"That Special Perspective They Say They Want"

Many blacks who covered the Los Angeles riots found the experience frustrating on many levels: at being sent out on the story only because they're black; at being called on to do the "street reporting" but not to write the analytical stories that followed the breaking news; and at the dearth of black editors in positions to shape the coverage, which many felt led to a focus on the rioting and concern that it be stopped rather than on the verdict and other factors that caused the outbreak.

Los Angeles Times reporter Andrea Ford says minority group members at her paper have long cited such problems, but with the riot, "it was much more stark. All of these problems jumped right out."

One of only four blacks permanently assigned to the dowtown newsroom of the Times's 112-member metro staff, Ford says that even though black reporters were given bylines during the riot, they didn't get to write the stories. "You would bring in your stuff and white people would write the stories," she says. "It makes a difference who writes the story."

New York Times reporter Michel Marriott, although pleased with what he was able to accomplish in Los Angeles, says he heard black colleagues there express a lot of frustration. "There seems to be this prevailing sense that black reporters, regardless of their seniority, weren't really given the opportunity to shape stories," he says. "Once we have distinguished ourselves on the hazardous coverage, it doesn't translate into opportunities to do similar types of journalism -- without the hazards."

Atlanta Journal and Constitution reporter Lyle V. Harris, who was sent to Los Angeles, was left with conflicting feelings. He was glad to do street reporting, but dismayed that he wasn't given a chance to analyze what he saw. "It seems that every time I've been assigned to work on these stories [involving race relations]," Harris says, "I've been given a sort of secondary role."

Linda Williams, an assistant business editor at the Los Angeles Times, pointed out at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists the "extraordinary" number of minority bylines in her paper at the start of the riot. "I call it the Los Angeles Times busing program," she told The Oakland Tribune. "They were busing journalists [from bureaus] into the city to use as cannon fodder." In quieter times, says Williams, there is an "institutional bias" at her paper that "only certain people can be trusted with the big story, and it's generally white males." The Times, she says, "has not made the effort to include minorities in the big stories, including the Rodney King story before it exploded into a riot."

A full year before the videotaped King beating, according to Andrea Ford, black reporters at the Los Angeles Times had been "deluged" with tips about police mistreatment of black men, and had suggested a project on the subject. The suggestion went nowhere.

After the beating, Ford was assigned to cover the Christopher Commission, the panel that looked into the Los Angeles Police Department. But when the panel released its findings of racism and brutality and recommended that Chief Daryl Gates resign, Ford says, the editors started adding reporters -- white reporters -- and she was eased out. "I just stopped getting assignments," she says. "I had covered that story by myself for three months. I had done all the grunt work, gone to all the night meetings. But as soon as the story got sexy . . ."

Ford notes that there are no black editors on the Los Angeles Times metro desk, and only one Hispanic and one Asian. "In the meetings and the planning sessions you don't have anybody with that special perspective they say they want," she says.

"The way newspapers use minorities for stories like this is almost the way they cover minorities as a whole -- it's almost crisis management," says Yves Colon, executive director of the Multicultural Management Program at the University of Missouri, a seminar for editors and reporters on working in a culturally diverse newsroom. "We only do a one-hit and then we retreat."

As for why blacks don't get to write the big-picture analytic takeouts, Colon says, "I'm kind of hesitating to call it racism because I don't know. But it is fear of the unknown, lack of trust, lack of faith in young people. Also, I think there's a problem in that the media only want to speak with one voice. What if the voice that's speaking is not a voice we're comfortable with?"

CORRECTION-DATE: September, 1992 / October, 1992

CORRECTION: An editing change in "That Special Perspective They Say They Want" (CJR, July/August) left the impression that of the Los Angeles Times's 118-person metro staff only four were black. At the time of the riots, there were seventy-four reporters on the metro staff, four of whom were black. Since then two black reporters have been added, and a weekly community news section for central Los Angeles is being launched this month.

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