Armchair Sociology

Last week, the National Book Critics Circle awarded “A Visit From the Goon Squad” by novelist Jennifer Egan its highly-touted prize for fiction. It was a huge honor for Egan’s work, but you really wouldn’t know it from glancing at the LA Times’ website. Alongside its writeup of the awards ceremony, the Times chose to run a shot of Jonathan Franzen–who’s novel “Freedom” was arguably the favorite to pick up the award–instead of Egan.

Times readers weren’t having it.

“Seriously? Seriously???,” one wrote. “The news is that literary darling Jonathan Franzen LOST an award, not that (talented but less well-known female) Jennifer Egan WON? Please spend a couple of minutes gazing into your editorial navels today and ask yourselves what happened.”

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Leave it to comedian-turned-radio-pundit Dennis Miller to fire back at Charlie Sheen with a reference as esoteric as many of those spewed by the embattled actor.

Appearing last night as he occasionally does on The O’Reilly Factor, the Santa Barbara resident revealed that he has been thoroughly enjoying the new king of going off on a rant, and compared Sheen to a deceased French playwright. “I find Sheen uproariously funny,” Miller raved. “I think he’s an absurdist supreme. I don’t think I’ve seen a farceur like this since Georges Feydeau at the turn of the 20th century with his plays…”

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Looks like James O’Keefe‘s latest prank has not only gotten NPR‘s president to resign, it’s gotten Andrew Breitbart back in the national spotlight. Breitbart was on Piers Morgan‘s show last night talking about his protege’s capers, and the left wing bias that prevents them from being properly acknowledged. We thought the Shirley Sherrod incident would finally send Breitbart to the media glue factory, but now he’s back galloping around like nothing happened–saying calculated, counterintuitive things like “the best coverage on this incident has been NPR. It’s been impeccable…I respect NPR more than you would actually think.” And he’s actually right about the bias against this latest O’Keefe prank.

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A couple of months ago, over the course of several weeks, Spot.us undertook a comprehensive survey of the Los Angeles media scene. Asking questions like, “Forgetting celebrity gossip, name something unique reporters in L.A. should focus on…” the non-profit journalistic upstart queried its readers about what kind of coverage this city is lacking, and what forms of media they’d like to see stories presented in.

After more than 500 respondents took part, the results are finally in and published on Spot.us’ site. The survey is pretty lengthy, worth taking a look at in full, but here’s what Spot.us readers came up with in answer to the aforementioned question of what they’d like to see covered.

The most common responses included transportation issues, air- and water-quality issues and the cultural, racial and ethnic diversity in the L.A. area. A noticeable contingency expressed interest in seeing stories about the city’s grassroots arts cultures and ethnic enclaves, and several mentioned being tired of celebrity coverage and wanting to see coverage of “regular” people. There were also a fair amount of responses about education and homelessness in L.A.

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This morning, researchers at the University of Colorado released the results of a study that wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about the LA Times‘ stories on “value-added” teacher scores as the Philip Meyer Award judges seemed to be. But don’t tell the LA Times that.

Over at Witness LA, Celeste Fremon notes that despite the harsh conclusions of university researchers, the Times’ writeup of the study seems to suggest the research “confirms” their findings.

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Fresno’s own Gary Brecher, otherwise known as the “War Nerd,” offers his unique take on the upsurge of violence in Egypt.

You can’t help thinking of Ancient Rome when you watch this riot video from Cairo. What you see is humans re-learning the lessons of ancient warfare. And they do it in a matter of minutes! I swear, this video had me more upbeat about the species than I’ve been for a long time. It’s not that we’ve lost our edge, we’re just rusty.

We still know how to do it. First rule: mass wins. You get your side together and stay together. Second: deploy skirmishers. Those are the hotheads throwing rocks about 30 feet ahead of the main mob. They’re to provoke the enemy, absorb the enemy’s first counterstrike. It’s a suicide job, so it’s a favorite in the male age 12-20 demographic.

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Live Action founder Lila Rose has published a new–once again, highly suspect, highly edited–video on Andrew Breitbart‘s Big Government site, purporting to show Planned Parenthood workers in Virginia helping a “pimp” to circumnavigate the law to get abortions for his underage prostitutes.

Writes Rose:

Young girls are going into Planned Parenthood clinics every day, too many the victims of abuse. According to the Department of Justice, an estimated 300 to 400 thousand children are trafficked for sex every year.

Some are taken to Planned Parenthood clinics for secret abortions. Instead of reporting the abusers of minors and young women, Planned Parenthood is enabling pimps and predators with their refusal to report abuse and willingness to assist the pimp’s underage prostitution business.

Yuh, huh…

Well, that’s the biggest bullshit we’ve seen in quite some time. If what Rose says is true, then, as a journalist, the natural thing to do would be to find several of these trafficked girls and tell their stories. Then you send reporters out undercover to corroborate the girls’ stories. Instead of, you know, making the whole thing up.

This new video could not be edited in a more patchwork fashion. It reminds us of one of those Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard phony phone calls.

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Call us crazy, but what does it say about our culture that in the midst of a general American decline, on the eve of austerity measures poised to virtually eliminate the social safety net, and in the middle of a democratic movement in the Middle East that in a matter of months could potentially take away access to all the cheap, ill-gotten oil our society is built on, do we choose to elevate films about a power-hungry billionaire, a pitiable British monarch and ballet, while lavishing praise and attention upon an actress–Natalie Portman–for showing up to her celebration decked out in $2 million worth of jewels?

We’ll let you ponder that as you take a peak at the SAG Award winners from last night. After the jump:

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Ooohh boy. Apparently Us Weekly‘s most recent cover, featuring Elton John posed with husband and son, is too much for customers of the popular Arkansas chain store Harps. The store had to install a “family shield” in front of the cover to protect children from seeing THE GAYS!!!

In fairness, it doesn’t sound like the store took the initiative on this one. The website CoverAwards called the cashier at the Harps store in question, who said customers had been complaining about the cover, demanding something be done.

“We’re in a no win situation,” she said, adding she thought it was ridiculous that anyone would complain. “They’re going to have to know at some point [about gay families].”

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Bill Simmons most recent podcast is a good one. Simmons had openly gay ESPN sports reporter LZ Granderson on to talk about longtime Boston Herald sports columnist Steve Buckley‘s recent “coming out” column. Simmons says he expected more from Buckley’s piece.

“In 2011, is it too little to come out and write a column that says, ‘I’m gay?’”

Granderson disagreed: “I’m certain his words touched someone that needed to hear those words. It was evident during the discussion surrounding ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’ we have a long way to go to discussing homosexuality in a rational way. So I’m happy he did it.”

Though Granderson has lived as an openly gay man for years–he was an out gay man before he was an out sports fan–he says, “I never wrote an ‘I am gay column.’” Though he certainly has covered gay issues in relation to sports, Granderson’s first column that addressed his own sexuality came after he was gay bashed at a party in New Orleans for the 2008 NBA All-Star Game. “My t-shirt didn’t reach my knees, so they thought it was too small,” Granderson says, of what started the incident. Eight to ten men then surrounded him, calling him “faggot,” until police broke up the scene.

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