Convention Casualties

A confrontation on August 16 at Olympic Boulevard and Figueroa Street, Stewart later told the Weekly, was media-instigated. Though she relies in part on notes from an unnamed “observer,” Stewart asserts that as police attempted to keep a 50-foot area clear to separate two groups of protesters, the media surged forward toward police lines and the crowd followed. “They became the crowd that was out of control,” she maintains. “They act[ed] like unprofessional goons.”

Although Stewart is a member of the L.A. Press Club board of directors, her viewpoint is not widely shared on the board. Press Club president Mary Moore, who described police actions during convention week as “disturbing,” counters that “I didn‘t see any journalists out there making news -- I saw a lot of them trying to figure out how to cover the story. Many times it was hard to know where to stand.” Moore, a Daily Breeze reporter, says that later Monday night she was on a sidewalk blocks west of the confrontation flash point when a motorcycle officer drove his bike up onto the sidewalk, yelling, “You don’t belong here.”

The club has invited Chief Bernard Parks and LAPD Commander David Kalish to appear at a Press Club “town hall” meeting to air differences in police and media perspectives. Moore and a colleague met with Kalish before convention week, she says, and “He assured us officers would be trained . . . and would be able to recognize credentials” and deal with press appropriately. The club may consider filing an amicus brief with the ACLU lawsuit, Moore says; one portion of the complaint demands that LAPD devise guidelines that would protect news coverage of demonstrations.

As the city‘s oldest and most influential media institution, the Los Angeles Times might have been heard by city powers had it made its position on LAPD tactics clear -- or its readers might have weighed in had the daily made police actions clearer to them. But the paper’s coverage of the street scene, several younger reporters told City Editor Bill Boyarsky, wasn‘t making police behavior clear. Boyarsky agrees there was a difference of opinion: To this veteran of decades of demonstrations and riots, the salient fact was that “At the end of the day, no one was seriously hurt.” While he questioned the LAPD decision to use clubs and rubber bullets, he expressed no particular concern about their use on reporters or about interference with newsgathering. “I think it’s just as serious when you club a non-reporter,” he told the Weekly. “This is just my personal opinion,” he said. “I‘m not speaking for the Times.”

On the other hand, Deputy Managing Editor Leo Wolinsky, in overall charge of convention-week coverage, declined to pass judgment on police tactics: “From one side, what’s wrong? There was no riot, no serious injury. On the other hand, was it necessary at all?” Wolinsky sees no reason to believe the press was singled out, but if there was an “intent to scare us away . . . it wouldn‘t stop us. We could use more protective clothing, bulletproof vests, hard hats.”

If the voice of today’s Times appears indistinct or garbled, yesterday‘s Times leaders had less trouble sorting things out. “Rubber bullets are not an innocuous form of crowd control -- they’ve killed people occasionally and put out people‘s eyes,” said USC journalism professor Bryce Nelson, who worked at the Times from 1975 to 1977, first as Chicago bureau chief and then as Washington correspondent. “It certainly has a chilling effect . . . [Coverage ability] is also chilled by the failure of conventional media to tell that story. I don’t think the Times or the TV stations were particularly eager to judge the police.”

“The Times made a conscious decision, which I don‘t understand, not to cover this story very much,” agrees Ed Guthman, its national editor from 1965--77, who is also at USC’s School of Journalism. But the ill effects of police overreaction, Guthman says, may be negligible. “We had three Times reporters jailed in Chicago [at the 1968 Democratic Convention],” he recalls. “It sure didn‘t keep them from doing their job and becoming great reporters.”