Bob Brill, West Coast bureau chief for UPI radio, was crouched down at a public telephone, filing a report for NBC radio at the flash point of the Los Angeles riots. About fifty yards away, rioters were attacking truck driver Reginald Denny. Within moments Brill himself was accosted by an angry-looking man who asked him, "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I raised my arms and said, 'I'm a news reporter, I'm just filing a story,"' Brill recalls. Before he knew it, a full bottle of beer exploded on the side of his face, knocking him to the ground, where people kicked and beat him.

"They kept yelling, 'Get the hell out of here! Get the hell out of here,"' Brill says. "The really frightening thing was wondering if more people were going to come in and join the fun."

Instead, the mob stopped and Brill began stumbling the fifteen feet or so to his car, only to be stopped by another man, who demanded his wallet. Brill gave him his cash but not the billfold, and finally made it inside his car. Just as he got it started, the man threw a large rock through his back window.

Brill suffered a cracked skull, a perforated eardrum, and a broken thumb. A veteran reporter of twenty years, he says he was "totally shocked" at the assaults against him.

Two days after this incident, Jim Herron Zamora of the Los Angeles Times was covering a small round of looting in the relatively calm San Fernando Valley, when a man demanded his notebook. Zamora refused and the man grabbed his tie and punched him in the face, breaking his glasses. Several others joined in, grabbing him, punching him, even hitting him across the jaw with a board.

"Right after than," Zamora recalls, "I heard someone say, 'Step back, man, step back so I can get a clear shot."' When he looked up, Zamora saw a glint of metal about ten feet away and knew that someone was aiming a gun at him. He heard the shot, but the gunman missed. "It was terrifying," Zamora says.

But even more frightening, he says, is the way the attack has changed him. When Zamora made it to safety, he noticed blood covering his pen -- and it wasn't his. It was from someone he'd stabbed during the beating. "It hit me later that night that by attacking me, they make me part of the violence. I was shocked to hear myself say to the police officer that I would have loved to shoot the guys," he says. "I really resented that. For a couple minutes there, I turned into a killing machine just like them."

New York Times stringer Richard Perez-Pena was interviewing residents who were sweeping broken glass in front of some burned-out storefronts during the second day of unrest when an angry African-American man in his fifties began yelling, "He's the rapist! He's the White Establishment raping you right now!" The man then slugged Perez-Pena in the back of the head, and another man chased him back to his car.

Mary Ellen Geist, of Los Angeles's all-news radio station KFWB, kept on reporting from the heart of the riot, even though her clearly marked news van was the frequent target of flying bottles and rocks. She was inside the van, poised to deliver a live report, when a carload of rioters armed with guns pulled up alongside her. "One of the men turned to me and said, 'Do you get hazard pay?' and I said, 'No,' and he said, 'Well, you should because your life could be in danger. In fact, I'm putting it in danger right now.' They raised their guns. I blew out of the area."

The nation's worst civil strife this century found an unprecedented number of journalists of all races threatened, shot at, and assaulted. For most reporters covering the riots, this was the first time that a press badge offered none of the immunity from harm that they had to come to expect.

In fact, just hours after the riots started some news organizations began papering over the logos painted on the sides of news vehicles, and reporters began hiding their i.d.'s under blouses and shirts. "I prepared for a tough, hot day," Geist says. "I prepared for driving through fires. I knew it would be a little scary, but I did not prepare for personal attacks against me."

Some of the reporters who were chased or beaten express sympathy for their attackers; others don't. Haywood Galbreath, a free-lance photographer, is one of several African-American journalists who were targeted by rioters. Galbreath was shooting photos for The Associated Press when a group of African-American men came after him with axes and pipes, threatening his life and stealing all his camera equipment and his truck.

Galbreath says that, while he felt "frustrated" at being attacked by other African-Americans, he nevertheless understood their anger at the media, which he says presents and emphasizes "the white point of view."

KFWB reporter Geist is among those journalists who believe the media have been long remiss in offering a voice to the urban underclass. "These fires were illuminating faces that we'd never shown before," she says. Dick Morgan, another reporter for KFWB radio, was shot at several times while covering the riots in his marked news car. He saw his assailants and other rioters as nothing more than looters taking advantage of an out-of-control situation. "I wasn't part of the things that make them angry," Morgan says. "I'm an observer."

"There's a lot of people running in the street who are high on the power of knowing that no one is in charge," Zamora says, "so as a media person, they sort of see you as representative of who's in charge."

Free-lance reporter Jeff Kramer was shot several times in the leg and once in the shoulder. In a first-person article published in The Boston Globe, Kramer wrote that, oddly enough, during the worst of the attack he kept thinking about how wrong the Rodney King jury had been. "Maybe I was in shock," he wrote, "but I almost didn't blame these people. I certainly wasn't angry at them."

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