Patterico's Pontifications

6/9/2007

Quanisha Pitts vs. Paris Hilton: It’s No Contest

Filed under: Crime,Dog Trainer,General — Patterico @ 6:01 pm



This is a fascinating entry on the L.A. Times‘s Homicide Blog:

“One reporter? One single reporter?”

Solomon Martin, 71, was forthright about what he thought about a reporter for The Homicide Report walking down his Compton street last month after a homicide.

“They send you, by yourself? Where are your lights? Where are your trucks? Your cameras?” he demanded. “You can tell your supervisor that I was displeased! Displeased with you coming out here with a little digital camera–a little digital camera–for this! Where are your trucks?” Martin, a retired school-district worker, assumed a look of disgust. “One single reporter,” he repeated. “To do a story that will be three lines on page 20.”

Where are the trucks, Mr. Martin? I’ll tell you. They’re downtown, covering Paris Hilton. Meanwhile, you were certainly naive to assume that Quanisha Pitts would merit any space at all in the vaunted print edition:

The story was about 17-year-old Quanisha Pitts, who was killed down the block from where Martin lives. In fact, the write-up didn’t appear in the Los Angeles Times print edition, but rather on this web page. But even here, the space was short, and Martin is quite correct in noting that many homicides covered by The Times are afforded only briefs of a few lines buried within the California section, or the scantest mention on the lists published here.

What Mr. Martin fails to understand is that, in serious journalism, you have to prioritize. There just isn’t space for every slaughtered teenaged black girl in Compton — not when the paper has to find room for a dozen stories about Paris Hilton.

a-million-paris-hilton-stories.JPG

Count ’em up. Meanwhile, Quanisha Pitts doesn’t even merit three lines in the print edition.

Martin and two of his neighbors, who soon join the conversation, believe murders in Compton in particular get short shrift. They are disturbed in ways that they struggled to articulate by the way media outlets treat stories about the killings of their city’s men and women.

“It’s the way you report it,” said Martin’s neighbor, military reservist Walt Graham, 53, (near left, above) who came over from his front yard. “It’s just going to be someone killed in Compton, on page 25,” he said.

“Just another story. Another minority kid. So what.”

Well, if the reaction of the news media is any gauge, this story is not a thousandth as important as the plight of Paris Hilton — a white woman who is rich and famous due to no particular talent — having to go to jail for a few days for violating probation.

Celebrity homicides are covered differently, they contend, as are those rare killings in nice neighborhoods, such as that of the college student killed in Westwood years ago. “When does the value of life in this community matter as much as in another community?” Graham demanded. “Is the life of that young lady any less important?”

The effect, said Martin, is to create an impression that people in Compton are somehow different–that their concerns can somehow be discounted. “You let them know that we want the same things as people in Torrance and Beverly Hills,” he said. “We don’t want to worry about someone shooting up our house. We want the same protection.”

“You tell your editors to get down here, that they don’t have to be afraid of us,” he concluded.

They’re not afraid of you, Mr. Martin. Well, maybe some of them are . . . but that’s not why they’re not covering Ms. Pitts’s story in the print edition. It just won’t sell. Don’t you get it? The L.A. Times isn’t going to have its largest month in Web traffic ever by running stories about Quanisha Pitts.

P.S. You can’t blame Jill Leovy of the Homicide Blog. She’s doing the best she can to cover the epidemic of killings in South Central.

UPDATE: Here is Ms. Pitts’s picture, from a MySpace page found on Google:

quanisha-pitts.jpg

12/31/2007

Patterico’s Los Angeles Dog Trainer Year in Review 2007

Filed under: Dog Trainer,General — Patterico @ 12:22 am



It is time for this blog’s fifth annual review of the performance of the Los Angeles Times, which long-time Patterico readers know as the Los Angeles Dog Trainer. Previous annual reviews can be found at these links:

This year’s installment covers a number of topics, including the 2008 election, the U.S. Attorney scandal, and many others. It summarizes an entire year’s worth of work documenting omissions, distortions, and misrepresentations by this newspaper. The evidence is voluminous, but hopefully entertaining. If you have half as much fun reading this as I did writing it, you’ll enjoy this post considerably.

I hope every new reader who reads this post will bookmark the main page and return often. Bloggers: please blogroll the site if you like it. I’ll be happy to reciprocate the link if I like your site — write me and let me know your URL, and I’ll take a look.

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Without further ado, let’s get to the bias:

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6/10/2007

Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts

Filed under: Crime,Dog Trainer,General,War — Patterico @ 11:59 am



In Section B of the print edition of the Los Angeles Times today is a list of all the military deaths in the country. Section B is called the “California” section — yet the paper finds space in that section to list 34 deaths of military personnel from Indiana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Utah, and other states across the country. The paper does this every week.

Meanwhile, in the same Los Angeles Times, victims of violence in Compton and other parts of South Los Angeles often don’t even get mentioned in the print edition of the paper — even though these deaths are happening locally, right under the editors’ noses. The online-only Homicide Report lists 16 people killed since May 29 — in Los Angeles alone. They’re not all gang members, either — for example, Quanisha Pitts was a 17-year-old girl out on a date.

The report of her death appears only in the online-only Homicide Report. Quanisha Pitts’s story didn’t merit a single word in the “California section.” And that is common for deaths in South Los Angeles — a place that, last time I checked, is in “California.” What’s more, it’s in “Los Angeles,” which I believe is the area theoretically covered by the “Los Angeles” Times.

Both military deaths in Iraq and murders in Los Angeles are important. Both are symptomatic of a larger and newsworthy problem.

But only one set of deaths is getting any prominence in the Los Angeles paper — and it’s not the one most relevant to Los Angeles.

Make of that what you will.

P.S. Thanks to Michael Connelly’s character Harry Bosch for the title of the post.

7/28/2013

Don Lemon With Suggestions for the Black Community

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:42 pm



Nice video from Don Lemon. (No embed code, unfortunately.) He’s being attacked for it by the professional race hustlers, of course:

By the way, Don, I have talked about black on black crime plenty here, and not in the context of sticking it to black people. In fact, much of the time I have been sticking it to white journalists at the L.A. Times for ignoring crime against black victims, in favor of eyeball-grabbing stories like Paris Hilton’s court troubles.

P.S. Professional race writer Jenée ‏Desmond-Harris is busy wringing her hands over Lemon’s supposed ignorance, while not taking on a single specific point he made. I’d ask her myself, but she has me blocked on Twitter as part of her quest for a national conversation on race.

7/11/2008

Selections from This Week’s Dust-Up

Filed under: Dog Trainer,General — Patterico @ 6:01 pm



I’ve put most of my writing energy over the past week into my debate on latimes.com with Marc Cooper, concerning the future of the L.A. Times. In case you haven’t followed it, I wanted to provide a roundup of links, together with some highlights from my entries, to whet your appetite:

Part One:

[T]he paper ran a front-page story last month alleging that Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, had a website with pornographic images, including a “half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal.” The obvious suggestion was the video depicted bestiality in a prurient manner.

Nonsense. In fact, the video is humor. It portrays a man who is probably trying to relieve himself while trying to fight off an aroused donkey with one hand as he holds up his pants with the other. It has been shown on television and is available on YouTube. Most of the material on the judge’s website, as it turned out, was similarly intended as humorous and not lewd. Many readers I know who viewed the actual material felt deceived by The Times’ article. They felt that the newspaper tried to make the story seem splashier than it really was.

You can’t blame that on Tribune.

Part Two:

The [L.A.] Weekly exposed the laughable naivete of a 2005 Times article lionizing an alleged “former gang member” supposedly turned “man of peace.” The Weekly’s secret trick? Talking to law enforcement!

The Weekly printed an excellent piece about gang warfare in housing projects. Meanwhile, The Times couldn’t be bothered to run one line on the shooting death of a teenager in Compton. Yet somehow, the paper found room for a dozen stories about Paris Hilton’s jail sentence.

Part Three:

Worse than the complacency is the paper’s arrogance — its overweening, unbearable arrogance.

L.A. Times editors view themselves as self-appointed shapers of public opinion. They dislocate their shoulders patting themselves on the back for their alleged “intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline,” to use Tim Rutten’s memorably modest phrasing in 2003.

The hallmark of arrogance is casual, aloof dismissal of one’s critics. Some snigger behind their hand as they dismiss bloggers as a “crew of dilettante verbal snipers” whose views can be safely ignored while the ever-so-serious newspaper people discuss the issues of the day.

Part Four:

[T]he paper’s dismissive attitude toward bloggers is so supercilious, it’s comical.

Times business columnist David Lazarus once contrasted the virtues of “the much-respected, widely esteemed news outlet you’re currently enjoying” — no arrogance there! — with blogs, which, according to Lazarus, “continue sprouting like crab grass throughout the electronic ether.” The late David Shaw called blogs a “solipsistic, self-aggrandizing journalist-wannabe genre.” Every time I catch the paper in yet another embarrassing error, my readers fondly recall Shaw’s pompous pronouncement that his columns were superior because they were reviewed by “four experienced Times editors.”

Does The Times still have four editors reviewing every piece it publishes? I doubt it. How could it, with round after round of layoffs?

Part Five:

Yes, The Times is dying a slow death right in front of our eyes for the reasons we have discussed ad nauseam: the impact of the Internet coupled with the paper’s arrogance and aloofness. It won’t be missed.

This is a paper where even the Pulitzer Prize winners are often an embarrassment. When they’re not publishing stories based on forged documents or embroiled in ethically questionable conflicts of interest, they’re snooping into their colleagues’ e-mail or leaving silly sock-puppet comments on my blog.

You can read it all here.

My sparring partner in this debate, Marc Cooper, says of me:

I enjoyed mixing it up with Patrick “Patterico” Frey. He’s a nice and thoughtful guy, if politically errant.

Funny; that’s just what I was going to say about him!

Seriously, though, I did enjoy the jousting with Marc. And he does seem like a good guy, even if he’s maybe a bit hostile to you, my commenters. (You did know that you’re “bitter, angry and delusional folks” . . . didn’t you?)

4/13/2008

BREAKING!!! Britney in Minor Fender Bender!!!!

Filed under: Dog Trainer,Media Bias,Morons — Patterico @ 10:39 am



Not that long ago, the Los Angeles assistant bureau chief for the Associated Press told his troops: “Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal.”

He wasn’t kidding. From the AP today: Spears in minor accident on Ventura Freeway.

Britney Spears’ motoring misfortunes continue.

The pop star was involved in a minor traffic accident late Saturday, but no one was injured and no vehicles were damaged, authorities said.

Stop the presses, baby!

The L.A. Times is not immune to this silliness. In fact, I found the bombshell story about the Britney accident on the main page for the Los Angeles Times web site today. I wonder how many stories about murders of Compton teenagers will have to be squeezed out of the print edition to make the necessary room for the Britney fender-bender story. [UPDATE: Or, as commenter Sam points out, “non fender-bender story” — since no fender was bent.]

3/10/2008

Two Shootings Near the Compton Courthouse

Filed under: Crime,Dog Trainer,General — Patterico @ 5:56 pm



The L.A. Times reports:

Authorities say two people were killed overnight in two apparently unrelated Compton shootings.

The first shooting was reported at 9:50 p.m. Sunday in the 300 block of West Alondra Boulevard, according to Los Angeles County sheriff’s Deputy Oscar Butao.

Witnesses said four men approached a car in which two women were sitting with a child and the groups exchanged words, Butao said. One of the men then opened fire before his group fled on foot, Butao said. One woman was killed and the other was wounded, Butao said. . . .

. . . .

Deputies responded to a second fatal shooting at 12:05 a.m. in the 300 block of West Magnolia Street and found a man dead at the scene.

Each shooting occurred within 1/3 mile of the courthouse. Pin #1 represents 300 W. Alondra Boulevard, near the first shooting. Pin #2 represents 300 W. Magnolia St., near the second shooting. The orange square in between them has a blue arrow pointing at the location of just below the courthouse.

compton-shootings.JPG

Here is an aerial of the same area:

compton-shootings-aerial.JPG

Nothing to see here, folks.

At least the paper reported it this time . . . That hasn’t always been the case.

1/18/2008

“Who Do I Have to Kill to Get in the Paper?” — Jack Dunphy Explains

Filed under: Crime,Dog Trainer,General,Media Bias — Patterico @ 6:31 am



Jack Dunphy has an excellent piece at Pajamas Media regarding what it takes to get a murder reported by Big Media nowadays. His piece begins:

It’s often difficult to predict when a crime story will tickle the media’s antennae. I still recall the puzzlement I felt when, early in my police career, I would be at the scene of some gang murder in South-Central Los Angeles waiting for the newspaper and television reporters to arrive. They seldom did, and I came to learn that most crimes in the inner city, even murders, were somehow considered less than newsworthy. Little has changed.

Jack sets out the calculus for whether a story gets coverage:

The Los Angeles Times and the local television stations seem to employ a peculiar calculus when deciding to cover a crime story, and in the event they do, how much coverage to give it. Among the factors weighed in this calculus are the number and age of the victims, their perceived culpability (i.e. the sympathy factor), and the crime’s proximity to a white neighborhood. . . . Today, with violence in Los Angeles on the decline, there is a new variable in the calculus of determining a given crime’s newsworthiness: the inter-racial factor. When a black gang member kills another black gang member it will most likely be ignored in the media, just as when both the murderer and the murdered are Latinos. But let a Latino gang member kill a black one, or vice versa, now that’s a story.

Read it all.

This is a good day for this piece to come out, because it dovetails nicely with the post immediately below, about Hillary’s pandering visit to Compton yesterday. There is no indication that she talked about the war in our inner cities. Why should she? The newspapers don’t.

In that post, I talk about a shooting case I handled where four teenaged boys were shot, blocks from the church where Hillary spoke. Four boys. Did you hear about it on the news? Was it a nationwide story? Of course not. Just another day in Compton.

Down the street from the church where Hillary spoke, I used to teach classes of fifth-graders about staying out of a life of gangs and crime. I talked about it in this November 2003 post:

[T]here was a skit that involved someone being shot. I asked the students to raise their hands if they had ever heard gunfire from their houses.

Every hand in the room went up.

I asked them to raise their hands if a family member or friend had been shot.

Every hand but two went up.

How does Hillary not talk about that? How does the Los Angeles Times not talk about that? Why does our California section report the deaths of soldiers from Indiana with no connection to California who died in Iraq, but not the deaths of young teenaged girls gunned down in Compton?

Read all of Jack’s piece for more insight into the question. Click here.

1/9/2008

The AP: Focusing on the News That *Matters*

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 10:11 pm



It’s a fill in the blank quiz. Via Roderick comes a recent memo from the AP‘s Los Angeles assistant bureau chief to his troops. I’m leaving one name blank:

From: Baker, Frank S.
Sent: Tue 1/8/2008 11:58 AM
To: News – Southern California Editorial Staff
Subject: ___________

All:

Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving _________ is a big deal. That doesn’t mean every rumor makes it on the wire. But it does mean that we want to pay attention to what others are reporting and seek to confirm those stories that WE feel warrant the wire. And when we determine that we’ll write something, we must expedite it.

Thanks.

Frank

Fill in the blank with one of the following:

a) President Bush
b) Mitt Romney
c) Mayor Villaraigosa
d) Governor Schwarzenegger

Answer below the fold.

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