The Los Angeles Times

Why did editors let a reporter publish a right-wing political advertisement just days before a critical election deadline?

The Los Angeles Times has just published one of the most transparent, politically-motivated articles seeded by the right-wing I’ve seen in a long time. I try my best to lay out what happened because the timing and content of the article are so disturbing.

First, some background. Only a few days were left for signature collection in a right-wing and police/prosecutor union funded campaign to recall the LA District Attorney for being too progressive. After the signatures were filed last night, it will be tight whether the right wing gets enough.¹

The recall campaign would be a major boon to police unions, the prosecutor union, the $3.6 billion Sheriff department who wants to expand the jail, real estate developers, the multi-billion dollar for-profit bail bond industry, and private equity firms investing in incarceration.

Enter the LA Times. At a crucial juncture in this political campaign, the paper’s editors let reporter Kevin Rector mislead readers days before signatures were due to dramatically weaponize the tragic murder of an Asian man from *two months ago.*

The thrust of the emotional LA Times article is that the slain man’s daughter wants to recall the DA. Rector tells the devastating story of the daughter, filled with haunting family photos. The article pulls at all of the heartstrings. It’s the story of an American Dream destroyed.

Side note: There is a notable contrast between the sympathy, sensitivity, and sheer length that the LA Times devotes here to how it often covers the victims of police murders or, for example, how it often talks about (i.e. ignores) immigrant families devastated by the years long reign of terror of the previous LA District Attorney.

This article is nothing less than Willie Horton-style journalism. It uses a horrific tragedy to stoke outrage and, having stoked outrage, uses that outrage to suggest, contrary *to all of the available evidence,* that recalling the DA could prevent these kinds of tragedies.

The era of mass incarceration in this country—one of the great scandals of modern history—was fueled by reporting like this. The message from LA Times: if you care about this man and people like him, you’ll want to recall the DA just like his daughter does. I want to focus on three things.

The Premise is False

First, the article itself essentially admits that its own thesis is bogus. The article acknowledges that nothing would likely have been different under the prior, more harsh prosecutor. The fact is, the line DAs would probably have done the same thing based on the same facts, and tweaks in prosecutor policies don’t create or prevent hate crimes anyway.

It’s worth noting in this regard that almost all of the DAs in the office are the same people. They have civil service protection and a powerful union. The LA Times article doesn’t identify **any policy of the new DA that determined this outcome.** The entire story is based on a manufactured premise.

The Article Omits the Relevant Evidence

Second, the article ignores the available empirical evidence. The effects of some of the progressive DA’s main actual policies—like reducing cash bail, less charging of low level cases, less charging children as adults—have all been studied and improve safety! (LA Times could have googled that, or interviewed experts.)

The LA Times ignores that empirical evidence. Instead, it launders disproven right-wing recall talking points through a sympathetic victim. It doesn’t ask her to support her position and doesn’t provide readers the actual evidence. It weaponizes her pain, making it hard for would-be critics to respond.

The article fails to ask the most basic, obvious empirical question: if the DA’s policies are increasing hate crimes, why are Asian hate crimes increasing across the country in places with exactly the kind of harsh prosecutors being called for?

Note how the unsupported, highly dubious factual claim that the DA was somehow at fault for hate crimes is portrayed as simply reporting the *victim’s daughter’s opinion* and note how the reporter uses this to introduce the trope of the “hardworking” immigrant and to portray the DA, who won in a landslide, as “embattled.”

So, the core argument of the article--that more harsh DA policies would reduce or prevent crime--is entirely unsupported and false. Indeed, if more incarceration and longer sentences made people safe or prevented hate crimes, we would have the safest society in world history.

Not only does the article fail to provide readers any of the scientific evidence to counter its main thesis, but it ignores the harms of what is being suggested: harsher incarceration policies devastate the poorest people, including disproportionately immigrants and people of color and poor AAPI immigrants.

What are a few of these things? Harsher punishment extracts hundreds of millions of dollars from poor communities in LA to corporate bail bond and private equity interests; every year in prison takes two years off a person’s life; harsher punishment separates children from families, spreads infectious disease, increases sexual assault; etc. All ignored.

As always, and especially when you see an article pushing a misleading or false thesis, ask yourself: Who benefits from this article? Who benefits from how it is framed? How did the story get to the reporter? How did they decide who was quoted and who was ignored?

What Will LA Times Editors Do Now?

This brings me to my third point: the LA Times should open an investigation into the paper’s use of sources.  In a lengthy article, there is not a single person quoted with a critical perspective or context. Editors let Rector exclude any source critical of his narrative, including silencing a wide range of AAPI sources.

The lack of diversity in sources is all the more troubling because Rector repeatedly claims to be making assertions on behalf of “L.A.'s diverse Asian and Pacific Islander communities.” It’s astonishing that editors allowed these broad assertions while at the same time excluding many of those “diverse” voices.

The article therefore erases the inspiring work by directly impacted organizers and AAPI crime survivors in Los Angeles to reduce violence by investing in communities and to address hate crimes not with carceral violence but with investments of care.

The article does a disservice to their work on the root causes of hate-based violence: white supremacy, systemic trauma, profitable hate-spewing algorithms on social media, toxic masculinity, mental illness, inequality, poverty, etc.

And this article is far more problematic because it is framed as news. The article is not framed as an opinion piece by a grieving daughter. It is framed as a *news* story, implicitly reporting objectively and comprehensively on what the public needs to know about this and on reasonable political and policy reactions to a horrific crime.

Deeper Bias and Subtle Propagada

Finally, I wanted to show two clear examples of the reporter’s bias.

The LA Times reporter does something I’ve written about a lot: he portrays the stated motivations of bad faith right-wing actors or people in power as their *actual* motivations. Here, LA Times editors let him assert that it was an “increase in violence” that “spurred” the recall effort. That’s false.

Does the LA Times consider the possibility that the recall was spurred by strategic political interests because more progressive approaches threaten the size, power, and profitability of the punishment bureaucracy?  Asserting this motivation for the recall is like declaring that Exxon’s clean energy marketing is spurred by genuine concern for climate change.

Recall efforts in SF and LA began as soon as a progressive person bad for business as usual was elected and before any “violence”—violence is actually near historic lows in California, far lower than under prior harsh prosecutors in SF and LA.² And the political nature of both recalls is why there were no recall efforts of past harsh DAs when crime was far higher.

These are obvious points.  But instead, LA Times allowed its reporter to do the right-wing recall effort’s propaganda for them. Of course they want people thinking it is a reasoned response to violence and not a political ploy to increase union power and corporate profits!

Similarly, the LA Times does something else I’ve written about before: it allows the person advocating brutal, anti-science, right-wing policies to portray it all as “progressive.” The paper inserts the gratuitous point that the victim’s daughter “supports criminal justice reform” and believes there are “systemic injustices” that “need correcting.” It doesn’t mention what actual policies or injustices these might be, or that the position being advocated is exactly the opposite.

This is a key strategic PR goal for the recall, and it’s something that all of their PR operatives repeat in each interview. They know they can’t be seen as a purely right-wing effort even though funded by and organized by right wing money and police/prosecutor union operatives.

As I noted in the SF recall, one of the key tactics of recall supporters was to portray themselves as compassionate progressives who cared about “reform” and justice and discrimination. 

Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

THREAD. This is a thread about how self-identified “progressive” people are being bombarded by a barrage of copaganda to boost mass incarceration. I’ve never seen anything like this moment in my time tracking police unions, the media, and corporate incarceration profiteers.

The San Francisco Chronicle even portrayed a grotesque, unethical, prosecutor as “progressive.”

To see one of the great newspapers in this country like the LA Times provide a forum for this kind of sophisticated PR without even the hint of critical analysis, historical context, scientific evidence, or AAPI organizers is crushing at a time of rising state repression and right-wing mobilization. 

Finally, even worse than the article, LA Times promoted it on social media in the most incendiary ways. I will write more in the future about how media outlets attempt to create urgency and virality through push notifications and by augmenting sensational aspects of their reporting without context. This is exhibit A.

Finally, it’s striking how similar LA Times crime reporting is to the 1970s tabloid journalism analyzed in Stuart Hall’s legendary study Policing the Crisis (I’ve included a free PDF version of the book for easy access for LA Times editors).

The British media created a panic around mugging by immigrant Black youth in the 1960s and 1970s that helped create and define a generation of right-wing repression. The editors of the LA Times would do well to read Hall’s brilliant but sensitive indictment of the British press, for his insights have never been more relevant.

1. While beyond the scope of this piece, another LA Times reporter, James Queally, has used the platform given to him by editors to become something of a bizarre spokesperson for the radical right-wing faction of veteran prosecutor union members leading the recall campaign. Queally has consistently been allowed by editors to use the pages of the LA Times and his twitter account to push public awareness of the recall campaign and to legitimate as genuine “news” its right-wing grievances at the same time that the LA Times has ignored some of the most consequential local stories involving genuine injustices and police and prosecutor corruption. Since virtually the beginning of Gascon’s tenure, Queally has published and tweeted the prosecutor union talking points (including granting them anonymity to make false statements) in one-sided articles that don’t meet basic standards of journalistic objectivity or completeness. Recently, he manufactured an entire story that suggested the progressive DA was to blame for cops getting shot before later conceding himself on twitter that he had no reason to believe that the prior right-wing prosecutor would have handled the case any differently.

2. These FBI stats don’t have 2021 yet, but the heavily manipulated LAPD stats for 2021 show only modest increases in police-reported crime that still leave the city at near historic lows well below most of the years during the tenure of the prior District Attorney. This makes sense because society-wide crime trends don’t have anything to do with policy changes by the Los Angeles DA (many of which have been blocked because the prosecutor union has challenged them in court).