On balmy Saturday mornings, I actually allow myself a few minutes to pore through the physical pages of my LOS ANGELES TIMES. These days, it doesn’t take all that much time anyway; aside from the real estate inserts, it’s a mere two sections where sports, local news and entertainment share one of them.
And yesterday, dominating the front local news page both above and below the fold,
and occupying the lower half of a second, was the third chiding, urgent, and disproprotionately long article in a week from their remotely based expert on all things COVID, our old friend Rong-Gong Lin II, with this one headlined by a call to action with more than a shred of admonishing embedded within it.
I’ve written about Mr. Lin a few times before, as regular readers might have noted. At the end of last year, I updated a piece from just about a year ago that tried to cut Mr. Lin some slack. Days later, I was inspired to give a bit of guidance as to what might actually be a worthwhile way to get this messaging across that would actually call the level of attention to this that Mr. Lin and his employer seem to insist should be top of mind even today.
So while I normally highlight via italics what I believe is something you should read, I’ve already given Mr. Lin’s beat more attention than I believe most of you are interested in. I will provide a link to his latest diatribe should you want details.
But there’s virtually nothing in it that you haven’t already read before. Or, for that matter, anything else that Mr. Lin wrote in the two previous articles he authored from this past week alone.
All because in his perpetual updating of statistics involving the perusal of bilge, a whopping 39 new cases of COVID were identified in the county of Los Angeles during the last week of July vs. the prior week.
But, of course, Mr. Lin yet again was quick to add his immediate disclaimer that cases are an undercount, as they only include tests conducted at medical facilities and don’t account for at-home tests or the fact that fewer people are testing when sick.
And continuing his omnipresence in these series of articles is Mr. Lin’s go to expert of experts, Dr. Peter Chin-Hong of UC San Francisco, who this time opines it’s reasonable to keep a mask in your pocket and put in on if someone around you starts coughing, like on an airplane. This pretty much goes in line with his informed, localized opinion offered in Lin’s first article from Monday where Lin gave him yet another mount to sermonize from:
At UC San Francisco, COVID-19 hospitalizations seem to have stabilized, but “there’s a lot of COVID outside the hospital. Almost everybody has it: There’s been outbreaks at, you know, music gatherings and people’s dinners(.)”
Well, we apparently know a lot about how Dr. Chin-Hong spends his spare time these days. Going to dinner and flying on planes. Nice work if you can get it.
But nowhere in these articles does the esteemed expert offer anything beyond personal anecdotes and observations to qualify him as anything more than a titled overreactor. And it’s not as if Mr. Lin has gone out of his way to find anyone else locally to provide context or confirmation beyond whatever statement is being offered up online by public health departments.
In fact, if you go through Mr. Lin’s most recent “series” you’ll note that virtually the same notes are hit in every single one. An updated graph of wastewaster-based inferences, a series of statements he’s culled from various agencies, and the “duh” assumption that if you’re not masked up, socially distanced and sanitizing you’re some sort of menace to society.
It sure appears to those who run the TIMES that nothing else going on in this city warrants anything close to this kind of attention. A point that was informatively raised back in October by Jack Humphreville, the “LA Watchdog” of CityWatch, who pointed out that, if nothing else, the size of the pulpit that Lin and the Hyphenates have has been shrinking faster than the actual potential of lethality of COVID:
Over the last twelve months, the total paid distribution dropped by 17%, from 150,000 to 125,000 copies. This was not unexpected given the sorry state of the newspaper business.
What was unexpected was the 4% drop in paid digital subscriptions, from 314,000 to 303,000, an area of expected growth. This is contrary to the July announcement by The Times that it had 550,000 digital subscriptions.
Along with the serious decline in run-of-press and classified advertising, the paper is hemorrhaging cash.
Humphreville went on to offer a few suggestions of what might constitute worthwhile topics for a purported local news leader to spend some time and space on:
This year’s “balanced” budget is now $173 million in the red and next year’s shortfall of $68 million has ballooned to $440 million. At the same time, the City Council and Mayor knew of and ignored the carnage because they feared alienating the leaders of the public sector unions. The Los Angeles Times should have been all over this malfeasance.
Likewise, the paper should be examining the impact of the 100% Renewable Energy plan being developed by DWP. This plan, which will cost $87 billion, will triple our rates over the next twelve years. But if the goal were only 80%, this would reduce expenditures by an estimated $30 billion, or about $7,500 for every Angeleno, and dramatically reduce the impact on rates.
Or put another way, why pay $1,200 to eliminate a ton of greenhouse gas for the last 20% when the current market is only $50?
Maybe I missed those stories if they indeed were reported by the TIMES. They may have been drowned out by the barrange of bylines from Lin.
But I know I didn’t miss the recent series of articles on how much their level of competition has declined, a point driven home in a lead article a week ago from one of Lin’s few remaining colleagues, Ashley Ahn:
California has lost one-third of its newspapers since 2005, according to a 2023 Northwestern Medill School of Journalism report. The number of journalists in the state has dropped 68% since then, and despite shifting efforts to digital, news outlets are struggling to attract readers and subscribers. The Los Angeles Times cut more than 20% of its newsroom in January, representing one of the largest staff cuts in the newspaper’s 142-year history. Since L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong sold the San Diego Union-Tribune to a hedge fund in July 2023, its staff has been cut by an estimated 30%. LAist is also facing “a significant budget shortfall” over the next two years and has offered voluntary buyouts to journalists ahead of a potential round of layoffs.
Nor did I miss this sobering opinion piece from Gustavo Arellanothat brought to line how this competitive decline has been even more significant among Spanish-language readers:
When Laura Pantoja immigrated to Santa Ana from Mexico City in the early 1990s, she could choose from about a dozen local newspapers in her native language. The so-called semanarios jockeyed for position on newspaper racks in front of restaurants, mini-marts and liquor stores across town but especially on 4th Street, the downtown commercial district that catered to Latinos with beer bars, quinceañera shops and clothing stores. Today, the teeming newspaper racks are almost all gone. The few that remain stand as rusting witnesses to the rise and fall of a media market that needs journalistic watchdogs more than ever, at a time when presidential candidates vie for the Latino vote and illegal immigration is a hot topic yet again.
Great. Less competition for Rong-Gong and the hyphenates to worry about keeping them either accountable or avoid being redundant.
I’m asked by many why I even continue to subscribe to the TIMES if I’m this frustrated and pissed off. It’s the occasional decent work by the likes of Ahn and Arellano. It’s the entertainment (don’t call it CALENDAR anymore, that’s soooo 20th century) reporters like Meg James and Stephen Battaglio that break stories and offer insights that aren’t driven by the Penske priorities. It’s the remaining decent sportswriters, even the ones with axes to grind like the UCLA-biased Dylan Hernandez. At least his articles bash different USC teams based on seasonality.
But when I continue to see so much of the limited shelf space the current print iteration offers be devoted to one single issue, with virtually nothing new being offered up beyond the latest numbers, even at a time when outlets like NBC NEWS and THE YOUNG TURKS who regularly offered up similar updates when the pandemic was first emerging have moved on with their lives, it leads me to conclude that this as much of an example of agenda journalism as anything else out there anywhere. Hunter Biden’s laptop didn’t get as much regular attention from THE NEW YORK POST. The Central Park Five didn’t get as many column inches from THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS. The Spanish-American War didn’t command as many words from the papers of William Randolph Hearst.
Which leaves me with a burning question prompted by this concern Ahn raised in her piece:
(C)oncerns about unreliable sources and misinformation have been growing. Four in 10 Americans who get news from social media say they dislike the inaccuracy, up from three in 10 in 2018, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey. After the 2016 presidential election, about a quarter of Americans said they shared fabricated news stories, knowingly or unknowingly.
My burning question:
Could Rong-Gong and the Hyphenates be contributing to those concerns about unreliable sources and misinformation?
Ah, there’s a story I’d love to see Mr. Lin byline. Maybe quote someone else for a change.
Until next time…