Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > LA Times' Tony Pierce Interviewed

Bloggasm interviews Tony "Keep Rockin" Pierce, the LAT staffer who told the LAT's bloggers to not mention the John Edwards adultery story.

I spoke to Pierce for a few minutes on the phone today. He said the decision to send the email came after several senior editors at the Times met that day.

“The Opinion LA blog had already written about the rumors from the National Enquirer,” he explained. “We knew some of the other blogs wanted to write about it or were thinking about writing about it. And at that point we were like, ‘you know, we already have our metro desk working on a story and before we just kind of write a whole bunch of stuff about the National Enquirer article, why don’t we give our metro desk a chance to see what they can find.’ That’s when they said, ‘OK Tony, why don’t you write this letter to your bloggers.”

Of course, Pierce sent that email last Thursday. It's Tuesday and the LA Times still hasn't run the newspaper story they were supposed to be working on. I don't think your reporters on top of this breaking news, chief.