The deaths they do keep coming…
Otis Chandler, whose family played a huge role in building Los Angeles, and who himself single-handedly transformed the Los Angeles Times from a fourth-rate right-wing rag into a world class paper, has died. A very long obituary (much of it obviously written some time ago) is here on the Times website.
The LA Times is not what it was a few years ago. Otis Chandler made it a great paper, and his chosen successor as publisher, Tom Johnson, made it a better one. In the 1980s and 90s, the paper had a series of excellent editors-in-chief, including a very fine man to whom I was once very close, Shelby Coffey III. Since Shelby’s departure in late 1997, the paper has gradually gotten thinner — literally and figuratively. Owned today by the Chicago Tribune, there is little sign that the paper’s recovery is imminent. I still read it daily, but supplement it more and more with online visits to the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Those interested in the Times — or in Los Angeles history — would do well to read the whole obit.
Weird coincidences; in the last week I read a short story by Octavia Butler and this morning I led a class discussion on some selections from Mike Davis’ City of Quartz in which Otis Chandler figures prominently. The history of the LA Times, at least the bits of it Davis gives us, are quite fascinating.
Well, Davis has the same dim view of Los Angeles that Paul Haggis does in Crash — the reality, at least to me, isn’t nearly as grim as they perceive it. But Mike Davis is a hell of a writer, and his history of the Times is exciting, I agree!
I assign Davis in part to get students to lose the habit of dismissing that which has a whiff of ‘bias’ of apparent lack of objectivity. Davis is so clearly and deeply commited to a radical and idiosyncratic perspective virtually none of my students share, but they come to see they can still learn a great deal from him.