New Los Angeles Times OpEd: The Blue You Don't See

My latest OpEd in the Los Angeles Times has been published this morning.  Published as an "Outside the Tent" piece, it covers the long littany of the Times' biased reporting against the LAPD.  This piece required a lot of professionalism from the Times' Nick Goldberg, who very fairly editted the piece with an eye to accuracy. "I don't want to have to publish a correction on a piece like this," he said more than once.  As it should be with any piece.  Nick's edits made it a stronger work.

THE BLUE YOU DON'T SEE

In its most recent editorial about the May Day demonstrations at MacArthur Park, The Times again showed its historic disregard for facts and history in its coverage of the Los Angeles Police Department and in its slavish devotion to the concept of police "reform," regardless of cost, consequences or wisdom.

The editorial, published in response to the Oct. 9 release of the LAPD's report on the MacArthur Park disturbance, described the scene at the park as "chaos" resulting from "missteps" by the department.

How did this terrible situation come to pass? Well, the editorial noted, among other things, that training "seems to have lapsed perilously -- the Metropolitan Division's basic training course was cut in 2005." It also described Chief William Bratton's ongoing struggles with the department's "cultural and institutional defects" connected to this lapse.

Yet, astonishingly, the paper failed to point out that it was Bratton's own decision to eliminate that training. Instead, the editorial praised the chief's "deserved" second term and his "impressive response" to the events of May 1. It seems that publicly condemning your subordinates for problems you helped cause impresses The Times.

Sadly, this intellectual dissonance is true to form. Looking back at The Times' coverage of the LAPD, it's easy to see decades of factual omissions, routine second-guessing of police officers and a consistent support of activist agendas.