'Law & Order: LA' Takes on the City of Bell Scandal

They've been busy reading the Los Angeles newspapers at NBC's revamped Law & Order: LA. The show is relying on two of the year's biggest L.A.-centric news stories to fuel its narrative over the next two weeks. Tonight, Law & Order: LA will tackle local government corruption — motivated by the well-publicized mess in the City of Bell, a suburb of Los Angeles. Then, on April 25, the show airs its episode based loosely on the mysterious murder of Hollywood power publicist Ronni Chasen.

Read all about it here.

By the way, tonight's City of Bell-inspired LOLA episode comes as the L.A. Times awaits word this afternoon on a potential Pulitzer for its coverage of the scandal.

Los Angeles County's Top Earners

In light of the City of Bell scandal, everyone's taking a second look at compensation among our elected officials and government employees. L.A. Weekly's Dennis Romero put together a list of the county's highest-paid employees. Turns out most of them are physicians. Here are the first five:

1. Name redacted, commander (sheriff's), $440,915.61 (including a $190,070.97 base salary and $250,844.64 in "other earnings").
2. Elaine C. Yang, senior physician (Harbor-UCLA Medical Center), $430,909.32.
3. Christine H. Holschneider, chief physician I (Olive View Medical Center), $423,533.89.
4. Gail Anderson, Jr., medical director II (Harbor-UCLA Medical Center) $421,648.65.
5. John S. McDonald, chief physician I (Harbor-UCLA Medical Center) $413,807.18.

City of Bell Scandal Rings for Local TV News

So this is what it takes for local TV to cover politics: A massive city corruption scandal, followed by extensive arrests.

Tuesday's arrest of most of Bell's city officials -- including former city manager Robert Rizzo -- led the local newscasts at 10 p.m., even warranting "team coverage" from reporters on KTLA 5 and KTTV 11.

As seen above, KTLA even ran a scroll at the bottom of the screen of texts from viewers commenting on the Bell scandal. Kind of pointless, yes, but at least they're engaging their viewers in something a bit more hefty than Lindsay Lohan's or Paris Hilton's problems.

OK, those stories were still addressed as well. But at least the Bell story led the newscasts; that's a rare instance of the TV news departments and the L.A. Times actually leading with the same story.

This Bell story has been the gift that keeps on giving for the L.A. Times. And it's wonderfully juicy: Bell currently has just one elected official not behind bars at this moment.

Maybe the producers behind Fox's "Lone Star," which had a terrible start and now faces cancellation, should quickly revamp the show and make their lead character (James Wolk) into a corrupt city manager instead of an oil biz con man.