A City as Envisioned by a Newspaper

The 21st century began as an embarrassment for Los Angeles. All day we watched as, time zone by time zone, the other great cities of the world celebrated with a raucous pride in themselves, pride not possible unless citizens felt a share in both their city’s identity and its claim to glory. But when midnight struck in Los Angeles, we made hardly a peep. Los Angeles, survivor of riots and earthquakes, the city with the greatest ethnic diversity of any city anywhere at any time in history; center of the world’s TV and film industries, where Hollywood has defined glamour for a century; city of moguls and lowriders, New Age hooey and surfboard daredeviltry, where wave upon wave of people come to invent and live out their dreams--Los Angeles could not find in its heart any shared pride or glory to celebrate.

New Year’s Eve 1999 revealed us to ourselves as an encampment of loners posing as a city, where most feel stuck in the traffic jam of everyone else’s ambitions. “What do we do together in this town?” I asked a friend, soon after New Year’s. “We drive the freeways and we read the L.A. Times,” he said. He thought he was being sarcastic, but as he said it, he realized he was right.

We watch 100 different channels, we go all over the world on the Net, we listen to dozens of niche radio stations, read dozens more niche magazines and our neighborhoods are segregated by income and race and ethnicity, but the one constant from the desert to the sea is the L.A. Times. A fact that apparently was not a cause for celebration but a fact, nonetheless.

“Before there was a city, there was a paper,” Gore Vidal said last week, when discussing the Los Angeles Times. Other cities generated their newspapers, but the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times can be said, without much exaggeration, to have built this city. A century ago, when this was an out-of-the-way town unimportant on the map of America, the powers behind the L.A. Times had a grand and greedy vision: a West Coast city to rival any in the world, if only you could steal enough water, build a harbor, attract industry and exert sufficient control from the top to let that industry have its way. Relentlessly, the L.A. Times, and the money it represented, pursued those goals and built that city. Yes, it got a large break when moviemakers congregated here circa 1914, and a larger break from World War II, which brought big industry and hundreds of thousands of laborers to settle here. But without the infrastructure and power structure created by the Chandler empire and its circle, those developments would not have been possible.

When the city became important enough to be self-conscious about its lack of culture, the L.A. Times empire spearheaded the buying and import of culture, and any culture it didn’t recognize and get behind, like the brilliant music scene of Central Avenue in the 1940s or the Latino art scene of the last 20 years, was often marginalized. Needing heavier national political clout after the Second World War, the Chandler circle looked for a champion and found one in a young, brilliant and unscrupulous candidate for Congress, Richard M. Nixon. It’s unlikely he would have risen without L.A. Times support. Whether one agrees with their vision or not, the Chandlers had one, they pushed it and they made it stick.

They didn’t do it pretty. They generally rode roughshod over many a more generous vision of what Los Angeles could be, and they could make life miserable for anyone who got in their way. If they can take credit for the very existence of the city, they must also take the blame, and shoulder not a little shame, for its inequities, its lack of identity, its well-deserved reputation for expediency. Saying that, it must also be admitted that city-building is rarely an edifying sight when looked at closely. Robert Moses in New York, and the role of the New York Times from the 1930s through the 1960s, aren’t sweet examples of democracy. City-building is about power, and power is, to put it mildly, not nice.

What’s different about Los Angeles is that much of the power to make the city work was generated, for better and worse, from its major newspaper. As a result, its reportage was, shall we say, suspect. But in the last 35 years, conscientious journalists brought the L.A. Times within range of the New York Times and the Washington Post, as one of the few significant papers in the country. If it has frustrated us by never having quite fulfilled its promise, it has engaged us by having a promise to fulfill. And when the paper focuses on a subject, its level of in-depth coverage is as high as anywhere.

Certainly, it’s undeniable that The Times has cared deeply about Los Angeles--within the realm and limits of its interests, surely, but that can be said of any of us.

For myself, I found out that I cared for the newspaper more deeply than I’d realized when I woke to the headline it was being taken over by the Tribune Co. I felt as I had on New Year’s Eve: embarrassed. Los Angeles no longer is the headquarters of a major financial institution, so we have to depend for investment on people with no stake in the city; we’ve never had a major publishing house--we long ago ceded that crucial function to New York; our baseball team is still largely famous for what it did once upon a time in Brooklyn; our alternative papers answer to New York and Phoenix; and now our immensely influential daily newspaper is going to be owned by a company in Chicago.

Not to worry. The L.A. Times will be “a wholly owned subsidiary,” with a separate board of directors, and the buyers are assuring anyone who asks that there will be complete editorial independence. Yet, looking at the Chicago Tribune, print journalists are strongly encouraged to do broadcast work as well. So there’s a double message: There will be complete autonomy, but change is on the way, and that change is coming from Chicago.

Whether the changes will affect the level of journalism at the L.A. Times will be evident soon enough, and there’s no point prejudging. It’s certainly possible that the Chicago owners, beholden to no powers here, could make some fruitful trouble in all the right places. But it’s no comfort to know that they’ll have no stake in the consequences: The quality of their streets, their institutions, their daily life, will not be directly affected by anything the L.A. Times prints, supports or rejects.

What is certain is that we are a city adrift, and our fate is less in our own hands than it has ever been. A century ago, the L.A. Times had a vision, and, however one may argue with that vision, a city was created and it became our city, and we became its people. We have always been more fragmented than most cities, though, as someone who once lived in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, I can witness that the relationship of those boroughs to Manhattan, and to each other, is problematic at best (something the New York Times, an elite Manhattan organ, is queasy of admitting).

We haven’t a Times Square or an Eiffel Tower or Acropolis to gather in. We speak too many languages and have too many discordant cultural and ethnic values to communicate fluidly with each other. The rich look down from their houses on the hills, or look away from their houses by the sea, while the rest struggle in a confusing maze, a concrete and steel bazaar without center and without an elective city authority that can effectively translate our desires into action. We brought these conditions on ourselves and have no one to blame but ourselves. But can Chicago ask, much less answer, where Los Angeles is going and how it should get there?

It is not an easy question, but that is the question that the new incarnation of the L.A. Times will be asked, every day, by its readers.

Los Angeles is still an unfinished city, a city seeking its identity and seeking its reason for shared celebration, which is to say, a city seeking the kind of change that brings about a commonly shared range of sensibility, a feeling of belonging that Angelenos don’t yet have. As our only common voice, the L.A. Times is central to that quest, no matter who owns it. *