WHAT A HEEL!: Just Who Is The One With The Conflict Of Interest At The Los Angeles Times?: Part II
Los Angeles media blog LA Observed published an open letter that Los Angeles Times staff writer Mark Arax e-mailed "to everyone on the news editing system laying out his side and demanding a public apology" from Managing Editor Doug Frantz for accusing him of bias and reassigning an article on H.Res.106 to a non-Armenian reporter. Here are excerpts:
I have been accused by Doug Frantz of having an opinion on the Armenian genocide. "Are you now or have you ever been a believer in the Armenian Genocide?" Of the numerous accusations that Frantz has thrown my way over the past month, this one I am happy to plead guilty to. Yes, I have a stance on the Armenian genocide. I believe it happened. And I am gratified to know that my newspaper believes it happened, as well. So here is the dilemma at hand: What is our obligation when this same newspaper, in stories from Istanbul in 2004 and 2005, begins to contradict its policy on the genocide? What is a reporter to do when members of the Armenian community—judges, politicians, civic leaders--start calling and demanding to know why the newspaper is suddenly throwing qualifiers in front of the word "genocide?"
This was the question confronting me and Greg Krikorian and Ralph Vartabedian and Robin Abcarian in the fall of 2005. So we did what our Jewish and African American and Latino and Asian colleagues have done countless times when faced with an ethnic community angry over our coverage. We went to our editors. We reminded them in a letter that the newspaper had an official policy on the genocide—that it happened, that there was no need to equivocate or treat it like a "he said-she said" dodge. We pointed out chapter and verse in the Times style book. "The Armenian genocide is a historical fact and we should use the word ‘genocide’ without qualification in referring to it." To act as our newspaper’s eyes and ears and help correct the error was our duty. To stay silent would have been a dereliction of that duty and only served to damage our newspaper’s public standing even more.
Thus, the proper question confronting Doug Frantz as he read my story three weeks ago on the Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress is not whether I believed in the Armenian genocide or signed that letter in September 2005. The proper question—the only question that mattered--was whether I had allowed my beliefs to bleed into my story in a way that made it tendentious. This is the same question that every editor must ask of every story because all reporters, all human beings, have opinions. And yet it does not matter, really, what Henry Weinstein believes in his gut about capital punishment. It does not matter what Megan Stack utters over dinner about the war in Iraq. It does not matter what Robert Lopez writes in a memo to his editor about our coverage of border issues. The only question that needs to be answered is if their biases are on display in a story. This is what we have spent years training as journalists to put aside—our own quarrels, our own narratives, our own wounds. This is how I, the son of a murder victim who had spent more than half his life searching for the killers, was able to go inside the California prison system and uncover official abuses against murderers and rapists.
LA Observed reports that, "Word going around Times staffers [is] that editor Jim O'Shea ordered Frantz to make a public apology and that it wasn't going down too well with Frantz." Neither O'Shea nor Frantz confirmed the rumor.
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