The Media Did It

If you announced at a dinner party that you worked for S&W; Fine Foods canning crushed tomatoes, it is doubtful that anyone would suggest you were therefore a whore, a liar or a murderer.

They would say how nice, a crushed-tomato canner, that must be a fascinating profession, how many crushed tomatoes would you say go into a 28-ounce container?

The hostess would not scurry into the kitchen, bring out a can of crushed tomatoes, read aloud the percentage of U.S. recommended daily allowances of riboflavin and tear into it.

Even those essentially opposed to canned foods or to killing tomatoes would maintain a polite silence and allow the canner to go about his business unmolested.

Now let’s say you’re a journalist.

It is a month after the celebrated L.A. riots and you are invited to a dinner party. You know some of the people and others you don’t.

There is an unfrocked English professor, a lawyer who thinks he’s Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow, a free-floating feminist, an author of obscure books on Elizabethan history and assorted others.

The minute you walk in the door, the hostess, a person with an overactive thyroid who consults an astrologer before giving a dinner party, shouts, “Hey everyone, here is Al Martinez, whore, liar and murderer, and his wife, Cinelli, the poor dear!”

How would you feel about that?

It’s been happening a lot lately. Because the L.A. riots required massive media coverage and no one can determine exactly who’s to blame for them, everyone is blaming the media. It has become a hobby for some, like philately or glossolalia.

Preachers roar condemnation from the pulpit and a little boy with a defiant expression gives us the finger as his car goes by.

Many of those bashing the media are from the media. They offer hand-wringing apologia on What We Did Wrong and Why We Will Never Do It Again at lengths unequaled in the history of moral atonement.

They’re half right. We did things wrong, sure, but you can bet your Aunt Emily’s virginity we’ll probably do them again. The reason is no one comes to us before a riot and says we are about to burn down the city, try to be present for the planning sessions.

I tried to explain that to the free-floating feminist and the unfrocked English professor with as much equanimity as I could muster toward someone who has just asked how long I had been a whore.

Cinelli, in fact, suggested later it would be a good idea to have me tested for hyperglycemia due to the melliferous manner of my response.

I shrugged off accusations I was prostituting myself to the biased attitude of a publisher, smiled at the notion that I was a professional liar and cheerfully assumed responsibility for those killed during the riots.

Only when the lawyer suggested each city ought to have a media board composed of educators, judges and clergymen did my head begin to wag from side to side like a tiger shark before it bites a leg off.

The reason I managed to maintain my composure was because media-bashing, like sex and human sacrifice, is nothing new. It goes back to ancient Rome when people stood around reading a posted diary of daily events called the Acta diurna.

They no doubt cursed it in lyrical Latin as a pack of lies and later at the evening orgy attacked its writer as a whore. Well, I guess being a whore at an orgy was no big deal, so maybe they just called him an un-Roman.

The first journalistic account of war or disaster was when the English beat the Scots at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. It was contained in a news pamphlet published in London.

Assuming historical license, I’m sure it also precipitated the first accusation that if the media had not been present, the armies would have been more restrained in their attitudes and lives would have been spared.

I don’t date back to the Battle of Flodden, but during my own years in newspapering I’ve heard similar kinds of criticism. I smile, shrug and say you’re right, we’re to blame. The media did it.

Notwithstanding my most recent ordeal in social flagellation, there’s no real question in my mind that our riot coverage was very good.

Reporters and photographers for all the media, men and women alike, risked beatings and bullets to bring us what we had to know, whether or not it will make them popular at dinner parties.

Neither turning tricks nor delivering bad news are comfortable vocations, but, for all the carping they cause at social functions, they still beat hell out of canning crushed tomatoes.