A troubled history in our pages
[ History, from AA2] time of rapid change.
Typical of the paper’s attitude was a 1978 interview in which Otis Chandler airily dismissed Black and Latino readers: “It’s not their kind of newspaper. It’s too big, it’s too stuffy. If you will, it’s too complicated.”
Chandler later stepped back from that, saying the paper was looking for readers in the “broad middle class” and “upper classes” regardless of race or ethnicity. “We are not a paper that’s sought after in the lower-class areas,” he said.
Around that time, in 1979, The Times was slow to cover the shooting of Eula Love, a 39-year-old Black homemaker who was shot to death by Los Angeles police officers in her frontyard in a dispute over an unpaid gas bill. L.A.’s afternoon daily, the Herald Examiner, played the story big, and Black residents were outraged at what they saw as an egregious example of police abuse. After being hammered by other media outlets for underplaying the story, including in an Esquire article headlined “Mr. Otis Regrets,” The Times ran a long story by media writer David Shaw about how it had “muffed” the story, and top editors began rethinking how the paper covered the LAPD.
As has often been the case in history, progress came from the bottom up. After the “marauders” series, Black reporters met with Editor William F. Thomas to register their objections. And in February 1982, a pioneering group of Latino journalists, gathering for pizza and beer in Downey, began conceiving of a staff-led effort to tell a rich and deep narrative of their growing community. “We keep seeing the same damn stories in the paper: about crime, gangs, illegal immigration,” Frank O. Sotomayor, one of the editors on the series, recalls his co-editor, George Ramos, saying. “We want to tell our stories.”
The result was a landmark series, published in 1983, about Latinos and how they were reshaping Southern California. Latino journalists initiated and carried out the project, and presented the Latino community in all its complexity, featuring gang members and wealthy entrepreneurs, priests, police officers, university students and politicians. It examined issues that impeded Latino progress and celebrated improvements. The project was recognized with the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the highest honor in American journalism. The same year, The Times’ parent company, Times-Mirror, established a Minority Editorial Training Program, or MetPro, which continues today.
Yet The Times remained a lonely place for journalists of color. In December 1990, Shaw, The Times’ media critic, wrote a series lamenting the dearth of diversity in journalism. He wrote of his own newspaper: “The Times is widely regarded — particularly by blacks, inside the paper and out — as having one of the poorest records for minority advancement of any major paper in the country.”
The police beating of Rodney G. King in 1991, and the [See History, AA4]
William J. Drummond Staff writer during the 1970s
Shortly after I arrived at The Times — and became one of only two Black reporters on the city desk staff — I threw a small dinner party at my Baldwin Hills apartment. Among the guests was the late Kenneth Reich, a legendary, outspoken Times political reporter. Ken and his date were the only Caucasians who showed up. It was mid-1968 and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed in Memphis, and several cities had rioted. Race was, to put it mildly, a dangerously touchy subject.
After dinner we settled into drinks. Ken decided to become a provocateur. Wasn’t it self-destructive for Blacks to burn down their own neighborhoods? he asked.
To my horror, I watched as tempers and voices rose. It wasn’t long before Ken was literally backed into a corner during a heated exchange. Fortunately, everybody eventually got exhausted and went home.
I thought Ken would never speak to me again.
To my amazement, he called the next day, thanking me for the invitation, saying he found the whole group interesting and the discussion fascinating. He could not remember when he had been so stimulated.
The party was probably a landmark event for him. Black areas of town were terra incognita to The Times, in part because the majority of the editorial staff lived in majority-white neighborhoods. They simply did not know anyone Black. I had become Ken’s Black friend.