Relentless Criticism p.

By: M.L. Stein

Sixteen months after the Los Angeles riots,
coverage by the local media continues to be blasted
SIXTEEN MONTHS AFTER the Los Angeles riots, local media continue to be blasted for their coverage of the event and its aftermath.
Most of the criticism is directed at television but newspapers are taking a great deal of heat from the public, community leaders, activists and minority journalists.
Figuratively, the fires were again fanned at the Los Angeles convention of the Asian American Journalists Association.
At a panel on the subject titled "Can We All Get Along?" Los Angeles Police Commissioner Jesse Brewer, a former top cop, cautioned the media against relying on inflammatory spokespeople in the minority communities in covering civil disturbances.
"We are not monolithic," said Brewer, who is black. "You are often getting statements from some very provocative, very volatile people who spit
venom every time they open their mouths."
Brewer said he would like to see "equal time" given to more representative leaders in the minority communities.
Ed Chang, a Korean-born professor at the University of California, Riverside, objected to what he alleged was the media's habit of depicting "gun-toting" Koreans in writing about the tensions between blacks and Koreans.
Chang noted that gun sales tripled after the riots "but all your focus has been on Koreans arming themselves, not on the fact that many other people are buying guns."
The panelist also faulted the media for making Koreans look "stupid" in interviews because many of them cannot express themselves well in English. He urged newspapers and broadcast stations to send interpreters along with their reporters.
Ramona Ripston, director of the Southern California office of the American Civil Liberties Union, was a bit kinder to the media, saying they cannot be blamed for other factors causing racial animosity such as the city's high jobless rate.
"When people are competing for scarce resources, there are problems," she said. Ripston praised the Los Angeles Times for its comprehensive, post-riot analysis of the last year's outbreak, calling the series "magnificent."
This was one of the few rewarding moments in the evening for Times editor Shelby Coffey III who, with Jeff Wald, executive editor of news programming for KCOP-TV, represented the media on the panel.
Even Ripston fired a few rounds at the press. She criticized reporters for having a "mind-set" when covering ethnic communities. "They know what they want to say before they go out there and if they don't hear what they want to, it won't be reported," she charged.
Ripston also chided the Times for failing to tell readers that the "Rebuild L.A." project was a "sham."
"It wasn't going to work and it has not worked but the Los Angeles Times fed into it," she said of the project, which has produced few results.
Smiling, Coffey retorted that Ripston was "listening too much" to right- wing commentator Rush Limbaugh. He said the Times' "Voices" column has provided an outlet for a wide variety of viewpoints from people who usually do not appear on the op-ed page and who have skewered "Rebuild L.A."
Coffey also defended the paper's coverage of the project, calling it fair and balanced.
Another panelist, Jorge Mancillas, director of the Latino Merchants Association, said the media should have sounded the alarm that "Rebuild L.A.," a privately financed venture, was doomed to failure without financial support from local, state and federal governments.
"We don't always follow a story as we should," Wald conceded.
Carol Anderson of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation scored the Times for not distributing its City Times section beyond the inner city. The weekly section was launched following the riots in the wake of complaints that achievements and ordinary news from the minority communities were not being played in the paper.
In not including City Times in the Times' full run, "you are only preaching to the converted," Anderson said.
A number of Times stories dealing with minorities, including some in City Times, appear in the full-run paper, Coffey responded. He explained that the Times is distributed in a vast area in Southern California and that much of the news coverage is zoned for communities ranging from Orange County on the south to Ventura County north of Los Angeles.
"We try to tell each region about itself," Coffey continued. The editor disputed what he said was the notion that if newspapers "stir themselves, they can solve everything."
"We can point to solutions," Coffey added. "We cannot be held responsible for curing all of the city's ills."
Brewer did not hold the media responsible for Los Angeles' high crime rate.
"Crime is out of control in this city," he stated.
However, at another panel, "After the L.A. Riots," a Korean community leader urged the media to assume a leadership role in helping rid the nation of racism. Dozens of Korean-owned businesses were set afire during the riots.
"The media is the only thing that the different races have in common, but the media continue to racialize things," said Bong Hwan Kim, executive director of the Korean Youth and Community Center.
That is because staffs are mostly white and dominated by a corporate viewpoint, leading to a "myopic focus on a black-Korean conflict," Kim charged. He called for increased hiring of minorities to achieve more balance in reporting.
Monica Lozano, associate publisher of La Opinion, the Spanish-language daily in Los Angeles, said the paper takes an activist role on behalf of its readers because "most of them feel completely abandoned by government officials."
In a speech opening the convention, which drew about 500 people, AAJA president Evelyn Hsu of the Washington Post said Asians employed in the mainstream media are "victims of a Catch-22."
"Whenever we fail or fall short, we are dismissed by those who would just as soon not deal with the challenges of diversity," she said. "When we succeed, however, some shrug that Asian-Americans are overachievers who need none of the mentoring or support that are supposed to be given to all minority journalists."
She said AAJA's task is to open up more entry-level jobs for its young members and seek to have more mid-career members "break through the glass ceiling" into senior management.
"We must fight for jobs and promotions," Hsu continued. "We must be assertive. We must disprove the crippling stereotype of passivity that is so often used against us.
"We cannot let American journalism forget us, ignore us or take us for granted. And we cannot allow some media executives to pit us against other minorities."