LA Reported

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

At The Wrap, Michael Calderone discusses a new initiative by Claremont McKenna College alumni David Dreier and Scott Woolley:

What has transpired in Los Angeles is part of the national crisis, as large city dailies once flush with advertising dollars have contracted, while many smaller papers and muckraking alt-weeklies have shuttered or shrunk. The number of news deserts, communities lacking reliable and timely information, climbed from 206 to 213 this year, according to Medill’s latest study, and this phenomenon isn’t relegated to large, rural expanses. In Los Angeles, a major metropolis where Hollywood and Big Tech are covered from all angles, there are communities, or news “islands,” as former Los Angeles Times executive editor Kevin Merida put it, “without coverage to serve them.”

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With nearly 10 million people living in Los Angeles County, there will always be stories untold. Even the Times at its most robust, with a newsroom of roughly 1,200 staffers two decades ago, couldn’t comprehensively cover every community at every moment. But the cutbacks at the Times, and elsewhere, have revealed significant gaps in coverage that journalists and civic leaders are hoping to fill through a variety of models, both for-and-non-profit.

 Forbes veteran Scott Woolley is co-founding and editing LA Reported, which launches on Jan. 8, and will utilize Substack as its primary distribution model. “Our plan is to publish a small number of deeply reported stories, written as lively and engaging narratives,” he told TheWrap. Woolley expects the outlet, which will rely on freelance writers, to cover housing, affordability, political malfeasance, transportation and public safety policy, as well as “some lighter pieces that don’t deal with such weighty topics but are just damn fun to read.”

Online Sleuthing Gone Wrong

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  It is easier than ever to spread lies at scale.

Zachary Basu at Axios:

As police scoured New England this week for the gunman who killed two people at Brown University, a parallel manhunt erupted online, falsely targeting a Palestinian student.Authorities say the real suspect, a Portuguese national also linked to the slaying of an MIT professor, was found dead Thursday in New Hampshire.

Why it matters: Social media influencers who play detective after tragedies are getting it disastrously wrong — falsely accusing innocent people of crimes with little evidence, massive reach and virtually no accountability.

The speculation often is stoked by ideological accounts that seize on "clues" reinforcing their worldviews. Corrections are exceedingly rare — and seldom travel as far as the original claims.

Zoom in: Mustapha Kharbouch was never named by police as a suspect in the shooting that killed two Brown students, including the vice president of the college Republican Club.

But he was targeted online after his student profile disappeared from the university's website — a move MAGA-aligned accounts seized on as supposed evidence of a cover-up.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Tuesday there were many reasons the pages could have been taken down — including to prevent doxxing — and warned that online vigilantes were heading down a "really dangerous road."

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Even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a senior Justice Department official, amplified claims that Brown's removal of Kharbouch's student pages was suspicious.

 

How Other Countries Draw Districts

Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting -- much in the news now because of dueling gerrymanders in Texas and California.

Drew DeSilver at Pew:

So far this year, at least four states have redrawn their congressional districts with the stated goal of advantaging one party or the other in the 2026 midterms. Several others are exploring similar moves.

With this unprecedented wave of voluntary midcycle redistricting in the United States, we wondered how redistricting works in other democracies – and whether the process is as inherently political as it is in the U.S.

We analyzed how 107 democracies elect their national legislatures (mostly unicameral, or the “lower house” in bicameral systems). We found that only one other country uses the same redistricting approach as the U.S. – that is, single-member districts drawn mainly by state legislatures. That country is the Federated States of Micronesia, with a population of around 100,000, which was formerly administered by the U.S. under a United Nations trusteeship.

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 In more than two-thirds of the democracies that heavily rely on single-member districts (29 of 42), special commissions or national election agencies have primary responsibility for drawing the lines. Lawmakers’ role, if any, is limited.

Mitt Romney: Curb Spending and Raise Taxes

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Mitt Romney at NYT:

In 2012, political ads suggested that some of my policy proposals, if enacted, would amount to pushing grandma off a cliff. Actually, my proposals were intended to prevent that very thing from happening.

Today, all of us, including our grandmas, truly are headed for a cliff: If, as projected, the Social Security Trust Fund runs out in the 2034 fiscal year, benefits will be cut by about 23 percent. The government will need trillions of dollars to make up the shortfall. When lenders refuse to loan the money unless they are paid much higher interest rates, economic calamity will almost certainly ensue. Alternatively, the government could print more money, inducing hyperinflation that devalues the national debt — along with your savings.

Typically, Democrats insist on higher taxes, and Republicans insist on lower spending. But given the magnitude of our national debt as well as the proximity of the cliff, both are necessary. DOGE took a slash-and-burn approach to budget cutting and failed spectacularly. Europe demonstrates that exorbitant taxes without spending restraint crushes economic vitality and thus speeds how fast the cliff arrives.

And on the tax front, it’s time for rich people like me to pay more.

Why DOGE Failed

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

At The Dispatch, Jessica Riedl writes that DOGE was incompetent and illegal.  Most important, its assumptions were wrong.

The promise to save trillions of dollars was ultimately doomed by the reality that most federal spending was off limits to DOGE. Roughly two-thirds of all federal spending goes to five items (Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest) that Trump either promised not to cut, or in the case of interest, cannot directly reduce. Attempts by DOGE to scale back Social Security customer service spending as well as assistance at veterans’ hospitals were largely abandoned in the face of a steep backlash. Even much of the remaining one-third of federal spending consists of programs that Trump voters generally support, such as infrastructure, border security, farm subsidies, and law enforcement. Ultimately, DOGE was left to slash cultural totems that benefit MAGA enemies: aid to Africa, DEI contracts, Politico subscriptions, and government employees. And while the potential savings from these expenditures look like a lot of money for a typical family, they represent budget dust in the context of a $7 trillion federal budget.

Because real waste exists in the federal budget, DOGE represents a colossal missed opportunity. After all, Washington has a moral obligation to eliminate unnecessary and wasteful spending in order to minimize the necessary cuts to priority programs. OMB estimates that $191 billion annually is lost to payment errors, which overwhelmingly take place within Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and earned income tax credit payments. Moreover, Washington is plagued with dozens of overlapping programs in areas such as education, economic development, and job training. And the Defense Department has a long record of losing tens of billions of dollars in contract cost overruns.

These examples of wasteful spending are easy to identify yet quite difficult to fix. Cleaning up such waste often involves completely overhauling countless government computer systems, developing new oversight controls (without unduly paralyzing the distribution of legitimate benefits), and coordinating with state governments that share in the administration of key programs. Overhauling these practices across hundreds of federal programs is tedious, complicated, and thankless—which is why it occurs so rarely. Lawmakers will hold hearings and press conferences blasting government waste, yet few are willing to invest significant resources into, for example, reducing Medicaid payment errors. DOGE could have focused on such activities—especially given its leaders’ background in computing technology—yet it seemed to lack the required attention span. Trump and Musk instead prioritized headline-grabbing gimmicks such as demanding a war on “millions” of fraudulent Social Security payments that did not actually exist.

Failed State: Wildfire Recovery

Many posts have discussed disasters.

 David Zahniser at LAT:

It was supposed to be a speech with a clear message of hope for survivors of the Palisades fire.

In her State of the City address in April, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called for a law exempting fire victims from construction permit fees — potentially saving them tens of thousands of dollars as they rebuild their homes.

Eight months later, the City Council is still debating how much permit relief the city can afford. Palisades residents have been left hanging, with some blaming Bass for failing to finalize a deal.
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“This should have been pushed, and it wasn’t pushed,” said electrician Tom Doran, who has submitted plans to rebuild his three-bedroom home. “There was no motor on that boat. It was allowed to drift downstream.”

Since the Jan. 7 fire destroyed thousands of homes, Bass has been announcing recovery strategies with great fanfare, only for them to get bogged down in the details or abandoned altogether.


After two of the most destructive fires in the state’s history, The Times takes a critical look at the past year and the steps taken — or not taken — to prevent this from happening again in all future fires.
Read the stories

At one point, she called for the removal of traffic checkpoints around Pacific Palisades, only to reverse course after an outcry over public safety. She pushed tax relief for wildfire victims in Sacramento, only to abruptly pull the plug on her bill. Her relationship with Steve Soboroff, her first and only chief recovery officer, quickly unraveled over pay and other issues. He left after a 90-day stint.

Critics in and outside the Palisades say the mayor’s missteps have undermined public confidence in the rebuilding process. They have also made her more politically vulnerable as she ramps up her campaign for a second term.

Social Security, Early and Late

Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Brian O'Connor at NYT:

The amount of money you get from Social Security each month depends on when you start receiving benefits.

If you were born after Jan. 1, 1960, your full retirement age is 67. Wait longer, and your benefit rises by 8 percent a year until age 70.

But if you claim Social Security “early,” or before your full retirement age, your payment is reduced, often drastically. Claiming at 62 results in your payment being slashed by as much as 30 percent from the full retirement age benefit. The reduction shrinks each year until your full retirement age. Claiming early also means that any income you earn above a set limit results in part of your benefits being temporarily withheld until you reach full retirement age. While there are limited options to withdraw or pause to reset your benefits, you should consider your initial choice to be permanent.

There are understandable reasons people cannot wait. Ruth Finkelstein, executive director of the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging at Hunter College, said many people who claim benefits at 62 have been out of work or underemployed for years.

“The mass of people who ‘retire’ between 50 and 62 were pushed out of the workplace or had to leave because of someone in the family with health concerns,” Ms. Finkelstein said. “They’ve been holding on until 62.”

About 40 percent of retirees get more than half of their retirement income from Social Security, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. About 13 percent depend entirely on their benefits.

And there’s a fear factor: According to Schroders’ 2025 U.S. Retirement Survey, more than one-third of non-retired Americans say they worry that the Social Security program will run out of money. That worry is based on federal estimates that by 2033, the program trust fund can afford to pay only 77 percent of all scheduled benefits.