Poor Los Angeles Times. It's getting hammered all over, from buyouts to force-outs to ever-shrinking page counts to perceived shoddy coverage of La Lindsey. Now they're getting criticized by conservative news watchers for running a positive review of my book, ¡Ask a Mexican!, without disclosing that I'm a contributing editor to the Times' op-ed pages.
Newsbuster.org contributor Dave Pierre claims this is just more proof of the Times gone amiss. “In other words, Arellano had about as much chance of receiving a negative review as it snowing in Santa Monica this week,” Pierre writes. “Honesty and integrity at the Los Angeles Times? Not in this case, folks.”
I agree with Pierre on one point: The book review (written by chingona author and Loyola Law School professor Yxta Maya Murray) should've stated I do write commentary for the Times. But Pierre is pendejo to think that my relationship with the Times guarantees me positive coverage for ¡Ask a Mexican!. Indeed, just the previous week before, the Times allowed Latino culture reporter Agustin Gurza to write a scathing attack on my column/book in which he called me the “Paris Hilton of the Latino journalism world” and compared me to Don Imus (he also disclosed my contributing editor gig for his paper). And the day after Murray's review, the Times published a letter by one Rene M. Castro of Long Beach in which he dismissed my “cheap satire” as “meant for Orange County clubgoers who don't mind reading an article bashing Mexicans between the breast enhancement and strip club ads of the OC Weekly.”
So why didn't Pierre disclose the above facts to his readers? Quoth GOB: come on! It simply doesn't play into his LA Times-is-liberal raison d'etre. Honesty and integrity at Newsbusters.org? Not in this case, folks.
