Bad City

Paul Pringle of the L.A. Times has written an account that has all the elements of potboiling cinema, except it is real. What is most unsettling is not that the head of the USC medical school was smoking methamphetamine with young people and supplying them with drugs, but that Pringle's superiors at the newspaper blocked publication of the story for more than a year. When corruption reaches into the leadership of newspapers to this extent, democracy is not sustainable. Thankfully, the doggedness of Pringle and his colleagues at the Times led to a housecleaning at the top.