Today’s Agenda

Has the media concentrated too much on the wealthier communities and people devastated by the fires in Southern California? That’s what Evelyn Kellman writes in today’s Gripe.

She may have a point, says Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the journalism school at UC Berkeley and author of “The Media Monopoly.”

“There does tend to be a disproportionate concentration on large impressive homes.”

According the Bagdikian, reporters and editors have a tendency to identify with people “like ourselves--not that we’re all rich and have mansions, but we tend to speak the same language.”

Affluent people generally feel at home talking to the media, he says, and reporters tend to concentrate on people who can tell them what they can understand more readily or that media people can identify with.

“Some of it is, I think, almost inevitable,” he says. “It is a matter of public interest that the Getty Museum was threatened or that there have been some huge mansions lost. There’s glamour in it. And also the media do overstress celebrity.

“When I moved from L.A. to Washington for two years back in the late ‘60s, I realized that big politicos were the organizing principle around Washington news,” Bagdikian says. “In L.A., it’s the entertainment industry and celebrities. There’s a lot of awareness of them in the general public and that’s partly because of the stress on celebrities in the media.”

At the start of a catastrophe like the fires, Bagdikian says, “You’re mostly dealing with the holocaust and the actual phenomenon and occasional mention maybe of landmarks disappearing. But I think the real test comes afterward, when it becomes necessary for the entire community to understand the complexity of the problem and that many of the burned out areas had some modest homes.”

It isn’t enough to say that a lot of people identify with the big house on the hill and aspire to it, Bagdikian says.

“A lot of people are bitter ‘cause they know they’re never going to get it. But also they’re dealing with what your letter writer wrote about. The loss and trauma are just as great for both (the affluent and non-affluent) psychologically, but the recovery is in fact easier for someone affluent. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, God knows.”

It’s nice when one has the money and the sophistication to deal with the aftermath of the devastation, he says. Poorer people have fewer resources to deal with insurance companies.

Bagdikian says some “brutal” rules of California insurers were changed after the Oakland and Berkeley Hills fires in 1991 partly because of an activist insurance commissioner, John Garamendi, and partly because highly educated, affluent people find it easier to come together to hire a good law firm and fight. “Hiring a lawyer and a law firm is much more common to people with money than it is with people who don’t have money,” Bagdikian says.

But it all comes down to the fact that journalism tends to concentrate on items that people can identify with because they have been been publicized in the past, he says.