The Los Angeles Times Distorts the News

The Times reported in June 2000 on the execution of a man who had admitted and was convicted and sentenced to death for “gunning down four people, including a pregnant teenager, in the cooler of a Taco Bell restaurant in Irving [Texas] during a botched robbery attempt.” A normal person might have expected that the title for this article would read something akin to “Multiple Murderer Executed in Texas,” but the normal person would be mistaken. In the midst of the charged atmosphere of the Presidential election campaign, the Times had a better idea and chose instead the incendiary headline, “Texas Executes Latino After Bush Refuses to Grant Stay.”

In 2001 a Times article dealing with the case of an admitted child killer bore the subtitle, “New Mexico, a law and order state with a great respect for life, wrestles with the issue of capital punishment.” The message of these words was clearly that an unwillingness to impose the death penalty reflected a respect for life although one might just as well have said that its implementation evidenced a regard for the lives of crime victims. As an aside, the reader may indulge in a flight of fancy by asking himself when the Times ever remarked of abortion opponents that they had “a great respect for life.”

A report on the fight over President Bush’s nomination of lawyer Eugene Scalia, son of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to a top post at the Labor Department – and this was supposedly a straight news piece, mind you – was titled “A Questionable Labor Advocate.” Only those, including the Times apparently, who opposed Scalia might have agreed with such an assessment. Another story about Scalia cited his past writings on labor policy that have infuriated leftists. The Times asserted that in his US Senate confirmation hearings Scalia “seemed to back away from such extreme views.” The writer obviously decided that it was his job to evaluate the nominee’s record.

The extensive Times reporting on President Bush’s energy proposals issued in May 2001 was filled with commentary from numerous sources overwhelmingly critical of the Administration. Try to guess the attitude of the LA Times based on the following headlines spread over five pages in one day’s edition of the paper: “Bush Off by a Few Decades, Experts Say,” “Analysis: Bush Plan Is Stuck in the ‘70s,” “Critics Say Bush Proposal Leaves California in the Dark,” “Bush Calls for Bold Action but Produces a Modest Plan,” and “Consumers Take Back Seat in Bush Proposal.”

The Times article on the US Justice Department’s legal brief backing the individual’s right to bear arms reduced the position of Attorney General John Ashcroft and the DOJ to “their strongest support yet for the gun lobby.” The writer framed his story as a “battle between the gun lobby and gun control advocates.” “Scholars and gun control advocates” were “alarmed”; “experts” issued warnings. Only Ashcroft’s DOJ and the National Rifle Association stood together against them. The Times left the reader at the end of the article with the final verdict, “‘This action is proof positive that the worst fears about Atty. Gen. Ashcroft have come true. His extreme ideology on guns has now become government policy,’ [gun rights opponent] Barnes said.”

In a summary of 2001 developments in education, the Times reported on a major school voucher case by claiming that the US Supreme Court “took on a challenge to a Cleveland program that uses tax money to send poor students to religious schools.” A more accurate description of the program would have been that it allows parents to take a portion of their child’s share of public school funding and apply it to tuition at a private or parochial institution of their choice. Perhaps such a characterization might have risked sounding too appealing, particularly to those readers who value “choice” in another context.

A Times story about liberal Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter said that they represented the tradition of the “Party of Lincoln,” thereby supposedly explaining their frequent dissents from the conservative Republican majority on the US Supreme Court. The article contained the statement, “Last year, the 5-4 majority knocked down the Violence Against Women Act, which gave victims of sexual assaults a right to sue their attackers.” However, as Harvard Law Professor and former US Solicitor General Charles Fried wrote in the Wall Street Journal, for sexual assaults “there is ample redress in the courts of every state.” The legislation in question had created a special right to sue in federal court, and the majority said that the effect of upholding the law would have been to allow Congress to “use the Commerce Clause to completely obliterate the Constitution’s distinction between national and local authority.” The advantage of the Times’ brief formulation is that it was more likely to scare women into thinking that the Rehnquist Court was out to revoke their civil liberties.

In March 2002 the US Supreme Court denied back pay to an illegal alien even though the National Labor Relations Board had determined that he had been unjustly fired for union organizing. The majority concluded that to decide for the employee would have had the effect of undermining the enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws. Aside from those involved in the litigation, the Times’ story on the case quoted six people who criticized the decision and not a single person who supported it.

Coverage of Tom DeLay’s early efforts to win election as House Republican Leader to succeed the retiring Dick Armey focused on the alleged risk that his reputation posed for the GOP. The paper called DeLay “The Hammer,” said that he was “controversial,” and referred to his “hard-edged conservatism” and his “hard-nosed tactics.” In contrast, on the same page as a major DeLay article, the Times provided a flattering profile of Mary Francis Berry, the chairwoman of the US Civil Rights Commission, titled “Civil Rights Chief Shows Equality in Bedeviling Critics.” The Times writer described Berry as “outspoken, passionate, tenacious,” and she could not even bring herself to call Berry “a liberal,” forget “a doctrinaire leftist,” and settled instead for “a proud black woman talking truth to power.”

The Times has characterized certain liberal politicians and the cities of San Francisco and Santa Monica as “progressive.” Strict rent control, prohibiting banks from charging for use of their ATM machines, attempting to coerce businesses into paying nearly twice the minimum wage, barring local police from assisting the INS to apprehend illegal aliens, and hard left politics, all of these at one point or another have enjoyed in the Times the positive label “progressive.” Of course, standing in the way of who and what is “progressive” must mean that one is against progress. It is a magical, “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” kind of word.

The Los Angeles Times has also been critical of George W. Bush’s conduct of foreign affairs and on its editorial page has charged the Administration with “A Mighty Arrogance,” a point of view it is certainly free to adopt and offer up for discussion. However, just as with its treatment of domestic issues, the Times’ opinion on this and other international matters sometimes contaminates its news reporting.

President Bush’s efforts to advance American interests as he perceives them instead of simply catering to the wishes of European elites have caused consternation at the Times. The subtitle of a front-page article on the US’s loss last year of seats on two United Nations commissions, including the Human Rights Commission, attributed the ouster to “frustrations with American hubris,” treating “American hubris” as fact, not opinion. The story went on to allege, “Hubris was exacerbated by tactics.” Remarkably, in 2002 after the US regained the Human Rights Commission seat, another Times writer sang a different tune, this time claiming, “The defeat [in 2001] had more to do with disorganization in the way candidates were chosen than with the world’s disenchantment with an increasingly isolated US government.”

The Times provided an unbalanced report on Secretary of State Colin Powell’s refusal to attend last fall’s United Nations conference on racism. The paper’s staff writer lamented, “The long-awaited decision is certain to evoke widespread disappointment and anger, both at home and abroad….” Furthermore, “A decision not to send a high-powered delegation to South Africa could hurt US standing and potentially backfire, analysts warn.” She showcased several critics, led off by Congressional Black Caucus member Barbara Lee of Oakland CA, and closing with an official of Amnesty International, who cried, “To pass up the opportunity [to participate in the conference] would be tragic.” The Times writer quoted not a single person outside the Administration who supported the US decision.

When anti-globalists and anti-capitalists demonstrated in Goteborg, Sweden, against President Bush during the June 2001 European Union summit, the Times put on its front page in bold letters under a photo, “Sweden’s Scorn on Parade,” and repeated much the same language on later pages. The paper implied that the marchers, waving their red flags, represented the eight million people of Sweden even though the article acknowledged that the “more than 10,000 demonstrators [came] from across Europe.” Did the protestors who went on a rampage in Seattle represent the United States? Did the rioters in Genoa represent Italy?

A Times article in April from its staff writer in Germany dealt with a pending and controversial immigration law that attempts to accommodate a growing influx of foreign workers. The writer called the bill’s opponents “archconservative,” even as she noted that the legislation actually passed the Bundesrat, the upper house of Parliament, by only one vote. She also spent numerous paragraphs detailing the arguments of supporters of the pro-immigration proposal and quoting them at length, including their criticism of the bill’s foes. On the other hand, she only briefly referred to the views of the opponents and quoted none of them.

The Times is notorious for its respectful treatment of Fidel Castro. The paper’s news writers try to avoid calling Castro a “dictator.” Instead they almost invariably refer to him as “President Castro,” “the Cuban President,” or “the Cuban leader.” Incredibly, in the same articles in the past year in which the LA Times referred to former Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista as a “dictator,” the paper described his successor Fidel Castro as a “leader.”

The Times also names the following as “leaders”: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libyan Col. Moammar Kadafi, Syria’s Bashar Assad, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. Meanwhile the paper reserves the label “dictator” for Cuba’s Batista, Park Chung Hee of South Korea, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. This past May when the daughter of the one-time military ruler Park of South Korea met with the current Communist boss Kim of North Korea, the Times ran this amazing headline: “Ex-Dictator’s Daughter Visits North’s Leader.”

In recent months many readers have complained of a pro-Palestinian bias in the Times’ coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The outrage has been so great that the paper felt compelled to print a story that acknowledged “almost 1,000” subscription suspensions. This did not stop the Times the following week from running a “First Person” article by one of its photographers who had been holed up inside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem during the recent standoff with Israeli troops. She portrayed the armed invaders as martyrs — with not a mention of terrorists or hostages — and said, “The Palestinians in the church are a family of sorts. Some are already planning a reunion – same time, next year.”

Naturally there is more to the LA Times than its presentation of hard news, and it might be rewarding to get a broader picture of what Angelenos have the opportunity to read each morning. The Times’ editorial stance is generally liberal although the paper does have its differences with the local teachers union. Its political writers are also mostly liberals, including and most emphatically the voice of the Times op-ed page, 1960s New Leftist Robert Scheer, a fierce critic of the Bush Administration. The only regular right-of-center contributors are James Pinkerton from Washington and Norah Vincent from New York.

Political cartoonist Paul Conrad has been with the paper for so many years that his name is virtually synonymous with the LA Times. Shortly after the new President took office, Conrad came up with a supposed letter to “My Fellow Citizens” from George W. Bush that contained a long list of apologies: “for the arsenic in your drinking water,” “for the carbon dioxide in your air,” and “for the nation’s toxic waste and foul water.” Another cartoon showed a line-up of several white men in suits, “Some of Bush’s Cabinet Choices,” all of them wearing dunce caps, except for one who was draped in KKK sheets and a hood (Ashcroft). In yet another offering Conrad depicted a handcuffed white, middle-aged convicted “hate crime” killer who had shot to death a Filipino mail carrier and wounded five people, including four children, at a Jewish community center in the San Fernando Valley; the cartoonist identified the murderer as “a faith-based compassionate conservative.”

One of the Times’ theater critics reviewed a play written by radical historian Howard Zinn that “mounts a clarion defense of the principles of Marxism while taking a timely jab at the consumerist culture run amok.” She then resolved matters with the statement, “As Marx himself makes clear, his vision of a world order had little to do with the institutional brutality of the former Soviet Union, and everything to do with advancing the cause of humanity against the rapacious corporate interests that would devour it.” This was no doubt good news for the hundred million corpses left behind after past Marxist experiments.

A Times report on the life and death of lawyer Robert Treuhaft, widower of author Jessica Mitford, both of them proud Communists, saluted Treuhaft as a “crusading civil rights activist and attorney.” The obituarist remarked about her subject that he was “so liberal he belonged to and served as attorney for the Communist Party of the USA for many years….” One could only gasp at her equating of extreme liberalism with communism. The writer further told that “his intellectual but humorous parrying with members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in their red-baiting hearings of the 1950s became legendary.” And she added, Treuhaft and Mitford were “known for their outrageous wit, keen intelligence and intense social consciousness [and] they often attributed their long and happy marriage to a shared sense of fun….”

The Times’ Festival of Books held at UCLA in April 2002 featured several celebrities renowned for their strong political views, including Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, Tom Hayden, Victor Navasky, and Oliver Stone. This was a group barely distinguishable from the editorial board of The Nation magazine, and yet the Times ballyhooed the Festival for its “diversity of ideas.”

It is unfortunate that a dynamic albeit troubled place such as Los Angeles has only one major newspaper. How wonderful it would be if each morning an Angeleno could find on his or her doorstep a paper that offered a consistently straightforward presentation of the news as well as vigorous debate from a variety of viewpoints. Is this too much to ask? Former Mayor Richard Riordan announced recently his intention to establish a second newspaper in the city. One can only hope that a better day is coming.

Edgar B. Anderson is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School. He works as a journalist and lives in California.