Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where her work has spanned national politics and stories from the Los Angeles riots and earthquakes and the Space Shuttle to the Super Bowl – which she covered from inside a women’s bathroom – and the death of the Princess of Wales. As a member of two Los Angeles Times’ reporting teams, she has a share of two Pulitzer Prizes.
For her work hosting programs on public television and radio, she has received six Emmy awards and a dozen Golden Mikes. Patt is also a regular commentator on the Emmy-winning “L.A. Times Today” show on Spectrum 1.
Patt was featured on the cover of “Talkers” Magazine as one of its “Heavy 100” top radio hosts in the nation – a first for any local radio host. She created and hosted “Comedy Congress,” a political satire on her radio show, which twice earned Golden Mike awards as best public affairs show.
Her nonfiction books, “Rio L.A., Tales from the Los Angeles River” and “Don’t Stop the Presses! Truth, Justice, and the American Newspaper,” were both bestsellers.
A few among her myriad interview subjects: Salman Rushdie, Jimmy Carter, both James Watson and Francis Crick, Al Gore, Frank Gehry, four past and present Supreme Court justices (Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sandra Day O’Connor), Norman Mailer, Carl Sagan, Gore Vidal, Kenneth Branagh, Jodie Foster, Jack Lemmon, Steve Martin, Edward Albee, Timothy Leary, Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking, Eldridge Cleaver, Ray Bradbury, Leonard Cohen, Oprah Winfrey and five of the seven original Mercury astronauts.
She was an early regular panelist on the radio comedy show “Wait, Wait – Don’t Tell Me!” She has been a crossword puzzle clue, the central figure in a diptych called “The Triumph of Civility,” by Los Angeles painter John Martin. Pink’s, the renowned Hollywood hot dog stand, named its vegetarian dog, the “Patt Morrison Baja Dog,” after her.
Latest From This Author
Upton Sinclair, the author of ‘The Jungle,’ ran up against L.A.’s anti-labor authorities 100 years ago this month -- in a cinematic series of arrests in San Pedro that led to the founding of the ACLU of Southern California.
Charles is an open book compared to his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. And not only is the country he serves as monarch demographically and economically different, its enthusiasm for the crown has waned.
“God save the king!” rings out in Westminster Abbey as Britain’s Charles III is crowned amid pomp and pageantry.
Where will Prince Harry sit and with whom? Will he dominate the conversation at the coronation of King Charles III, and will the royals reconcile?
You think royal intrigue over Harry, Meaghan and King Charles III’s coronation is bad? This monarch hired bouncers to block his queen from his ceremony.
Watching the coronation of King Charles III? Here’s what you should know about the crowns, scepters, orbs and more.
On his nightstand the day I asked to see it: “The White Nile” by Alan Moorehead, a book about educational policies, another on great speeches of history, and an amusing bonne bouche by G.K. Chesterton. He was that kind of reader.
The freeways, the smog, the people, the culture, the intellect — nothing and no one is spared when it comes to people from New York and elsewhere insulting Los Angeles.
An L.A. Times exposé — and in one instance, Gloria Allred quite literally exposing sex discrimination — led the Jonathan Club, the California Club, the Friars Club and others to become less exclusive, if not less expensive.
The Cubs held spring training on Catalina Island. A team called the Tigers played in Vernon, then Venice, then Vernon again. And L.A.’s Wrigley Field held night games decades before Chicago’s did.