Opinion: Trump is selling himself. Readers say the L.A. Times shouldn’t help sell him.
Editor’s Note: This is the second half of a two-part series on how the Los Angeles Times is changing how it represents and covers President Donald Trump. The first piece, by Steve Lopez, was published Friday and can be seen here. The second piece explores how the paper is helping sell Trump to Americans, and why that is a problem. The story can be found here.
As a young man and new resident of L.A., there was no doubt I’d be reading this city’s paper, The Times.
“The L.A. Times?” I heard my father yell in my ear, as I stood on a bench at the bottom of my driveway in a suburb called North Hollywood, where the Times used to set up a big, four-paged newspaper on Saturdays. “The Times? Do you know it?” he asked as I peered over his shoulder.
I couldn’t tell him the name, not even in jest, because it was that famous “L.A.” name that made the paper famous. And I was hooked, even though I didn’t realize it at the time.
“The Times?”
“Yes — L.A. — The Times.”
“Oh, that’s the paper I used to read.”
I never doubted it for a moment.
After graduating from Loyola Marymount University in 1989, I was hired by the paper as a copy editor, but after a year I left to become a reporter. After a couple more years, my father had to take another reporter job in the sports department so I became a columnist. Within a few years I was becoming an editor.
I loved my job at the Times. From the time I was a copy editor, I thought journalism was all about building a relationship with readers. What I learned from my time at the Times was how a newspaper really is about making