Progressive Media Advocates
Lauren Steiner: Please help us spread the word across Los Angeles! Come with signs that say “Bruce Karsh, please don’t sell the LA Times to the Kochs” and “Bruce Karsh, our democracy is not for sale” We are gathering Thursday, May 23 for a rally and march.
Steve Smith: A sale by Oaktree (which has controlling interest in the Tribune Co.) to the Kochs would be an affront to the values of Angelenos and working people everywhere.
Joe Mathews: Most American newspapers today are owned by little-known rich people or faceless corporations, and it’s rare that papers do things that people love or hate. The LA Times suffers from this same malady: It’s unthreatening and predictable.
Lauren Steiner: The president of Oaktree Capital Management, is poised to sell the LA Times to the Koch Brothers but Angelenos don’t have to sit by and let that happen.
Good Grief: Who’s Going to Cover LA Now? The LA Media Reform Group’s 6th Annual media conference at Occidental College takes place Saturday, April 27th
Antonhy Samad: IWhat black people should be using as a day of critical observation and self-examination, we use to parade and party. And you wonder why the world thinks black people are crazy for remaining in the conditions of socio-economic compromise for as long as they have.
Michael Sigman: In the heat of the 2008 presidential race, the popular conservative blog Red State lambasted candidate Barack Obama’s remarks during a Berlin appearance as a “Kumbaya speech” filled with “nothing but platitudes and leftist, and multicultural, rah-rah.”
Charley James: Technically they aren’t counted as being homeless anymore because they now live in a house rather than on the street. Some activists think this distorts the numbers downward, masking the true extent of the problem.
Stephen Box: Be the story, tell the story, and cultivate a relationship with local journalists so that they call you when they are digging for information
Michele Waslin: It should raise eyebrows when ICE claims it’s falling behind on deportations and needs to deport more people.
Sikivu Hutchinson: In the American imagination, Black women are the poster children for disreputable irresponsible motherhood and Latina “illegals” a close second.
Cheryl Aichele: Occupy Activists aim to highlight the fraudulent ways in which the nation’s largest mortgage servicer forecloses on millions of innocent families.
Stephen Box: LA’s Fire Department has been turned upside down and placed in the hot seat, not for the actions of its rank and file, but for the creative accounting habits of its leadership.
Stephen Box: Greuel navigated the hot topics of land use and urban design without hitting any potholes or committing to any controversial positions on topics that ranged from Farmers Field to affordable housing to corruption within City Hall.
Steve Mikulan: Ed Padgett was driving in the rain to a union meeting when the L.A. Times called to tell him he was fired. The pressman, a third-generation Times employee, listened in shock.
At the ACLU Public Forum in Pasadena on January 10th, James Clark of the SAFE California Campaign and Brent Tonik of CCV will discuss the history of California’s death penalty and lay out the case for its abolition.
The following letter was written to the LA Times in response to their December 3, 2011 article, “Postscript: Digging into the Occupy L.A. ‘mess‘.” The writer, Scott Peer, also sent a copy to the LA Progressive. We are posting it with his permission: It’s not a huge surprise that The LA Times continues to slant [...]
Justin Chapman: The coming concentration of the media is probably a bigger threat to your civil liberties than anything the government’s doing right now, according to Tim Rutten
Stephen Box: Occupy LA has faced one of the most potent of enemies, an ambivalent audience, one that is most likely to respond with a tired dismissal based on aesthetics or a weary look of disbelief as issues such as unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, collapsing infrastructure and a collapsing economy are presented as a call to action.
Mario Rivas: Bell will forever stand as a stark reality of what can happen when too much trust and power are given to small government in the hands of the corrupt.
Mario Rivas: You tell the Marines that the green revolution has failed and they’ll tell you that the Marines don’t know how to fail.
Sharon Kyle: In a culture where “whiteness” is rarely mentioned and hardly ever critically examined it is not surprising that the women in my church saw the story as heartwarming and uplifting. I, on the other hand, saw this as just another story of the black experience as viewed through the white lens.
James Clark: No one is surprised to learn that California’s death penalty is a broken and dysfunctional system. After all, you don’t have to go far in California to find any government bureaucracy that’s broken or dysfunctional – it’s finding a functional government program that might take a while.
Madeline Janis: The attack against LAANE is consistent with the broader effort by the right to cripple progressive causes and leaders. And as the recent assault on Planned Parenthood reminds us, they are willing to do almost anything to achieve their aim.
Leonard Isenberg: Ex-LA Mayor Richard Riordan, who is now chairman of the board of cash-strapped ICEF Public Schools, is now in the process of trying to get his board to vote control of the charter’s 15 schools over to Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, another large, local charter-school group.
Cynthia Liu: What’s troubling is that rhetoric surrounding use of student standardized test scores–even if student performance year-over-year is compared to eliminate external influences–appears to include other measures of teacher performance, yet those other measures have never been identified.
Natasha Minsker: It’s time to stop playing the killing game. Let’s use the hundreds of millions of dollars we’ll save to protect some of those essential services now threatened with death. Let’s stop asking people like me to lie to those victim’s family members.
James Clark: A growing number of victims’ advocacy organizations are taking a stand against the death penalty because it prioritizes executions above the real needs of victims.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
Steve Hochstadt: The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s finally made an issue of fathering. If women were going to get out of the house and into the workplace, men had to change their roles, too.
The Frying Pan: A successful mayor and council cannot be satisfied with merely coping as issues arise, but must be able to anticipate and define the city´s needs for the next four years. As our newly elected leaders prepare for their roles, we´ve asked writers to share their thoughts about what lies ahead for Los Angeles.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Occupy LA Confronting City Hall on Police Chalk Abuse
Cheryl Aichele: Chalk Walk activists say they want to know why LA City Council ignored their requests for help with chalking arrests before the Council went on recess.