Journalism

How do you protest at a virtual Democratic convention? LA Times op-ed

With the Democratic National Convention meeting virtually this year, the fate of another longstanding political tradition is also in jeopardy.
For decades, protesters have brought their issues to the streets of the Democratic convention’s host city, demanding that the party address controversial issues it might rather ignore. . . .
1960 was the year of the first big demonstrations at a Democratic convention. That year, the event was held in Los Angeles, and the party nominated John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson at the brand-new Sports Arena. Outside the arena, Martin Luther King Jr. joined thousands of marchers picketing to demand a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic platform.
…continued at the LA Times 8-16-20 HERE

Venice vs. the LAPD: in 1969, and L.A. Now: LA Times op-ed

July 4, 1969, was a day of festive parades and picnics across Southern California: Pacific Palisades had its annual “Americanism” parade, the West Covina parade had two Vietnam vets for its grand marshals and Claremont had an “Old Tyme Parade.”
Venice didn’t have a parade at all.
continued at LATimes, HERE

Los Angeles Faces Down Covid-19: The Nation

Driving past the Fountain Valley hospital south of Los Angeles, you see something new: a huge white tent in what was the parking lot. To Angelenos, it looks something like the tent that appears downtown Beverly Hills for the Vanity Fair Oscar party. But this one, and others like it outside hospitals throughout Southern California, is not a party tent; it’s a temporary structure designed to deal with the overflow of Covid-19 cases at the hospital—a “triage tent.” . . .
continued at TheNation.com, 4-16-2020, HERE

 

Set the Night on Fire: the LA Free Press – LA Review of Books

The underground press of the Sixties is often described as self-indulgent; critics said it “trampled the tenets of accuracy and fairness,” while the mainstream media of the era is often portrayed as bland and cautious, and as practicing a phony objectivity. That was not true of the newspaper landscape in Los Angeles. The LA Times was firmly and loudly right-wing, while the LA Free Press (the “Freep”), the first underground paper of the era, and the most successful, was often a voice of reason, albeit a passionate one. A simple comparison of the coverage of the 1965 Watts uprising reveals a great deal.. . .
Excerpt from “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties,” continued at the LA Review of Books HERE

The Problem of Pundits and the Promise of Big Data: L.A. Times op-ed

It’s been another tough political season for the pundits. Take Super Tuesday. On the Monday before the vote, a typical headline read something like this one from The Hill: “Sanders Poised for Big Super Tuesday.”
On Wednesday, those headlines were replaced by ones like this from CNBC: “Super Tuesday results: Joe Biden shocks the world.”
Predictions gone wrong are nothing new for the punditocracy, of course. . . .
. . . continued at LATimes.com, HERE

The White Power Movement From Reagan to Trump

Jon Wiener: El Paso,Christchurch, Charleston: the attackers have all been described as loners. You say they are all connected. How?
Kathleen Belew: We’re talking here about the White Power movement, a coalition that includes Klan groups, neo-Nazi groups, skinheads, and other activists.  One of their key tactics is called leaderless resistance—a few people work in a cell without direct communication with other cells and without direct orders from leadership. This strategy was implemented to stymie infiltration efforts and prosecution. But there’s been a much larger and more damaging legacy: It has effectively erased this entire movement as a movement, so what we see instead are a series of stories about lone wolf attackers, acts of violence that are inexplicable and unrelated to each other. . . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE   9/3/19

Reading the Mail of the Ruling Class: From the Old Mole in 1969 to Wikileaks today

Fifty years ago this spring, Harvard students occupied the school’s administration building, demanding that the university end its complicity in the Vietnam War by kicking ROTC off campus. The student demands also included creating a black studies program and ending evictions of working-class people from property the university wanted to develop.
We didn’t realize at the time that we were also raising another issue that continues to resonate today: whether the 1st Amendment protects the publication of “stolen” documents — a question back in the headlines today with the Trump administration’s indictment of Julian Assange, publisher of WikiLeaks, for espionage.
. . . continued at LATimes.com, HERE  5/23/19