PRIVILEGED SON: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty.

SITTING HOME ON A SUMMER night a few years ago, listening to the Dodgers on the radio, I finally dropped off to sleep around midnight, score tied in the 12th.

I subscribed to two newspapers in those days: the thin and scrappy Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and the rich and invincible Los Angeles Times. So it was surprising the next morning, when the two newspapers hit my driveway within minutes of each other, that the ragtag Herald had gotten the job done ("Dodgers Edge Giants in 14") while the mighty Times could manage only something like, "Dodgers, Giants Knotted in 9th."

I called the Times to complain. The sports desk transferred me to circulation, where a cheerful senior executive was happy to set me straight. "See the photograph on the front page of the sports section?" he asked. "What do you notice about it?" It was a sailboat. A purely decorative shot, taken in the ocean off Marina Del Rey, unconnected to any story. "Yes, but what else do you notice about it?" he asked me. I had no clue. "It's in color," the Times executive said proudly. "We have new color presses, and I'm afraid that means earlier deadlines. So sure, the Herald can afford to wait around for those late sports scores. But they don't give you color photos, do they?"

So there it was. Joseph Pulitzer wanted newspapers to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable;" The New York Times wants "All the News That's Fit to Print;" and at the Los Angeles Times the motto seemed to be: "We'll give you sailboats. Get your own news." (OK, it wasn't big news, but still, it was a Dodgers score in a pennant race.)

But maybe the L.A. Times got the formula right after all; the Herald is dead now while the Times prospers, earning buckets of cash as well as the respect of East Coast journalists who fly in to cover L.A.'s cataclysms and conventions. They find on their roomservice trays a newspaper fat as a Belgian waffle, with more sections than a grapefruit. And such colorful sailboats!

Still, those of us who trudge up the driveway every, morning with our sprinkler-soaked paper are far less sanguine about the Times. We know how easy it is to get yardstick-deep into an L.A. Times news story without finding even trace elements of a lead. We know that the paper is perpetually timid and clueless in its coverage of show business, a reasonably significant cottage industry in these parts. We know that the Times, in its laziness, has historically run obituaries days or even weeks after they appear elsewhere, and, in its arrogance, runs corrections without using the word "correction," preferring the more grudging headline, "For The Record." This is a newspaper that largely ignored the city's minority communities for decades and now feels compelled to pander to them, with a political correctness that neatly blends Orwell with Monty Python. (A friend who worked for the Times during L.A.'s 1992 riots turned in a story that referred to looters stealing TV sets from an electronics store. Her editors insisted that "looters" was too incendiary a term and changed it to "protesters." Similar tales abound.) If the L.A. Times exhibits arrogance, entitlement, insensitivity (about which it is increasingly sensitive), and, at the same time, painfully good intentions marbled with occasional excellence, perhaps it comes by those traits honestly. They seem to flow directly from Otis Chandler, the paper's longtime publisher, scion of the Chandler dynasty, and the subject of Dennis McDougal's compelling biography Privileged Son.

A Southern California surfer who loves race cars and big-game African safaris, Otis Chandler transformed the Times from a Republican house organ (for the young Richard Nixon especially) into the well-regarded, if overrated, colossus that mints profits and Pulitzers. McDougal's research is prodigious. He is a first-rate investigative reporter, and equally skilled as a storyteller. And, fortunately, he doesn't confine himself to Otis Chandler, but starts the tale in 19th-century Los Angeles, taking readers to a darker, more muscular, more dissolute place than the sun-kissed, citrus-label portrait usually painted of early L.A.

Otis Chandler, in fact, turns up missing for whole stretches of this book, reflecting perhaps his own ambivalence about running a newspaper in a world where there were still big waves that needed surfing and big game that needed bagging. Even so, McDougal often gives us more Otis than we need--especially in the seemingly interminable passages chronicling the dumping of the first Mrs. Otis Chandler and the selection of the second. (Although there is some gold here about how one trains a San Marino trophy wife.)

Last year the Chicago Tribune Company bought the L.A. Times, ending the Chandler family's 116-year reign. So in a very tidy way, theirs was the story of the Southern California century--the story of Hollywood, of suburban sprawl, of land and water, of aerospace and immigration, of Nixon and Reagan. It is powerful material, and McDougal is equal to it.

Of course, if you want to understand Southern California's sunny weirdness and nocturnal nuances, the Chandler to read, now and always, is Raymond.

SCOTT KAUFER, the former editor-in-chief of CALIFORNIA magazine, is a L.A.-based TV producer and writer.