Michael Kinsley

If you want to know why journo-types hate Michael Kinsley's role at the Los Angeles Times, read LAWeekly's view.

1. He's East-Coast centric, as was editor John Carroll. (Carroll's replacement is from the New York Times, but that's, ah, different.)

2. Kinsley is giving up his downtown "pied-á-terre in Bunker Hill Towers." LAWeekly resents that it was a 10 minute walk from the paper, but "inevitably he drove. "That small revelation only served to underscore how little actual contact he’s had with his unadopted city." (As if every LA Times staffer walked to work. Bunker Towers to the Times-Mirror building runs right through some of the most depressed and dangerous landscape in the city.)

3. Kinsley gave the scoop of his leaving to LAT's "arch-rival" the New York Times. (The relationship is more like sycophant.)

4. He ran two pages of Sunday Opinion to cartoons about the mayor's race when "space could have been devoted to insightful analysis." (As if the LATs has ever engaged in insightful analysis of the city's politics, or even, for that matter, the open corruption.)

5. "Carroll also overlooked that Los Angeles has long been ground zero for the progressive movement. It probably never occurred to him that he’d disappoint this constituency by hiring Kinsley." (We are getting closer to the core here.)

An example is that recent Kinsley-penned LAT commentary downplaying the significance of the so-called Downing Street Memo concerning the timing of the decision to go to war with Iraq and the Bush administration’s distortion of the related WMD intelligence.

He had the arrogance and audacity not just to pooh-pooh the memo’s contents but also to poke fun at the progressive movement [bolding mine-ed] for pumping up the volume surrounding it. “I don’t buy the fuss. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the left’s revival. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes ideological self-confidence,” Kinsley ridiculed.

How dare he?

6. He argued publicly with Susan Estrich and won and made the leftwing Estrich look like a fool.

7. "Kinsley took the contrarian view that Judy Miller shouldn’t protect her sources." (You know, the "sources" who told her it was o.k. to testify, that is, if you believe or wanna believe it was Karl Rove.)

There you have the reasons that really boil down to one - he wasn't Left enough for them.