Or at least the movie producer, as the race to the bottom continues. Hugh Hewitt writes:

A few days back The Los Angeles Times trumpeted "the launch of a quarterly guest editor program for Current, the Sunday edition commentary section. Brian Grazer, Oscar® and Emmy®-winning writer-producer, has been chosen to oversee the debut and future guest editors will be similarly intriguing personalities from the worlds of politics, business, culture, entertainment and sports."

In a blow certain to further erode the paper's almost non-existent credibility, it has been revealed that Andres Martinez, the editorial page editor and overseer of the project, has been in a relationship with Grazier's publicist.

Martinez has resigned; Hugh adds, "I suppose this would be a bad time to bring up former Times' editor and Martinez mentor John Carroll's pompous lecture on the rise and dangers of pseudo-journalism".

Meanwhile, media objectivity? Dude, that's so 1994!

A bizarre scandal at the LA Times has prompted the resignation of editorial page editor Andres Martinez. In his angry farewell, Martinez drops this bombshell about the relationship between the editorial and news pages at the LAT:

Among the biggest possible conflicts of interest a newspaper can enter into is to have the same people involved in news coverage running opinion pages. I am proud of the fact that Jeff Johnson, Dean Baquet and I fully separated the opinion pages from the newsroom at the Times. I accept my share of the responsibility for placing the Times in this predicament, but I will not be lectured on ethics by some ostensibly objective news reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects, or who have suggested that our editorial page coordinate more closely with the newsroom's agenda, and I strongly urge the present and future leadership of the paper to resist the cries to revisit the separation between news and opinion that we have achieved.

News reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects? The newsroom's agenda? Really?

As Spruiell writes, "Cathy Seipp would have had a field day with this"--but I doubt she'd be at all surprised.

Mickey Kaus adds, "When there's a choice between publishing something Columbia Journalism Review ethics police won't cluck at and something its readers might actually want to read, the sinking, hapless L.A. Times instinctively knows what to do".