Disney Ban Elevated Tension at Los Angeles Times Newsroom

A dispute between The Los Angeles Times and the Walt Disney Company has ignited a battle between the paper’s employees and its new top management. On the morning of Nov. 3, the newspaper published a note to readers revealing that Disney had barred its journalists from attending advance film screenings in response to a Times investigation into the entertainment company’s business ties with Anaheim (CA). Outrage over Disney’s move was soon rocketing around social media. During a daily meeting attended by roughly a dozen editors, a staff member proposed publicizing the two-part investigative series that had precipitated the ban. But Lewis D’Vorkin, the recently installed editor in chief of The Times, flatly rejected the idea, apparently. Later, some journalists received messages by email and Slack warning them against retweeting any praise of Times stories. Many people in the newsroom interpreted D’Vorkin’s instructions as an attempt to keep attention away from a series displeasing to a powerful company that is one of the newspaper’s advertisers.