I ran to my office window this morning to check for locusts swarming into Orange County, but saw only clear skies.
I closed my eyes and rubbed them, thinking they were playing tricks.
I even asked colleague Rich Kane if we'd landed in another universe.
In today's paper, the OC Register published photographs of numerous self-styled “naughty” clothes, including one on the front page: the top half of a woman wearing–are you sitting, Betty Lou?–only a bra!
Isn't anything sacred anymore?
Another Reg picture, taken from behind a female model, reveals the woman's asscheeks in a manner that might have gotten a rise out of long-dead Register founder and right-wing prude R.C. Hoiles.
So what?
Well, for years Reg management has raised its collective nose in superiority over the Weekly on the racy factor. Indeed, they've strenuously attempted to claim (especially when they've been trounced on a news story) this paper's journalism isn't trustworthy because T&A graces our pages.
But here's the nasty problem the Reg faces: advertisers would rather reach a young, alive media market–like the one dominated by the Weekly. From what we're told, the average Reg reader gums his food and was born sometime between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.
How to attract younger readers?
Under the guise of reporting about an underwear show by Agent Provocateur at South Coast Plaza, the daily paper carried a whopping 10 “racy”–again, their word–photos of underwear models.
We're not necessarily bitching that the Reg boys are shameless hypocrites. Indeed, we welcome the paper's more titillating art. Welcome to this century! Besides, it will make it easier to stomach Dillow's ugly mug.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.