Dean of Sycophants

I’M NOT VERY POPULAR ON SPRING STREET nowadays. (Then again, I wasn’t much liked when I worked there either.) An editor at the Los Angeles Times just accused me of “wanting the death” of the paper. That’s because in recent days, I’ve called on Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet to resign. I’ve called out the new publisher as a Tribune Toady and exposed him as a right-wing Reaganite who once advocated illegal-alien “concentration camps.” And now I can even justify those parent company–ordered staff cuts deemed so damn draconian.

All this is my way of counterbalancing the increasing sanctimoniousness that has infected the paper’s coverage of its current chaos and crisis. Those staff petitions, those photos of foreign correspondents wearing T-shirts featuring Baquet in a defiant pose, and all sorts of other slavish nonsense usually associated with cults. Any day now, I imagine a team of carpenters erecting a pulpit for media critic Tim Rutten, whose columns have become insufferably evangelical, and then a crucifix for Baquet, who keeps playing the martyr.

Sure, Baquet takes pains to recuse himself from the paper’s reporting on its abusive parent. Where normally he’d be back-reading all the articles on such a sensitive topic, he’s handed off that editing job to Rick Wartzman, the paper’s West magazine chieftain. But Times readers are still being ill-served.

For instance, no one but me has dared to question Baquet’s disloyalty after his partner-in-complaint, publisher Jeff Johnson, was axed in that shock-and-awe way last week. (Tribune brass ordered the firing 24 hours after Johnson learned that his wife had been diagnosed with cancer. There was no mention by the Times of this classless act.) What an incredible gutless wonder Baquet was for staying put. His decision shows he cared only about his own ass, because clearly he’s still going to have to fire all those staff asses. But then, he knew from the moment he accepted the editor’s gig that layoffs and buyouts were going to be an integral part of his tenure, didn’t he? Baquet maintains that he took the job believing he could keep “bad stuff” from happening to the paper. It just didn’t happen that way. “So I’m still sitting in the chair and still fighting,” Baquet is telling people.

Still, I wouldn’t put it past him to stage some dramatic “pang of conscience” moment in the very near future for maximum publicity value. At least now, journalism can stop characterizing him as “Dean of Arc” and start referring to him as he really is: “Cover-Your-Backside Baquet.” If he didn’t quit in solidarity with Johnson, who sacrificed his job to support Baquet’s refusal to make those deep staff cuts, then Dean looked like a backstabbing weasel. If he did quit, then he’s unemployed, which is never any fun, especially not now, given the lousy state of the newspaper industry. Then again, he’d be a hero to his old employer, The New York Times, judging from the paper’s congratulatory coverage of Baquet and Johnson.

Even Baquet’s cadre of sycophants — his trusted senior lieutenants Doug Frantz, John Montorio and Leo Wolinsky — were backpedaling about their “suicide pact” (vowing that, if Baquet were fired, they’d quit in solidarity). I do know that, before Johnson’s firing, Baquet had contemplated what he’d do if he left voluntarily or involuntarily. He’d said privately that, after working in journalism for 19 years, he’d take a little time, smoke some cigars and finish reading a couple of books. But then he’d get right back in the saddle and find another newsroom job. Explained Baquet: “I had worked in my father’s restaurant in New Orleans, but I know they won’t take me back. That place doesn’t even exist anymore. Though my older brother does own a restaurant.” Sounds like a good, honest move to me — but then, so would Baquet loyally following Johnson out the door.

So what happens now? Baquet could still get fired. Everything depends on the Times’ new publisher, David Hiller, the Chicago Tribune publisher who’s long been tipped as the rising star/heir apparent of the parent company. He’s telling media types like me that, for the moment, he’s going to run silent and run deep. After all, there’s been a lot of loudmouthing on Spring Street. Look, any average Joe could come in off the street and start laying off staffers in such a way that the readership wouldn’t even notice. If I were steering this sinking ship, I’d scale back foreign and national (knowing that, eventually, the parent company will consolidate coverage of that, like McClatchy and Gannett, because of the enormous cost savings) and beef up local news.

I DON’T KNOW ANYONE WHO THINKS the Times is doing even a decent job of covering Los Angeles and its environs, unless editors think the story will win a Pulitzer. Not since the suburban sections became history. Not since Baquet himself ordered the Metro section mutated into a California section (as if Angelenos give a rat’s ass about what happens in San Francisco or San Diego). The truth, of course, is that even if the Times were given a Joan Kroc–sized infusion of cash (such as she bestowed on NPR) tomorrow, barely a penny would be spent on giving Angelenos what they want and need: news about their hometown. That’s something Hiller understands well, because the Chicago Tribune made its reputation on its exhaustive local coverage. Not the Times, whose own motto says it strives to be “the voice of Los Angeles around the world.” Isn’t that ass backwards?