The Missing Beat

Shortly after the riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, the news media began to provide in-depth coverage of federal urban policy and the newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Twenty-six years later, with parts of Los Angeles in ruins again, the media bear as much responsibility as the government for allowing cities to fall to the bottom of the national agenda.

Federal urban policy was a hot topic in the '60s. During that decade it was not unusual for forty to sixty stories on HUD and urban issues to appear in a single year, according to the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. In the '70s, magazine coverage dwindled, dropping off sharply in the '80s. For the period from 1983 to April 1992, the Guide lists just thirty-three stories on urban policy. Newspapers and the broadcast media also ignored HUD during the Reagan era, (see "HUD, the Dud that Exploded," CJR, September/October 1989). When HUD was covered at all, it was relegated to the real estate section.

When HUD finally made it back into the headlines in the late '80s, it wasn't because of the problems of the cities -- it was because of a scandal, served up by HUD's inspector general, about influence-peddling in HUD's rental assistance program.

The networks and national newspapers generated hundreds of stories about HUD from January 1990 to July 1991. Most took government information at face value, focusing on federally designated scapegoats, including former HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce and his assistant Deborah Gore Dean. They made little effort to examine the effectiveness of urban programs or to report on how HUD had come to be a policicized and ineffective agency.

The media's unenterprising, unquestioning coverage allowed HUD's new secretary, Jack Kemp, to wipe out programs that had provided a good deal of housing for the urban poor, despite the misuse of those programs under President Reagan. The HUD Reform Act, which imposed numerous restrictions on HUD operations, was passed by Congress in record time. From Kemp down to the field offices, HUD bureaucrats would rather kill a project than let a housing developer make a profit that the press might find excessive. Bureaucratic overkill brought many programs to a near-standstill.

Despite a flood of self-criticism about neglecting HUD, the press failed to commit any resources to ongoing coverage -- there was, for example, almost no follow-up to the HUD scandal itself -- or to analyzing urban programs. The Los Angeles riots have brought the media pack back to the urban affairs beat, resulting in some excellent coverage of urban issues, particularly by the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. But if the press does not make a genuine commitment to covering federal urban policy, the same pattern will recur: the government will pass a quick fix for urban ills, and the press will forget all about urban affairs until the government offers up another ready-made scandal. Or until another city burns.

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