Review: ‘Bad City,’ by Paul Pringle

When Pringle shared his concerns with colleagues, Times-affiliated lawyers and eventually the head of human resources, he helped spark an internal investigation into Maharaj and Duvoisin’s handling of the Puliafito story. Though the official findings determined neither editor commited wrongdoing, a month after the story ran, both were pushed out.

Despite his fight with Maharaj and Duvoisin, despite the still tenuous financial position of the newspaper and the might of U.S.C. — thanks to the fund-raising prowess of men like Puliafito — Pringle believes that reporters and their sources, lowly as they are, can outmaneuver even the most powerful people and institutions and bring them to heel. And when those institutions collude to protect one another, reporting may be our last best hope for accountability.

Pringle delivers his account in a torrent of sharp storytelling and righteous score-settling that might seem petty if the stakes were not so grave.

By 2016, The Los Angeles Times was a husk of its former self, thanks to Zell. As the newspaper cut staff through buyouts and layoffs, the university offered financial support to the publisher’s office in the form of advertising, and to the newsroom in the form of jobs.

“The Times’s power had always flowed principally from the robustness and incorruptibility of its journalism. Its power came from being a check on power,” Pringle writes. “It was that power that I was convinced Maharaj and his enablers had surrendered to a rising and emboldened U.S.C.”

There were terrible consequences when U.S.C. had the upper hand.

During the months that Pringle and his colleagues fought for permission to publish the Puliafito story, the doctor continued to supply drugs to Warren and others. He introduced Warren’s teenage brother to meth, and fostered an addiction that made school and work impossible. And Puliafito’s “No. 2 girl,” a nude model named Dora Yoder who also provided him with sex in order to feed her drug addiction, had a baby who died in October 2017, just 25 days old, with meth in his body.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/books/review/bad-city-paul-pringle.html