Only a Fraction of L.A. Shootings Are Reported in Media

Midnight in Hollywood, the 1900 block of Argyle Avenue: Two gang members are shot, one of them fatally.

For UCLA film student Jim Tipton, a recent arrival to the neighborhood from a small town in Texas, the event is significant. But to his dismay, there is no mention of the double shooting on the television news or in The Times the next morning.

“I’ve come from a place where shooting wild turkeys on the school playground is front page news,” said Tipton, “to a place where this gigantic, 200-page newspaper can’t even devote six inches to human beings who get shot. I guess people would rather read about Cher.”

The Times in 1991 printed stories describing 411 shooting incidents in Los Angeles County in which 615 people were either killed or wounded. Meanwhile, the newspaper did not report incidents in which about 8,000 other people were hit by gunfire.

“There are just too many of them,” said Times Metropolitan Editor Craig Turner. “The sad fact of life in Los Angeles now is that we could fill the Metro section every day with crime, but that wouldn’t be telling the full story of L.A.”

Historically, The Times and other local news media have always been selective when reporting violent crimes in the county’s more than 40 law enforcement jurisdictions, veteran reporters say. During the 1940s and ‘50s, when shootings were not nearly so commonplace, crimes involving homosexuals, or occurring in black or Latino neighborhoods, usually were overlooked.

“Back then, we referred to murders in the minority community as ‘misdemeanor murders,’ ” said Jack Jones, who spent four decades as a newspaperman in Los Angeles before retiring in 1989. “We pretty much ignored them.”

Shootings have become so common today that most receive scant if any attention from the mainstream media unless the incidents involve multiple fatalities or occur in relatively unusual locations such as malls or movie theaters.

Most gang shootings are not covered unless the victim is a young child, promising athlete, senior citizen, pregnant woman or some other person considered particularly sympathetic.

“The unfortunate thing is the murder rate has gone up so much and the shootings have increased, that what happens is that the media, including television, have become desensitized to it,” said Jeff Wald, news director at KCOP, Channel 13. “It’s a danger I preach to my staff almost on a daily basis.”

Some news executives contend that viewers and readers have become inured to violence. Any attempt to comprehensively cover the daily array of shootings, they say, would further numb the public.

The Times used to publish a Monday “roundup” of the weekend’s shootings, usually when the death toll hit double figures. But the practice was sharply curtailed last year, Turner said, because the stories amounted to little more than an “exercise in statistics” and did little to convey the tragedy of the losses.

Instead, he added, The Times has sought to develop more articles on the causes and effects of crime in Southern California. Because a disproportionate number of shootings occur in predominantly minority communities, many black and Latino leaders complain that news coverage often leaves the false impression that people of color are prone to violence or condone it.

“If (a person) is killed in a more affluent community, there’s a sort of (community) outrage that goes along with the story,” said Danny Bakewell, president of the Brotherhood Crusade. “When it happens in our community, it’s reported as (if shootings are) expected.”

Times reference librarian Greg Rice contributed to this story