There’s No Escaping L.A., Even on a Trip to East Coast

Without remorse or regrets as a journalist, I tried hard to escape Los Angeles during the riots--a goal that proved elusive despite my best efforts.

On April 30--the second night of the conflagration--I drove to Los Angeles International Airport at dusk, just as the curfew started. There was an eerie silence, an orange glow in the sky, and I nearly had the freeway all to myself.

I was bound for New York City to attend the 20-year reunion of my class from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and later to Washington on a news assignment.

Earlier on Thursday, while doing some riot-related reporting about how Orange County commuters were faring, I called TWA every couple of hours to make sure my flight to New York was still scheduled. I was told over and over again: “Your plane will take off.”

But at about 10:15 p.m., after boarding commenced for passengers with small children, a TWA agent’s voice crackled: “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that this flight has just been canceled.”

Smoke from the torching of South Los Angeles was fouling the air lanes. Air carriers were having trouble assembling both flight and ground crews. Fuel deliveries were irregular at best.

TWA ran out of hotel vouchers less than halfway through the passenger list. I decided not to break the curfew. TWA officials said we should stay in the terminal. Like dozens of other passengers, I tried unsuccessfully to sleep sitting in a chair, and then on the terminal’s carpeted floor.

We were re-booked on a flight due to depart at 8 a.m. Friday. By the time we lifted off about 11 a.m., I had been at LAX for 15 hours.

Once aloft, Topic A among the passengers was the Rodney G. King verdict and its aftermath.

It was no different in New York.

My cabby drove us around a mid-town protest march held in sympathy with the rioters a continent away.

At the alumni meeting, my name tag showed that I work for The Times. Students, faculty and alumni peppered me with questions. “How could the jury do that?” “Do you think the prosecutor blew the case?” “How do you think the live TV coverage affected the situation?”

The questioning resumed during Saturday’s alumni events: “Why are they burning their own neighborhood? Why didn’t the camera crews put down their equipment and try to help people who were being beaten?”

Geez, in these halls of learning they’re still seeking rational explanations, I thought. They’re hunting for reason buried within a Los Angeles of countless individual truths, during a moment of mass irrationality.

Apropos of the gripping, live TV coverage of the riots during the previous 72 hours, a Saturday morning orientation session for this fall’s incoming journalism students focused on the power of the news media to influence people--even to incite.

Some students were openly skeptical. They said it’s the journalists’ job to provide information, not worry about what people do with it.

Associate Dean Stephen Isaacs took an opposing view, saying that the press can affect people’s lives quite dramatically. Current events had surpassed the videotape he used to illustrate his point. It was an old “60 Minutes” segment about a particularly outspoken theater critic’s power to make or break Broadway shows.

Meanwhile, a conservative black student from this year’s journalism class warned the incoming freshmen: “You will be here in a Politically Correct environment. . . . Your fellow students will sometimes harass you and make fun of your views . . . but you should have the courage to speak up. . . .”

Then came a discussion entitled “Career Angst.” All of the panelists were “five years out,” meaning they had left school for the real world in 1987.

One panelist said he recently quit a lucrative magazine editing job because he was fed up with changing reporters’ stories to satisfy management’s marketing goals rather than for journalistic reasons.

There was general agreement that editors are trying to improve newspapers’ “sizzle” with color, graphics, and an emphasis on crime, violence, lurid details about famous people and political corruption--a mad dash to produce stories about what’s “hot.”

Others talked about labor issues such as maternity and paternity leave, and the difficulty of serving in management roles where sometimes you have to deal with reporters who have nagging personal problems or don’t perform to expectations.

I had heard these discussions before--as an incoming student in 1971. Only the banter then was provoked partly by the prison riot at Attica, which had just occurred, and the Vietnam War.

“If you’re a correspondent at the battlefront, and you see a Viet Cong sniper about to shoot a GI,” a professor asked, “should you drop your notebook and tackle him, to get the soldier from ‘our side’ out of the line of fire?”

Times and locations change, but the issues don’t. I was glad to see that Columbia’s faculty still foments these debates, which supplement and do not detract from the school’s main mission: advanced training in reporting, writing and editing.

Before boarding the train from New York to Washington, I took the subway to Brooklyn Heights--my old neighborhood. About two blocks from the promenade overlooking New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty off in the distance, I was again reminded of Los Angeles. I saw an alley named Love Lane. On street signs in New York City, the word Lane is abbreviated.

And so the sign said: “LOVE LA.”

I still do.