Reporter Disciplined for Deception : Media: USA Today staffer is suspended and fined after setting up photo of armed gang members when youths actually sought to give up guns.

USA Today has suspended reporter Richard Price for one month and fined him thousands of dollars for his role in arranging a misleading photograph of Los Angeles gang members, sources said Friday.

Peter Prichard, the paper’s editor, said Price had been “significantly disciplined. We took significant action. I think it was an unethical lapse on his part.” Prichard declined to provide details, and the exact amount of the fine could not be ascertained.

Price set up the front-page picture in Tuesday’s edition of USA Today that showed five angry-looking black men with guns for a story about the potential for gang violence in Los Angeles. The newspaper did not say that the men had been assembled by a community activist named CaShears and were to surrender their weapons under a guns-for-jobs program.

The men initially showed up without their weapons and Price drove one of them to his mother’s house to retrieve a rifle so guns could be displayed in the picture. Editors at the newspaper were upset because Price did not tell them the men planned to give up their guns.

Price was not in his Los Angeles office Friday and could not be reached.

Publication of the photograph has added to the tense atmosphere surrounding the federal civil rights trial of four white police officers in the Rodney G. King beating case.

Three of the gang members--Tyrone Calvert, Joseph Bates and Terrence Townsend--told a news conference in Los Angeles on Friday that they plan to file a $10-million lawsuit against USA Today. In a telephone interview, the men, who live in Watts, said they have been scorned by friends and neighbors since the picture appeared.

“It was an out-and-out blatant lie,” Bates said. “They wrote what they wanted, what would get more papers sold. Our intention was to give up guns, to get some jobs, to better ourselves. They portrayed us as hard-core criminal gang members who are ready to incite a riot.

“Do you really think I would incriminate myself on the front page of a paper that sells in all 50 states?” he asked. “It makes no sense. . . . I can’t even go nowhere with my family. People and the police just stare at me.”

“We were trying to show people we were tired of the environment we were in,” Townsend said. He said the USA Today staffers “knew that when they came. Why would you get in the paper saying you wanted revenge on the police? It’s stupid.”

“That story was totally wrong,” Calvert said. “The guy even took us to go get (the guns) so they could take a picture saying we wanted a riot. That’s not hardly what we wanted. We want jobs.”