving toward fairness, but that the complex of blogs - the dialog and interaction between blogs - was, and might in fact be better than mainstream media, isolated as they are from feedback. (Note that Perry from Samizdata got this point before I finished the sentence).

And what was interesting to me was this - that while I have (violently at times) disagreed with other bloggers in face to face discussions, I always had the feeling that there was a discussion going on, a dialog in which two people were engaged and trying to understand each other's points, if for no other reason than to better argue against them. But in dealing with The Journalist In The Hat, no such dialog took place. He had his point to make, and very little that I said (or, to be honest, that others who participated, including Howard Owens, who pointed out that he had worked as a journalist) was heard or responded to. He had his points, and he was going to make them over, and over, until we listened.

Or until we said 'bullshit' too many times and he walked away in a snit.

Sadly, Hiltzek seems to be fitting himself for a hat.

I'll suggest that he listen to Jeff Jarvis, and begin to understand that news is now a dialog; and that the kind of conversation-ending comments Hiltzek makes - that obviously, without a deep understanding of the journalistic process (which I assume can only come from working as a journalist or studying journalism) no criticism of journalistic practice and outcomes is possible.

Riiight.

I'll make a simple suggestion to Michael - stop thinking of yourself as a West Coast James Wolcott; he's a laughable buffoon - kind of an Oscar Wilde with the words but not the wit. Start thinking about how to encourage dialog with your audience.

[forgot to give a hat tip to ex-Timesman Kevin Roderick at L.A. Observed]