By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, February 2011
In late February 2011, OC Weekly reporter R. Scott Moxley published a cover story that took apart, paragraph by paragraph, the LA Times Business section’s February 13 profile of Irvine Company chairman and Orange County’s richest man, Donald Bren. Moxley graphically marked up the original two-page LA Times article with annotations, arrows, and crib notes; his framing was that LA Times reporter Scott Kraft — whom Moxley acknowledged as an excellent journalist — had produced a structurally-too-friendly profile of a major real-estate-development billionaire. The original FishbowlLA framing called it a thorough and entertaining accountability-journalism exercise.
Then
R. Scott Moxley had been OC Weekly’s investigative point-man on Donald Bren and the Irvine Company across years prior to the February 2011 cover story. His earlier reporting had documented Bren’s litigation history, his paternity disputes, and the broader political-and-development footprint of the Irvine Company across Orange County. The accumulated subject-matter expertise was what gave the February 2011 piece its annotative force — Moxley could identify which paragraphs of the LA Times profile were echoing Irvine Company PR framing because he had spent years documenting how that PR framing operated.
One specific annotation flagged Bren’s claim of being “unconcerned with the media” — a framing Moxley directly rebutted by pointing to Bren’s 2003 retaliation against the OC Weekly after Moxley’s earlier paternity-related cover story (“Pardon My Hard On,” June 12, 2003), when Bren had pulled $120,000 worth of advertising from the paper.
Scott Kraft’s LA Times piece had been structured as a business-section profile rather than as an investigative piece — the kind of long-form profile that legacy newspapers routinely produced of major regional business figures. Moxley’s annotation strategy specifically targeted the structural softness of the format itself, not just the individual editorial choices.
The original FishbowlLA framing — by Richard Horgan — was admiring of Moxley’s accountability work. The piece treated the annotated-takedown as a model of how alt-weekly investigative reporting could function as a check on legacy-newspaper soft-profile coverage of major business figures.
Now
R. Scott Moxley has continued at OC Weekly and across the broader Orange County alt-press ecosystem across the years since 2011. OC Weekly itself shut down in November 2019 under Voice Media Group ownership pressure — joining the broader 2010s-2020s alt-weekly contraction. Moxley has continued in investigative work at various subsequent outlets, including the Voice of OC nonprofit news operation.
Donald Bren has continued as Irvine Company chairman and has continued to be one of the wealthiest real-estate billionaires in the country. The Irvine Company’s footprint across Orange County — the master-planned Irvine community, the Newport Coast holdings, the broader retail-and-office portfolio — has continued to expand across the interval. Bren is now in his nineties; the broader succession question at the Irvine Company has become a recurring topic in Orange County business reporting.
Scott Kraft retired from the LA Times in 2018 after a long career that included senior editorial roles at the paper. His 2011 Bren profile was one piece in a substantial portfolio of business-section work across decades.
The LA Times itself went through the 2018 Patrick Soon-Shiong acquisition that reorganized its ownership structure; the paper’s Business section has been substantially reorganized across subsequent years, with editorial-staffing reductions and beat reorganizations producing a substantially different newsroom architecture than the one Kraft was working within.
The 2011 piece reads now as a documented moment of OC Weekly accountability-journalism doing institutional check work on the LA Times’s coverage of Orange County’s largest single business interest. The 2019 OC Weekly shutdown removed that check from the post-2019 LA-region media landscape — the kind of structural diminishment that produced the broader civic-affairs-coverage thinning that other 2011-era pieces (Charlie Beck’s media critique, for example) were also tracking from different angles.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.