From the Archives: LA Weekly's Original Coverage of the L.A. Riots May Surprise You

From the Archives: LA Weekly's Original Coverage of the L.A. Riots May Surprise You

By Simone Wilson Fri., Apr. 27 2012 at 9:28 AM

Ted Soqui

Soqui's iconic photo of the Parker Center kiosk going down -- marking the start of the riots.

This week's print edition of LA Weekly is a "Then and Now" retrospective on the L.A. Riots -- a seven-page dive into the scenes of destruction across Los Angeles 20 years ago, and the state those places find themselves in today.

All this reminiscing led us to wonder: What was the Weekly's immediate reaction to the riots, back when Kit Rachlis was Editor in spring 1992? (But really, any excuse to go wild in the archive room.)

Here's what we found.

[Editor's note: The following two paragraphs were added at 4:45 p.m. Please see our correction at the end of this story.] One issue went by without any mention of the riots. Then, on May 8, the Weekly's cover, titled, "Judgment Day," featured a picture of Rodney King next to a photo of a scorched car.

Inside the issue, per the table of contents: "In our coverage of the Los Angeles Riot of 1992, Weekly reporters offer a collaborative hour-by-hour account of how it all came down on the streets in the wake of Rodney King verdict ..." Although we have not been able to locate a copy of the issue, the table promises such treats as "Harold Meyerson analyzes the disappearance of L.A.'s old political order in the ashes, and looks in vain for something to replace it" and "Laureen Lazarovici looks at the riot's impact on the swing voters who will decide the fate of the Christopher Commission's recommended reforms." Another piece was a "Weekly lexicon explain[ing] what the new language we all learned to speak that week really means."

Then on May 15, there was one news short -- focusing on the political future of L.A. County District Attorney Ira Reiner, whose career we could clearly give a damn about all these years later.

The title of the D.A. analysis referenced the riots' fiery death toll: "Up in Smoke: Add the Rodney King verdict to the McMartin preschool fiasco, and Ira Reiner looks like one more riot-related casualty." (The cover tease, in similar fashion, read, "Ira Reiner, R.I.P." Only obit in the place.)

The May 15 issue also featured a special riots-themed edition of Matt Groening's long-running Life in Hell comic strip. Groening seemed a little speechless:

LA Weekly archives

The week's cover story, meanwhile, lamented the near-extinct lifestyle of the cowboy-poet. (Yes, cowboys who are also poets.) We noticed a two-page spread on Cormac McCarthy's latest, All the Pretty Horses, as well.

The city still smelled of smoke.

Ted Soqui, the photographer behind the completely insane/heart-stopping photos in the pages of our current edition, says the LA Weekly didn't request his services back when the riots broke out, although he was a regular contributor and one of the first photojournalists at the scene.

Back then, the Weekly "was more writerly, not a photographer's paper at all," says Soqui."The photos were put in almost because they had to be. They didn't tell me to go out -- I just did it. If I had waited, I think it would have been days until they called me."

In the May 22 issue, Groening was back, with a strip making fun of the giddy rubberneckers on the Westside, bragging to their friends about their own hardcore place in history:

LA Weekly archives

On the news front, the May 22 issue also tiptoed a step further toward the great angry elephant in the room with a couple single-pagers on 1) The Innocents, or, curfew violators who were just trying to get home from work, yet were later coerced into pleading guilty, and 2) the various Latino political leaders who handled/mishandled the riots. (The article heaps praise onto City Councilman Mike Hernandez for his aggressive approach, rushing all over the city and hosting impromptu press conferences. Of course, we know now that Hernandez had been a $150-a-day coke addict, who allegedly showed up high to events prior to his 1997 drug bust.)

It wasn't until June 5 that the Weekly printed the closest thing we can find to ~~an L.A. Riots issue~~ an analysis of race relations in light of the riots. The cover, a graphic of different skin colors mosaiced onto a single face that screamed "early '90s," bore the question: "Is Multiculturalism the New Racism?"

LA Weekly archives

The series of articles within is pretty fascinating, actually -- but as it relates to the riots, it's wonky, pompous and lost in thought. A piece by white guy Tom Carson called "Why I Don't Want to Be Black" examines the annoying trend of "white hipsters as pseudo-blacks." Then comes a Rodney King quote-pun: Ruben Martinez writes "Can We Stop Getting Along," in which he laments the effect that increased racial sensitivity will have on the quality of modern art. They both read like Xeroxed chapters from a liberal-arts thesis.

"I think the Weekly felt like it wasn't a newspaper that had to report immediately," says Soqui. "They wanted to digest everything."

Editor in Chief Kit Rachlis and his team were largely uninterested in running his images, Soqui recalls. (Although for the record, LA Weekly did later collaborate with a publishing company to print a separate photo book of the riots.)

Yet dailies and alt-weeklies all over the rest of the country were banging down Soqui's door for photos of the mayhem -- including, ironically, the Village Voice and SF Weekly, now sister papers of LA Weekly.

The Voice was "running my pictures left and right," says Soqui. "There were papers all up and down California contacting me. They were way more interested than it seemed like the Weekly was."

Darnell Hunt, a UCLA professor who wrote a book on media coverage of the riots, says he remembers African-American paper The Sentinel, "a number of different Korean-American papers" and the Los Angeles Times being at the forefront of the conversation. Other than that, he laments, TV news stations were "very stuck in breaking-news mode," covering the "latest looting, the latest confrontation with police."

Ideally, says Hunt, "alternative media would do a better job of focusing on the underlying causes, as opposed to the symptoms."

Editor's Note: Somewhere between the archive room and our own muddled organization, we lost an issue in there, and a previous version of this post failed to acknowledge the paper's coverage in its May 8 issue. We regret the error.

Editor's Note No. 2: On Tuesday morning, L.A. Magazine's Mary Melton was kind enough to put together a PDF of the May 8 issue, and Fishbowl L.A. helpfully provided a link. Be sure to check it out.

[@simone_electra / swilson@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]

Tags:

Kit Rachlis, L.A. Riots, photojournalist, Ted Soqui

We Recommend

Kate Sullivan

Whatever. The real elephant in the room is how little the LA Weekly matters to the people of Los Angeles since it was taken over by the New Times.

J Michael Walker

The sad, inept quality of this article and its author's lack of deep thinking are also highlighted by the comment about "Matt Groening's long-running Life in Hell comic strip. Groening seemed a little speechless." Speechless? Matt absolutely nailed one aspect of it: Life here WAS hell, on some level, for many Angelenos - and for many (Most?) of us in the uprising's throes and aftermath it was a hellish, tragic and frightening experience.

I would add that describing the May 22nd LIH as "a strip making fun of the giddy rubberneckers on the Westside, bragging to their friends about their own hardcore place in history" is also a complete failure of the author to grasp satire of the reasonably blistering variety. No matter how terrible, how tragic, how devastating the event, there will always be someone out there who sees an opportunity to make money, and a bunch of fools eager to be parted with it. For goodness' sake, Groening practically spelled that out across the top--probably after receiving a bunch of letters to the effect of, "Huh?" concerning the burning skyline strip.

Not pc

That "Multiculturalism: The new racism?" story would be an interesting read but I bet the current staff doesn't have the balls to put it up in the online archives much less reprint it.

ruben martinez

Many have already rightly and eloquently pointed out that Ms. Wilson's copy is ignorant drivel. I just wanted to shout out to my colleagues -- this is like a virtual mini-reunion of the Weekly class of '92. I am proud to have worked alongside you all in our city's rawest moments. We testified.

Msigman

I was publisher of the Weekly at the time inquestion. To say that the Weekly staff reacted uniformly, immediately, fiercely andoften brilliantly to the riots is an understatement.

That first day was also the only time Harold Meyerson ever yelled at me. When I suggested that perhaps our receptionist could go home, since the burning and looting were getting awfully close to our building, he said, “Are you crazy? this is anewspaper!” And he was right.

Dave Gardetta

Ms. Wilson,

First, let me second Tom Carson's final thought concerning you. He was always our most eloquent writer. Next, let me suggest that when you cover a story, you speak with the people who -- in this instance -- were making the editorial decisions inside that building in 1992, not a freelance photographer.

Best wishes in your career,

Jeezycreezy

those writers and editors you so easily dismissed aren't that hard to find, indeed, and a few phone calls or emails would have really helped. Surely there's an editor at the Weekly who suggested this? God, I hope so.

Holly

Edit suggestion after "Here's what we found" insert "Our heads planted up our own asses." Delete the rest.

Jason Wojciechowski

Even if the mind-blowingly terrible mistake of completely missing an issue of the paper hadn't happened, the post would have been a failure. I'm all for looking back on your publication's history and talking about what you did wrong in the service of getting better. But this didn't set out to do that. It wasn't an exploration of how a weekly paper can be timely and interesting and do important local work. It was simply "we didn't do this." Only the very last line of the piece even gets close to an examination of a weekly's role in things, and that's practically throwaway.

Instead of a critical examination of the Weekly's (supposed) failings, why they matter, and what the paper could do the next time something like this happens (especially in light of the changed media culture / marketplace over the last 20 years), we get six paragraphs of whining about how Ted Soqui's photographs weren't used.

And seriously? An editorial staff that thinks this post was publishable has the temerity to sign off on wisecracks about the Tom Carson and Ruben Martinez pieces? Please do look into acquiring licenses to Carson and Martinez's undergraduate work -- it would surely improve the quality of the paper.

Bsquared2

In the words of another Matt Groening character....

D'oh!

Judith Lewis Mernit

The bizarre inaccuracy of this post aside, I'm not sure what Ms. Wilson is trying to prove here by disrespecting another era of the institution she works for. It seems to me she should be doing everything she can to shore up the continuum that connects that LA Weekly with the this one.

I mean, do you really think there are people running around L.A. saying "Oh wow! The LA Weekly is so much better now than it used to be!" No, there aren't. To the extent that people in this city think about the LA Weekly at all, they wonder where all those political columnists and narrative feature writers went, along with the deeply felt endorsements we did each election season. Those things made the paper meaningful to the people who lived here back in the day, which it sure isn't now.

As for the riots — I was the paper's arts editor back then, but I hadn't even been here a year. I hardly slept and violated curfew twice helping to get a paper out. I also remember trying to make it to Parker Center, and freaking out because the trees were on fire and people were jumping on my car hood. But I looked to my right, and saw Art Directors Scott Ford and Bill Smith walking down the street among the burning trees, talking as if covering a riot was all in a day's work. It was impressive, as was much of what my colleagues did back then.

Bill Smith

I, too, was on staff at the weekly during the '92 riots. As Paul pointed out, the last print run (Calendar section) left the door late Wednesday afternoon. The News and feature sections were already on the press, or printed by the time things started to heat up.The staff was usually exhausted by Wednesday, but most of editorial hit the streets again to cover the protests or be a part of them. There were LA Weekly staff all over the city that night. I remember Ted Soqui shooting so much he ran out of film, and Rubén Martínez' car being burnt to the ground. Art director, Scott Ford and I stayed with the mob and witnessed cars being overturned, LA TImes' windows being smashed, kiosks burning.The issue that resulted from the next several days of labor was one of the most ambitious and unique perspectives on the riots published in LA or elsewhere. I wish I'd saved a copy.I'm glad and surprised that New Times has an issue. I seem to remember staffers telling me that New Times management had destroyed most of the back issue library of the former Weekly upon taking over. Maybe that's why you couldn't find it.

Tom Carson

Dear Ms. Wilson,

I was on staff at the Weekly at the time of the riots. I well remember the emergency editorial meeting as the verdicts were announced, followed by assignments to everyone to cover every trouble spot we'd heard was brewing. Our May 8 issue -- featuring not only thousands of words of on-the-spot reportage and photographs, but a left-wing analysis of what had happened that I believe was unequalled by any other newspaper in the United States -- is my single proudest moment in journalism, even though I was a minor participant. So fuck you.

Paul Malcolm

You write:

"One issue went by without any mention of the riots. Then, on May 8, the Weekly's cover, titled, 'Judgment Day,' featured a picture of Rodney King next to a photo of a scorched car."

The riots started on Wednesday, April 29. The paper that came out on Thursday, April 30 was already put to bed and probably already on the printing press when the first sparks started. So unless you were expecting a weekly paper to suddenly switch into daily publication mode it's hard to know how you justify the phrasing "One issue went by without any mention of the riots."

So to recap, you can't correctly search your own archives, you can't read a calendar and you have no idea what the word "weekly" means in the title of the paper you write for. With those kind of journalism skills, the mind boggles as to how the current paper would cover such a calamity today.

Mmmm, Shower bath

Nor can they read a clock or distinguish between times of day.

Photo caption says: "Soqui's iconic photo of the Parker Center kiosk going down -- marking the start of the riots"

Um, no. That was at night. The riots started mid-afternoon, in DAYLIGHT, and were televised as they started.

Guesstimate of how many staff @laweekly now were actually in socal in 1992? Probably not many.

Molly

You really should update your headline now that you got your information right, you clueless blogger person. It's not surprising at all. That was one of the best staffs the LA Weekly ever had. They put you people to shame. And you should be ashamed of yourself.