SELF-LOATHING? L.A. Occasions Prints Lengthy, Gaudy Apology for Its Terrible Historical past of Racism

The Los Angeles Times has spent much of the past week apologizing to minorities in Southern California (and America in general) for being so profoundly racist for most of their history … that they went up to billionaire Dr. . Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the paper in 2018 and decided to drop bombs on almost everyone who owned it before him.

An internal revolt by minority workers may have forced this exercise. Members of the Los Angeles Times Guild “rightly insisted on redesigning and re-centering our coverage of color communities … On behalf of this institution, we apologize for the Times’ history of racism … The Times will double and.. realign our efforts to become an inclusive and inspiring voice of California, a guardian who uses investigative and accountability reports to help protect our fragile democracy. “

The editorial began with 3,400 words from the editorial team:

The heading “Marauders From Inner City Prey on LA’s Suburbs” has been removed from the top of the front cover. The story, published July 12, 1981 by The Times, described a “permanent underclass” in the city’s “ghettos and barrios” that sparked a wave of crime spreading from south Los Angeles to affluent – and mostly white – communities in Pasadena, Palos Verdes, Beverly Hills and elsewhere….

The series met with immediate and well-deserved review, highlighting an insidious problem that has marred the work of the Los Angeles Times for much of its history: while the paper has done groundbreaking and important work that highlights the problems that color communities face Having done this too, it has often shown a blind spot at best, and at worst, outright hostility to the city’s non-white population, both rooted and rooted in a lack of indigenous, black, Latin American, Asian, and other colored people in their newsroom was.

Stimulated by a pandemic, economic crisis, and national policing debate, all of which highlighted racial differences in the United States, our nation is now facing a lengthy reckoning with systemic racism. We would be a time of grief and introspection in the fall of 2020 if we did not participate in this self-examination. This editorial is part of that process.

It is not a “self-examination”. It tears everyone up in front of you so you can look “enlightened” in comparison. You can certainly look back on moments the newspaper shouldn’t be proud of – as quoted, for example, when they supported Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

But these people cannot sum up all the facts in their history of racism.

For at least the first 80 years, the Los Angeles Times was an institution deeply rooted in white supremacy and committed to promoting the interests of the city’s industrialists and landowners. No one embodied this aggressive, conservative ideology more than Harrison Gray Otis, the Civil War veteran with a walrus mustache who controlled the Times from 1882 until his death in 1917.

But then they noticed, “Otis was a Lincoln Republican who fought on the side of the Union and opposed slavery. ”

Oh, it started to improve in the 1960s when the “enlightened” owners descended from Otis cleared an investigation by the “anti-communist John Birch Society,” which included far-right white supremacists. Unfortunately, the newspaper advocated Barry Goldwater, who “firmly opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964”. Goldwater was nobody’s white supremacist.

The editors also believe the newspaper was racist in 1994 when “publisher Richard T. Schlosberg III directed the editors to support Governor Pete Wilson,” a Republican who supported Proposition 187, who “denied access to undocumented immigrants State wanted to exclude “. funded health care and education. Staff, especially Latinos, were disgusted. “

Forgive us if we laugh as the Times laments its past when the old man Otis was guilty of arrogantly pushing an agenda: “Time and again, the Times tried to shape and dominate the region instead of just recording it … . And in all of his crusades, he has won the powerful voice of his newspaper. “

And if the owner and the editors of The Times insist that they act as an energetic force against racism and for our “fragile democracy”, isn’t that mean “to shape and dominate the region”?