Bad City
book title
Bad City
Paul Pringle
Published Date : 2022-06-07
Amazon
Description
In 2016, a salacious tip came into The LA Times’ newsroom that journalist Paul Pringle thought would, at most, take a few weeks to check out: a minor drug incident at a fancy hotel involving one of the University of Southern California’s shiniest stars–Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the venerated head of the prestigious medical school. Pringle, who’d long done battle with USC and its almost impenetrable culture of silence, knew reporting the story wouldn’t be a walk in the park. USC is the largest private employer in LA and it casts a long shadow. But what he couldn’t have foreseen then was that this tip would lead to the unveiling of not one major scandal at USC but two, wrapped in a web of crimes and cover-ups. The rot rooted out by Pringle and his colleagues at The Times crept closer to home than they could have imagined: all the way to the top of the paper’s masthead. After the editors killed the initial story, Paul and his colleagues defied their bosses and quietly assembled a reporting team, risking their careers to continue their work and expose the underbelly of both USC and The Times. Ultimately a story of investigative journalism winning the day, Pringle’s tale of how he and his fellow reporters triumphed over the city’s debased institutions reads like John Carreyrou with the grit of an LA noir thriller. This is LA at its darkest and investigative journalism at its brightest.
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