Last year saw the newspaper praising Communist themed-retirement homes and North Korea. This year--only three and a half months old, remember--has already seen it run an op-ed that began "I don't support our troops".

More recently the L.A. Times ran an piece that....well, let Eugene Volokh explain:

Why Did He Steal? Well, Partly Because He's Black: That, I kid you not, is precisely what an L.A. Times op-ed from last week says. Black conservatives are bad, the theory goes; also, being conservative is spiritually bad for blacks; and that helps explain why White House adviser Claude Allen committed fraud: "It's hard to imagine that such compromises and cognitive dissonance don't exact a psychological toll at some point, and Allen's alleged dabbling in crime might have been that point for him."

Oh, and quite a charming little reference to "house Negro[es]" a couple of paragraphs before, as well — plus the old traitor-to-his-race line of "I don't support conservatism in its current iteration, and I support black conservatives even less." (I take this to mean "traitor to his race," since otherwise it makes no sense: Why would holding any view be worse if you're black, unless the theory is that somehow blacks ought not hold that view because it's supposedly bad for blacks?) When whites are called traitors to their race for supporting policies that are supposedly bad for whites, that's pretty roundly condemned as racism, and rightly so. Yet somehow condemning blacks as traitors to their race is seen by many as just fine.

Read the whole piece, if you have a high tolerance for bile and schadenfreude. And ask yourself how "progressive" it is to condemn people differently for the same views based on their race, and how progressive or factually plausible it is to argue that someone has committed fraud partly because he's black.

Meanwhile, Cathy Seipp writes that L.A. Times' revamped Sunday magazine is exploring heretofore unexamined realms of investigative journalism:

Did you know that Taco Bell food tastes like crap, is not authentically Mexican, and people who eat it are poor and fat? You did? Well, even so, the editors of the L.A. Times' recently relaunched Sunday magazine, West, thought it worth assigning Dagoberto Gilb several thousand words to elaborate on all this for you.

* * *

This is all perfectly true, I guess, but why would anyone at this tricky point in the mainstream media business think it worth taking up vast acres of increasingly scarce newspaper real estate? And why is Taco Bell the focus of a 2006 feature article discussing Mexican fast food anyway? "Taco Bell Nation" might have seemed fresh and interesting 10 or 20 years ago, before Baja Fresh and Chipotle changed the scene. But I doubt the typical reader (educated, affluent) of this article has much experience with Taco Bell. There are people who do, of course. But they don't tend to read the L.A. Times.

During his newspaper's latest redesign this past fall, James Lileks satirically unveiled "our new ad slogan for Gen Y: The Newspaper. A Viable Alternative to Staring Into Space".

As opposed to staring into--and interacting with--a computer monitor. 2014 (or thereabouts) can't get here fast enough.