The LA Times handling of Ted Rall has been very bizarrre:
Ted Rall, a journalist and cartoonist often critical of police misconduct, was fired by the LA Times after the LAPD claimed he lied about a 2001 encounter with an officer. But an audio recording of the event appears to back up Rall’s version of events, leaving everyone to wonder why the Times was so eager to cut him loose.
***The LA Police Union was ready with a gloating press release praising the Times’ decision.
The transcript provided to the Times depicts a calm encounter, but the audiotape that came with it is a murky, noisy mess.
Greg Palast, famous investigative reporter and manager of a nonprofit foundation that backs Rall’s work, writes that he was also about to fire him as well, but asked for the tape first to hear it for himself.
“To my surprise–and Rall’s glee–the crowd that he had allegedly fantasized about suddenly came alive–with three women shouting, ‘Why’d you handcuff him?’ and ‘Take off his handcuffs!,'” Palast wrote.
It’s hard to conclude much other than than that they were looking to can him, as he can be a total asshole at times (something I know a bit about), but he totally got screwed here it seems.
srv
Here Ya Go
Good times.
*this post not intended to offend anyone, simply to provide context without judgement or criticism.
John Cole
@srv: Wow, that was from so long ago it was before Goldstein went completely insane.
Thoroughly Pizzled
His “art” is abominable.
JDM
I wrote this a couple days ago at another site, but what especially jumped out at me about this case is that the LAPD had, and could readily find, a tape of a 14-year old jaywalking incident.
How often and for how long do you suppose they usually keep such things, for non-critics that is?
Mike E
Dunno when we’ll reach the Wingularity, but Trollmageddon is nigh!
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
I agree with Mr. Pizzled. I’ve always thought that his work was sufficient reason to fire him, or better yet, to have not hired him in the first place. But the LA Times seems to be using a bogus excuse to fire him, probably to avoid some sort of contractual obligation stemming from hiring him in the first place.
srv
@John Cole: Once a month, I force myself to go over to pw and gape.
Baud
@srv:
Those old posts are like stepping into another world.
Laertes
I’m pretty happy about the way the Times is eager to curry favor with police, since that’s how journalism ought to operate in a properly ordered society. The knowledge that the police were lying their asses off makes me vaguely uneasy, and I can’t bring myself to simply disregard that information, so I’m instead going to evade that knowledge by deciding that this is about Mr. Rall’s personality, a subject on which I’ve got uncomplicated opinions that cause me no discomfort to dwell upon. Also, it gives me something to say that I can stand saying.
Mike J
@Mike E:
To stop those monsters, one-two-three,
Here’s a fresh new way that’s trouble-free,
It’s got Paul Anka’s guarantee …
Guarantee void in Tennessee.
Just don’t look! Just don’t look!
srv
@Baud: I, for one, prefer the echo chamber of today.
SiubhanDuinne
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
I agree. Can’t stand his cartoons. They are rarely funny, clever, or insightful, and the drawing is dreadful. I didn’t even know he was also a columnist until this, and I just hope he writes better than he draws.
All that said, a quick read suggests that the LA Times was indeed looking for some excuse to get rid of him. And as JDM pointed out, it’s really pretty unusual that the LAPD could lay their hands on a tape of what was a super-minor incident that took place almost a decade and a half ago. The whole thing raises more questions than it answers.
Baud
@srv:
Me too.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
The LA Times is the only employer that ever made me pee in a cup to get hired, and I was a lowly (paid) intern.
Hookers can be raped, and assholes can get fired for made-up reasons. He can probably afford to hire a pretty good employment lawyer, so I won’t cry for Rall just yet.
mai naem mobile
I can’t be bothered to look it up but I wonder if He said some anti-police stuff during the Maher appearance before the stop and then they followed him just to harass him.
PeakVT
The management at my place of employment fired a guy today basically because he was an jerk that nobody liked. These things happen, and probably should.
No idea if this applies to Rall, and don’t really care.
Mike in NC
Who’s the bigger douchebag, Ted Rall or Ted Cruz? Discuss.
Brachiator
Seems as though Rall burned all his bridges. You know things are bad when your supposed friends as well as your enemies want to get rid of you. I remember when Rall also had a radio talk show gig, and apparently screwed that up as well.
Wow. He wrote about a decades old event, and the police just happened to have a tape and transcript ready? Damn. That’s some Mission Impossible level set-up, or, uh, I mean, coincidence.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
OT:
and ETA’d just for fun
Chris CillizzaVerified account
Rick Perry has stopped paying ALL of his campaign staff, according to the one and only @ PhilipRucker.
I wouldn’t have thought of him to be the first one out, but do Gilmore and Pataki even have any staffers to not pay? Personal money to do it with? Kind of surprised Perry doesn’t have a billionaire
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Mike in NC:
Cruz. For all his other faults, Rall has no interest in policing my uterus.
Anne Laurie
Thanks for posting this, Cole.
I’d been looking for a way to write about this incident, but there’s been a lot of other stuff to post about. And frankly, I knew anything I posted about Rall was gonna be met with a barrage of OF COURSE YOU WOULD SUPPORT THAT MISOGYNIST WHO CAN’T EVEN DRAW YOU SANDY-SNATCHED RACIST!!!!
… because, sure, Rall can’t draw but he is a pretty good cartoonist, and a better writer, even though I don’t always agree with his politics. And the LATimes firing him is… problematic. (Is that still the words kids use, these days?)
LanceThruster
Rall is awesome…even when I disagree. The style of his art is too. Shrubya in his general’s uniform? Puleeze!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@efgoldman: He also went after Bush today on something called “instagram”
I actually think this is a good rough draft for HRC and/or Dem SuperPACs, from “A chicken in every pot” to “A recession under every Bush!”
ETA: I actually would go easy, very easy on Poppy. He’s old and frail, and you really don’t want to have to pull an ad if he snuffs it
Bill Murray
@efgoldman: but Rall draws badly and is the hippie to be punched for the new generation, so clearly Rall
Sophist
So…when are they going to fire the cop who lied about Rall lying about the encounter?
I kid, I kid…
ruemara
I’d like to shed a tear for Ted Rall, but I’m kinda out. He’s had a long career, I’m sure it’s not over and frankly, I’d be looking at a lawsuit against the PD for stalking him and bringing up a 14 year old tape.
Now, back to real outrages.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said its deputies acted appropriately. They conducted a body cavity search in public on black woman. full on spread eagle public molestation to hunt for weed.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
In Southern California, you’ve got the movie industry, the record industry, advertising firms, talent agents, sports teams. The only reason most of these places would even consider given a drug test would be to find out what the hottest new drug might be. This makes companies that actually test for illegal drugs look more quaint than paranoid.
Let’s imagine a fictional newspaper, say one owned by a competitor to Charles Foster Kane. This paper has rarely been successfully sued for stuff like this. If they can’t win, they will delay until the first layer of attorneys retire, until the plaintiff has practically gone broke, and if it still looks like they might lose, they will then offer the cheapest settlement possible, and require tons of non-disclosure agreements.
sukabi
@efgoldman: you didn’t see his Jeb ad today? Someone posted it on another thread this morning… Third time is not a charm.
Anne Laurie
@efgoldman:
Bad news, old man… remember, I’ve met you ;}
Lavocat
I love Rall. Mostly for the fact that he has the uncanny ability to make otherwise normal people totally lose their shit over poorly drawn cartoons. He’s the kid who got off on raking his nails across the entire chalk board in school. Don’t like it or him? Fuck you.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@ruemara: I see Harris County includes Houston, the fourth largest country in the country, so I’m sure smelling weed was the most important problem the police faced that day.
Jesus christ.
Then, according to [Corley’s attorney, Sam] Cammack, Corley stood up and protested, so the deputy threw her to the ground and restrained her while another female was called in to assist. When backup arrived, each deputy held one of Corley’s legs apart to conduct the probe
for .02 ounces. Is that even a fucking joint?
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@ruemara: Holy crap! We are never, ever driving through that hellhole again. I’ll drive around even if it means I have to drive across Utah to get to Missouri… oh, wait: never going to Missouri again. Or Kansas.
And I’m a white-haired white lady.
srv
@Lavocat: Here, Ted Rall is a measurement of how far back to the right this blog has swung.
I mean that in a good way.
lamh36
@ruemara: ugh…I read that on twitter.
It’s stuff like this that really makes me believe that even if pott was legalized, the attitudes vis a vis Black pott smokers vs white pott smokers, won’t change and in fact, you will still get BS abuse for Black smokers more than whites
I mean, black folk on pot..crazy psycho. white folk on pot…good hearted stoner? Black folk rarely seem to get the “benefit” of the stoner logo.
You can change the law, but the attitude that black pott smokers (or other people of color) are more “criminal” than white folk will more than likely stay the same.
Gian
@Anne Laurie:
http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/2004/07/05
http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/2004/05/03
he also was an early “no difference” “don’t vote” proponent back in 1994 in the NYT according to his wiki page
He seems like the kind of dick you’d keep a tape on for 15 or 20 years just in case he decided to target you.
the two cartoons are his pat tillman (and he doubled down on that later) and Condi Rice ones.
Gian
@Lavocat:
To each his own. Some people like “house N___” jokes some don’t
some people like making fun of a guy who gave up a very lucrative NFL career for patriotism after 9-11 and read Chomsky and got killed by friendly fire, and some think it’s being a real dick to do that.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
No talent hack, and an asshole to boot. He should be unemployable, but probably didn’t deserve to be fired for this particular bit of fluff.
Geoduck
Ted Rall is a grenade-thrower par excellence. Whether that’s good or bad is up to the viewer. Also, I will always give him a large chunk of credit for having the guts to actually travel on the ground as a reporter, on his own far outside the safety of any press bubble, in Central Asia (Afghanistan and beyond) during the USA’s not-so-excellent adventures there.
scav
@efgoldman: Police know their viewing market. Abu Ghraib had that same weird combo of sex and violence and yee-hah-mercka-tough! caught on film too.
dirk
Rall lost me with his Pat Tillman cartoon. Apparently he has since apologized for it but I see no reason to read his stuff again.
the Conster
@lamh36:
You are just so infuriatingly right. UGH!!!
Steeplejack (phone)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That’s 0.6 grams. Maybe enough for one small joint?
ruemara
@Steeplejack (phone): I’d also ask if it was really hers. She was going to pick up medicine for her mother. Conveniently, she just so happened to have .02 ounces stuffed up her butt? You for real, police? She looks like me. I wouldn’t know where to go for a pot that wasn’t for making a sauce. Every white middle class teen in my neighbor knows more about how to get an illegal drug than I do. I know how to pick up high blood pressure medication.
Joel
I know nothing about Rall, despite having seen his comics here and there. The aesthetic is ugly, like Boston’s Government Center, so my brain just skims right past it.
Steeplejack (phone)
@ruemara:
Yeah, I was wondering when she had the time to “stash” the marijuana. Also, I don’t know much of anything about current marijuana laws, but is one joint still illegal in Texas? And, if it is, is it grounds for the storm-trooper treatment, i.e., a felony instead of a misdemeanor? (Not that there’s any excuse for this bullshit.)
different-church-lady
#ShittyCartoonistsLivesMatter
M. Bouffant
As an Angeleno, when I say fuck the L.A.P.D. & the L.A. Times, I mean it.
Ruckus
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne):
I’ve driven/ridden in 46 states, most of them several times over several yrs, lived in 4 of them and 2 of those are 2 of the many I’ll never go to again. Life is too just too short.
Ruckus
@ruemara:
I’d say WTF but that’s too tame a response.
First of all a body cavity search in public?
Second, hell there is no second here.
And I’m not even stunned that it happened. Ashamed for the country I live in, that something even approaching this would happen, yes. Ashamed for the human race that would allow, no, would pay people to be that big of an asshole that they would think this is a reasonable search.
Cacti
When I think about how Mrs. Cacti was well acquainted with Pat Tillman from her years of working for the ASU Football and Arizona Cardinals team physician, and how hard she took the news of his death…
My gut reaction to Ted Rall’s misfortune is “ha ha mother f**ker”.
Joe Bauers
Fuck Ted Rall. That no-talent asshole deserves to have bad shit happen to him. And no, being an asshole doesn’t count as “talent”.
Hob
@dirk: He did say later that he regretted the Tillman cartoon. At the same time, he repeatedly credited himself for helping uncover the truth about how Tillman died— not that he had had any intention of doing so, but that simply by drawing an ignorant cartoon about it that pissed everyone off, he got people talking more about Tillman, which then led to the truth eventually coming out, therefore everyone should be grateful to Rall for smearing the guy as a bloodthirsty Arab-killer-wannabe.
There are classier ways to express regret, IMO.
Hob
@Anne Laurie: “Rall can’t draw but he is a pretty good cartoonist”
It’s true there are good cartoonists who can’t draw (though most of them, if they keep at it long enough, become good at drawing— they’re just good at drawing in a simple way). I wonder if you could say more about why you think Rall is a good cartoonist, though.
To me, he’s incredibly bad at communicating ideas visually; I often have to read his panels three or four times before I have a clue what he’s trying to depict, and not because it was a subtle idea. If one is aware of having limited drawing skills, it’s best to keep things 1. simple and 2. expressive; he does the exact opposite, cluttering his drawings with pointless and distracting crosshatching, while making his figures and faces as stiff and uniform as possible. It would be totally possible to use the same set of graphic elements while paying enough attention to the overall visual effect that it actually reads well, but he doesn’t do that. He’s got a tin eye.
A good cartoonist also has the ability to appreciate and value other approaches to art, and Rall fails even worse in that regard. His bizarre screeds against other cartoonists are like a master class in how not to do criticism; he’s unable to explain why he does or doesn’t like an artist’s work except by reference to what he thinks they personally represent, and whether he approves of their fans. I find that kind of thing irritating as shit, but it’s also just a shame because it makes it really clear that he’s not going to get any better at his own craft— because he’s convinced himself he shouldn’t.
Hob
None of the above has much bearing on the LA Times thing, though; if Rall was fired on false pretenses, that would suck no matter what I think of him as an artist. It does seem hinky to me that this tape would’ve still been around, although it also makes no sense to me that the LAPD would’ve released audio that actually supported his claim about the handcuffing— no idea what to make of that, since I can’t hear shit on Rall’s “enhanced” version (and would have no way to know if it was accurate if I could).
nfh
Holee shit, Cole is finally covering Rall, and my life is complete. I can now ascend in peace….hahaha. /snark
Another Holocene Human
@ruemara: Somebody tell these cops “CRASH” was not a training program!
Another Holocene Human
@lamh36: Depressing but true.
Another Holocene Human
@Hob:
There was no drawing in “My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable/Get Your War On”, just cut and paste, but I never had any trouble following the strips.
There’s no excuse for making strips incomprehensible. It’s just laziness.
He always has a legion of rabid fans to defend him because of who he punched this week. The fans he cultivates and his obsession with others’ fans tells you everything you need to know about his approach to the craft.
Another Holocene Human
Nobody mentioned Rall doubled down on Daily Kos and tried to rally an army of screaming meemees when he was called out for drawing a caricature of Obama that was really over the line, resulting in him getting kicked off of there more or less. You realize how hard it is to get ejected from GOS. Seriously, fuck that guy.
forked tongue
He is a shitstain who makes cartoons that look like shitstains.
dannyhellman
@dirk:
Can you link to Rall’s apology over the Pat Tillman cartoon? I don’t think such an apology exists.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Hob:
Randall Munroe has made a successful career as a cartoonist drawing stick figures, because the ideas he comes up with are witty, clever, and thought-provoking. Random example that made me giggle:
https://xkcd.com/1214/
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne (tablet): I like Ted’s editorializing (generally). cartoon drawing is not his best feature, but I think he’s on our side almost all the time.
Tripod
TribCo & Ted Rall. That’s like Cole trying to blog while working for some sketchy for-profit college. In that sort of culture divide something always comes up (it’s not that we disagree with your editorial stance…) , and is addressed in the most passive aggressive manner.
tl;dr version – Lumbergh and the Bobs let it work itself out.
Paul in KY
@Gian: Am fine with both of them.