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They Call It “Journalism”
Whenever I find myself struggling to come up with a topic for a column, whenever the blank screen is a dark and forbidding landscape right out of one of the bleaker scenes in Dr. Zhivago, the Los Angeles Times comes through for me like that first beam of sunshine on a stormy horizon.
That once-respectable newspaper delivered for me twice this week in ways that were sadly predictable. Wednesday evening in Southern California, local television stations interrupted regular programming to cover an unfolding drama in Lincoln Heights, not far from downtown Los Angeles. Three Los Angeles Police Department officers had been shot while trying to arrest a wanted felon, who was now barricaded inside an apartment building.
As the scene was carried live, the news came that the officers would survive their wounds, and in due course a SWAT team found the suspect dead inside the building. All in all a satisfactory outcome for an incident that held the region’s attention through the evening and into the next day.
Given the Los Angeles Times’s history of hostility to law enforcement, especially the LAPD, I was curious to see how they would cover the story. Surely, I thought, the shooting of three police officers in a single incident would warrant a front-page story in the following day’s print edition.
But no. As I wrote over on PJ Media, the story was relegated to the second section, and even there it was not the most prominently featured story on page B-1. From the PJ Media piece:
The stories deemed worthy of front-page coverage were these: the arrest of a suspect in the murder of a teenager, the deaths of 12 people stranded by heavy snowfall in the local mountains, a Justice Department report alleging biased policing in Louisville, the recent proliferation of “earthy” car colors, and a woman’s struggle to avoid eviction after falling behind on her rent.
Surely the arrest of a suspect in a horrific crime deserves front-page coverage, as do the deaths of 12 people owing to record snowfall, but a fluff piece about car colors? And the hard-luck story about the woman facing eviction may make for interesting reading, but is it worthy of five columns above the fold on the front page, including two photographs? On the jump page are four more photographs to accompany the story that runs to more than 2,400 words . . .
But the most galling editorial decision displayed in Thursday’s L.A. Times is the one to feature on the front page the Justice Department’s report on allegations of racial bias in the Louisville Metro Police Department. Whatever the merits of the Louisville story, are the purported deficiencies of a police force 1,800 miles from Los Angeles more important to the Times’s readers than a gun battle in which three LAPD officers were wounded? The editors at the Times think so. One can imagine the decision-making process: “Yes, we must cover the LAPD shooting, but we will place the story on B-1 and reserve the prized space on A-1 to remind our readers that the police in Louisville (and by implication, police officers everywhere) are racists.”
And then on Friday, as if determined to prove the point I had made, the Times found an LAPD story they deemed worthy of front-page, above-the-fold placement, that of a man awarded $375,000 in federal court after being injured by a police officer while “peacefully protesting” the death of George Floyd in 2020.
Thus was provided material for another column at PJ Media, in which I also revisit an earlier and even more disgraceful example of agenda-driven journalism at the L.A. Times, one discussed three weeks ago here on Ricochet.
As always, fellow members of the Ricochet community, I invite you to read the linked columns and weigh in below with your thoughts.
Published in General
This is the kind of story that would have dominated the news. Has the velocity with which the news gets deseminated by non-print media contributed, at least in part, for the kinds of stories that get covered?
That may be a factor generally, but in the case of the L.A. Times, the rule they observe is that anything that reflects poorly on the police gets the most conspicuous coverage, regardless of how much play it got on television.
Do you think the Rodney King case was a tipping point?
Yes, for many things.
There are so many things that I could say about this essay. I’ll simply say that I can tell you of some of the things that I saw and did as a police officer. I cannot give you the full experience of doing the job.
The vast majority of journalists have never encountered or have been the victims of a crime. I have seen those that have been the victims of both intended and unintended mayhem. That includes the DOJ and the Soros type prosecutors. The type of attorneys that show up to a roll call and tell you how you should be doing the job out on the streets. None of them has had to fight with someone at o200 hours, nor do I remember any of them jumping in to help me in a fight.
I’ll leave you with one more story. I had to attend an in-service training seminar on hostile work environments. I told the hired consultant my work environment becomes hostile the moment roll call ends. I heard about it later, but I didn’t receive a suspension.
As Stalin might have put it, the racist culture of a distant city is a tragedy. The shooting of three local cops is a statistic.
And James, if you haven’t seen the L.A. Times story on the racist flight patterns of police helicopters, it’s really a classic of the genre.