The D.A.’s Press Attack

The Metropolitan News-Enterprise is a tiny newspaper, filled with legal notices and focusing on the doings of local courts and government. It prints only 2,500 copies daily, which circulate mostly among downtown politicians and bureaucrats. The newspaper’s small office near the Los Angeles Civic Center is sandwiched between a copy store and a snack shop. Some mornings, reporters and editors arrive to discover that thugs have once again scratched gang logos into the newspaper’s large windows overnight. Thursday, unwelcome visitors came in broad daylight--officials sent by L.A. County District Atty. Steve Cooley--but their behavior was no less outrageous than the vandals’.

Marching in with a search warrant, investigators shut down the newspaper for three hours Thursday, ordering reporters and editors out to the sidewalk. The investigators came looking for proof that a local law firm paid for an ad in the paper more than two months ago. The ad was a legal notice of a recall election in South Gate that is part of a broad political corruption probe in that city. Metropolitan News owner Roger M. Grace said the agents initially told him the search could last up to three days and that reporters’ desks would be searched unless Grace handed over the ad invoice and other documents, which he and his wife finally did.

Federal law and California’s shield law protect reporters from having to produce their notes, sources and other news-related documents as part of a criminal investigation and arguably can cover legal notices. Cooley’s warrant was written so broadly, potentially extending to reporters’ notes and documents, that the judge who granted it should have thrown it out on that ground alone.

Cooley’s office said the search was necessary to learn the name of the law firm that placed the notice. But since investigators were at the same time rummaging through the law firm’s files, it would seem they already knew.

Cooley’s invasion of the Metropolitan News evokes images from countries where newspapers either toe the government’s line or find their offices padlocked and their reporters jailed. We’d bet the district attorney would never try this kind of intimidation at the Los Angeles Times or some other large newspaper. He was absolutely wrong to do it to the Metropolitan News.