‘The Tarnished Dream’ and Other Fictions : California: There’s a pattern to national media-bashing of the Golden State, and it rests on a stock of laughable cliches.

History’s first hitting-on-California piece was published in the Overland Monthly of October, 1896. My librarian can provide only the title, “Is the West Discontented?” but you get the idea.

Since then, this staple of American journalism has run in cycles. Whenever a slow month for news and other unexplained factors coincide with a disaster on the Coast--fire, earthquake, mudslide; it doesn’t matter--the nation’s major magazine and newspaper editors cannot resist ordering up the state’s obituary.

Time magazine last week provided one of the more ambitious examples of journalistic California-bashing. “The crimes seem more vicious, the smog more choking, the poor more sorrowful in the light of fluorescent disillusionment,” Time began, and then went on for 42 pages before concluding, somewhat confusingly, that the state was “in a perpetual state of becoming.”

Like other native Californians, I have found most of these pieces annoying but harmless. But Time’s latest effort was so bad, I decided to respond.

I began by counting the number of major hits on California each year in American magazines, as recorded by the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. Then I compared the ups and downs of California-bashing with the state unemployment rate, thinking that Eastern editors might be revealing a natural interest in hard times.

The graph I plotted proved quite the opposite. In the recession and oil crisis of the mid-1970s, when California unemployment climbed to 9.9%, national magazines offered no general critique of the state’s excesses. Only when the state’s economy improved in the late 1970s did the magazines unleash another assault on the California Dream. In the early 1980s, when recession sent state unemployment back up to 9.9%, the Eastern guns were silent. During the last four years, with unemployment low, the hit pieces have reappeared.

What are we to conclude? Was it our prosperity they found most irksome?

I found that, through some magical mind-meld, more than two decades of journalistic efforts to defame and distort life in my state fixed on a few simple rules:

-- Rule 1: Always mention the smog. Time’s latest opus, “California: The Endangered Dream,” notes that “mad, fit joggers must run at night if they hope to breathe freely.” The 1989 Newsweek cover piece, “California: American Dream, American Nightmare,” said that “the smog evolved from a source of humor on ‘The Tonight Show’ to a genuine health hazard.”

The truth is that Southern California’s air pollution is one of the few things that has improved in the last 25 years.

-- Rule 2: Use the word dream as much as possible, and don’t forget to wax metaphoric and metaphysic. The tarnished dream, the damaged dream, the dream awakens--this is the stuff of great anti-California journalism. “Gravity feels different in California--life there sometimes has the weightlessness of a dream” (Time, 1991).

-- Rule 3: Cite the companies and people who are leaving, not coming.

In 1971, U.S. News & World Report quoted a business recruiter in Arizona: “California is our happy hunting ground.” In 1977, the same magazine noted that Dow Chemical had canceled plans for a plant near San Francisco, a loss of 2,000 jobs. Fortune headlined its 1978 hit piece “Why the Future No Longer Looks So Golden in California.”

Shortly after this surge of astute analysis, the state began its greatest period of economic growth. That has not bothered the analysts. Last week, Time said that one poll showed “1 out of every 7 medium-to-large companies . . . thinks about relocating outside the state.”

No hit piece is complete without a quote from some fed-up Los Angeles homeowner leaving for Oregon. The U.S. News headline in 1971 was, “Is California’s ‘People Boom’ Over?” Here’s the answer: The net immigration that dipped to 95,000 the year after that piece appeared climbed to 317,000 by 1980. Last year it hit a record 444,000.

-- Rule 4: Make the ethnic pot boil.

Time, based on no discernible research, tells us: “The state is dividing and subdividing now along a thousand new fault lines of language and identity.” Whoever wrote that is unlikely to have spent much time in the Los Angeles school system, which for all its faults is Americanizing multiethnic students at a remarkable pace.

-- Rule 5: Leave some wiggle room.

This is the sign of a truly professional hit-person. Writers cannot completely repress memories of past pieces gone wrong. We all know how to hedge our bets. “Should California be written off? Hardly” (Time, 1977). “Not everyone has given up on California . . . “ (U.S. News & World Report, 1987). “For many, the dream endures” (Newsweek, 1989).

And the cycle continues. When they stop writing about us, we’ll know we’re really in trouble.