Hugh Hewitt: An Outrage from the Front Page of the Los Angeles Times

HughHewitt.com ^ | 03/02/2005 | Hugh Hewitt

[Checkers]

Posted at 6:20 AM, Pacific with updates.

An Outrage from the Front Page of the Los Angeles Times

"There is love. There is hate. There is fighting. There is charity…. People marry. They divorce. They make children," he said.

"People are just trying to live a normal life."

So ends this morning's ode to North Korea, "North Korea, Without the Rancor," courtesy of the Los Angeles Times, which thought it "journalism" to publish an extended interview with a North Korean agent posing as a businessman. And what does he have to say? Among other things, that the United States was responsible for the collapse of the 1994 Clinton-Kim Jong Il agreement. And: "Is there any country where there is a 100% guarantee of human rights? Certainly not the United States."

This piece is much, much worse than the mild apologetic, "Kim Jong Il May Be Crazy...Like a Fox" which ran in the Times on February 17.

Imagine a 1938 Los Angeles Times piece, "Germany, Without the Rancor": "There is love among the Nazis. There is hate. There is fighting. There is charity....People marry. They divorce. They make blond children..."

"The Jews? Why always the Jews? Is there any country where there is a 100% guarantee of human rights? Certainly not the United States."

The Times has long been lost in a hall of ideological mirrors and deep, deep left-wing ideology. But this is a massacre of any standard of objective reporting. It is a puff piece for the most repressive government on the face of the planet, one which is starving its own people! Have the editors no conscience and no shame? Promoting the left at home is one thing, and an aggravating thing at that, but pimping for a ruthless killer regime that exports nuclear technology and murders hundreds of thousands?

The Times is owned by The Tribune Company, the web site for which, on its front page, proclaims:

CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP

:: Strong values have been part of Tribune since the company was founded in 1847. We are committed to maintaining ethical business practices and are an active contributor to the communities in which we serve. Look in the About Tribune section of this site to learn more.

The millions of North Koreans under the boot of the crazy despot can be forgiven if, upon escaping the giant gulag that is their country, have a different view of The Tribune Company's "ethical business practices." Complicity in the sprucing up of a tyrant's public image is not on anyone's short list of "ethical business practices." Dennis Fitzsimmons is the Chairman and CEO of The Tribune Company, and he will no doubt be enjoying another fine day in America today. If he had an ounce of ethics, he'd apologize for this outrage before the day's end, and do so publicly. The company proclaims "Integrity" as one of its core values: "Integrity - Earning the trust of our customers by applying high ethical standards to our business operations and journalism every day."

Tell it to the dead North Koreans. Here's the contact info for The Tribune Company. Call and ask for Mr. Fitzsimmons at 312.222.9100. Or the head of "media relations," Ruthellyn Musil, at 312.222.3394. Then cancel your Times subscription by calling 800-252-9141. It is one thing to subsidize the west coast tip sheet for the Democratic Party, and another thing to subsidize a newspaper that can't distinguish between news and propaganda.

Update: As part of American journalism's collective penance for the Times' indifference to the barbarity of the North Korean regime, I will devote today's entire program to the realities of North Korea and the wild irresponsibility of an article like this and the paper that would print it. Catholics refer to such episodes as "cooperation with evil": "The Catechism teaches, 'Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encourage.'(#2287)"

In honor of the baseball club formerly known as the Anaheim Angels, perhaps we should be calling this Times "The Pyongyang Times of Los Angeles," at least untie editor John Carroll steps down or is fired. Recall it was Carroll who used a high profile speech (which he then reprinted in his own paper) to blast FoxNews' coverage of the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection:

"An interesting study published in October explored public misconceptions about the war in Iraq. One of those misconceptions was that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction had been found. Another was that links had been proved between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A third was that world opinion favored the idea of the U.S. invading Iraq.

The study did not examine what had actually aired on specific media outlets, but the results spoke for themselves. Among people who primarily watched Fox News, 80% believed one or more of those myths. That's 25 percentage points higher than the figure for viewers of CNN -- and 57 percentage points higher than that for people who got their news from public broadcasting.

How could Fox have left its audience so deeply in the dark? I'm inspired to squeeze one last bit of mileage out of our river metaphor: If Fox News were a factory situated, say, in Minneapolis, it would be trailing a plume of rotting fish all the way to New Orleans."

I don't recall FoxNews ever running an interview with an Al Qaeda spokesman on how that network had been misunderstood and complaining about the human rights record of the United States.

If you e-mail a letter to the Times (letters@latimes), copy me at hugh@hughhewitt.com, and copy the Tribune Company as well, via musil@tribune.com. If you post on the story and the paper's awful judgment in running it, send me the link.

Only three months after Hitler's rise to power in Germany, CBS exec Stephen Duggan "called together a half-dozen high-level people to consider what America should do for the (Jewish) victims of Nazi academic thuggery," according to Edward R. Murrow biographer Joseph Persico. A committee was formed, and its secretary was Murrow. When Murrow moved to London, he never relented in his coverage of the Nazis, and recruited William Shirer to help CBS in the effort. 70 years ago American journalism did not cooperate with evil. It reported on it.

[wideawake]

The big lie at the heart of all this is the notion that America and American politicians demonize North Korea.

In reality, Americans and their elected representatives have nothing negative to say about North Korea or its people - negative comments are always leveled precisely where they should be, against the tinpot, megalomaniac dictator who is starving his own people.

[nuconvert]

pong

[TheDon]

Hmmmmm....dictatorship or a democratic republic....which would I prefer to live in? It is a tough call....

[Valin]

Winds Of Change
http://www.windsofchange.net/

Paging Mel Brooks...
by Armed Liberal on March 3, 2005 03:01 PM

Franz Liebkind: Not many people know it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer.

Franz Liebkind: Hitler... there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in ONE afternoon! TWO coats!

Max Bialystock: That's exactly why we want to produce this play. To show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler you loved, the Hitler you knew, the Hitler with a song in his heart.

[Mr. Jeeves]

It's topped by yesterday's Wall Street Journal article on the new generation of "fiscally pragmatic" Leftists who are coming to power in Latin America. When the author wrote of "the Left's traditionally warm-hearted social agenda" I nearly threw up.

The Journal really needs to rein in its writers and get them back in sync with the editorial page.

[kellynla]

The LA Times has less credibility than a screen door on a submarine. I canceled my subscription a long time ago when they doctored a front page picture of an American GI with his weapon standing over a prisoner in Iraq (The Times moved the rifle in the picture so that it was actually pointed at the prisoner laying on the ground...I guess to appear more threatening)

For more than twenty years, as a subscriber, I wrote to the Times and they never once answered my letters much less published them. So writing the Times is like pissing in the wind...

Semper Fi,
Kelly

[kevkrom]

In reality, Americans and their elected representatives have nothing negative to say about North Korea or its people - negative comments are always leveled precisely where they should be, against the tinpot, megalomaniac dictator who is starving his own people.

Of course, to the tinpot, megalomaniac dictator who is starving his own people, criticism of the tinpot, megalomaniac dictator who is starving his own people is considered being negative toward the people in general. To the LA Times, whatever the tinpot, megalomaniac dictator who is starving his own people says is to be believed at all costs.

[Deo volente]

Yeah, Kim Jong-IL may be starving his people and he surely wants to kill millions of Americans with the long range missiles he's developing, but he's really a NICE guy deep down inside. A benevolent leader to be sure.

Give the poor guy a break already!

[Checkers]

Here's the contact info for The Tribune Company. Call and ask for Mr. Fitzsimmons at 312.222.9100. Or the head of "media relations," Ruthellyn Musil, at 312.222.3394. Then cancel your Times subscription by calling 800-252-9141
If you e-mail a letter to the Times (letters@latimes), copy Hugh at hugh@hughhewitt.com, and copy the Tribune Company as well, via musil@tribune.com.

[nuconvert]

LOL.
Ain't That the truth!

[Rockitz]

I'm now in my 18th year as a proud non-subscriber of the Slimes. Some of my conservative friends say their doing research on the dark side by subscribing. I say cop-out.

The last good headline I saw and actually purchased a copy from the news stand was when Clinton was impeached.

[Bernard Marx]

The LA Times has less credibility than a screen door on a submarine.

LOL, I like that! I cancelled my subscription in the early 90s and have watched over the years as they keep doing the same old stuff in the face of declining circulation. Their circulation department targeted me for a time, using every stupid argument in the book to coerce me into subscribing. I told them if I wanted a subscription to The Daily Worker I'd cut out the middleman.

This latest stunt reminds me of the long-standing love affair the Times's top columnist Robert Scheer has had with Korean totalitarian Communism. David Horowitz wrote in "Radical Son" about Scheer receiving the collected works of N.K. dictator Kim il Sung at the "Ramparts" office and Scheer's plan to write an introduction for an American edition.

I quote Horowitz: "Like other die-hards, Scheer had formed an urban guerrilla commune with [Tom] Hayden and his ex-wife, Anne, which they called the Red Family. It was run on Maoist principles, and the walls of their headquarters...were draped with large portraits of the North Korean dictator and Ho Chi Minh, alongside Huey Newton and the Apache Geronimo. Shotguns were propped in the corners of the rooms. Political education for the communards consisted of readings from "The Black Panther" and Lin Piao's "On People's War." Commune discussions focused on such questions as whether underwear should be shared, and if it was a bourgeois hang-up to close the bathroom door when using the toilet."

It appears that the Times hasn't progressed much from Scheer's 1960s adolescent view of the world.

[kellynla]

I miss the Herald-Examiner...
especially the Sports page
Allan Malamud R.I.P.

[Getready]

I miss the herald-examiner too. They weren't afraid to say
it as it was...

L.A. times is only a legacy paper...I suppose the business
model is to take as much money out as possible of it before
it dies.
The times, I believe owns the Recycler, some auto reselling
magazines, and one of the L.A. spanish language dailies...
So my word on that....get your news on the internet (till
that's closed down) and never buy any product from the L.A.
Times...

[Checkers]

Hugh will be talking about this today:


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[TheSpottedOwl]

I can't stand Robert Scheer!

[kellynla]

The Tribune Company(Chicago) owns the LA Times now.
It also own the Chicago Tribune & Newsday(NY). I wish Rupert Mucdoch or someone would start a newspaper here. We definitely need a real one!

[Constantine XIII]

*head explodes*

(I'd say something substantive, but I'd be banned.)

[socal_parrot]

A couple years back, the Slimes started giving me a free OC edition of their paper as a promotion. I called and told them to stop. The said, "but it's free, just try it"...

I told them I would report them for littering if they didn't stop.