In April 2011 a Big Journalism contributor named Alexander Marlow published a sharp rebuttal of an LA Times column by Steve Lopez that had focused on teacher layoffs at Alexander Hamilton High School in Beverlywood, an LAUSD high school with two magnet programs. Lopez’s column read the school’s music and humanities magnets as fragile city institutions worth defending. Marlow, a Hamilton alum, read the column as a fan letter.
Then
Lopez’s March 16, 2011 column zeroed in on the threatened layoffs at Hamilton, framing the school’s magnet programs as exemplary city educational assets that LAUSD budget cuts were on the verge of dismantling. The framing fit Lopez’s beat — the LA Times metro columnist had built his reputation on protective-attention-to-LA-institutions reporting.
Marlow’s Big Journalism response on April 1, 2011 was first-person and skeptical. He had attended Hamilton, and his anonymous music-magnet sources told him the on-the-ground reality didn’t match Lopez’s framing — students using cocaine in the auditorium, teacher quality more uneven than Lopez’s column implied, one of Lopez’s named “spectacular teachers” remembered very differently by some students. Marlow’s broader argument was that Lopez had told a one-sided story tailored to support a public-policy point, and that the column’s structural premise — that the magnets at Hamilton were a uniquely-LA cultural treasure facing budget-cut destruction — wasn’t quite the same as the school’s actual day-to-day reality.
The dispute was small in absolute terms — a city columnist with a long tenure, a partisan blog contributor with a personal connection to the subject — but it captured a 2011-era pattern where right-leaning blog ecosystems were beginning to systematically rebut LA Times beat reporting on schools, teachers, and public spending.
Now
Steve Lopez continued at the LA Times for the rest of the 2010s and into the 2020s. His column became one of the paper’s longest-tenured marquee voices through the Soon-Shiong ownership transition and the 2023-2024 newsroom cuts. He has remained the city’s most-named metro columnist by the broader public.
Alexander Marlow took a substantially different trajectory. He became editor-in-chief of Breitbart News in 2016 and has run that publication through multiple political cycles, including a continuing presence in national right-leaning media. The 2011 Hamilton High rebuttal was, in retrospect, early-career work that prefigured the broader media-rebuttal model he later operationalized at a much larger scale.
Hamilton High itself remains an LAUSD magnet school with the same music and humanities magnet structures the 2011 column was discussing. The broader question the dispute raised — whether LA Times-style metro columnists can fairly represent specific public institutions to readers who don’t share their priors — has not gone away. It just has many more participants now.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: April 2011 snapshot