Patt Morrison

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.