Epic Self-Own: The LA Times Admits That They Are Racist

 Liberals are racist. There is no getting around this fact for them. They view everything as a matter of race, and they insist on judging people based on their color of their skin, not the content of their character. Of course, liberals and their progressive ilk don't have any character. They just have emotion and vehemence.

Now, the new owner of the Los Angeles Times has come clean and admitted that his newspaper is racist. Check out his open letter to this (very small) reading public.

I am not going to waste my time trying to sort through and comment on every aspect of this article. I am content to let the editorial and the open letter from the publisher speak for themselves.

The LA Times admits that they are racist!

The Times’reckoning on race and our commitment to meaningful change

By DR. PATRICK SOON-SHIONG

SEP. 27, 2020 3 AM PT

This year, with the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis, the systemic racism in our country has been laid bare. One need only look at who was vulnerable to and suffering from COVID-19 to understand how racial inequality disadvantages those who are discriminated against.

And then in May, as our physical environments remained limited and we were increasingly reliant on news media to stay connected to the world, we collectively witnessed — through a bystander’s cellphone video — the horrific killing of a Black man, George Floyd, in the custody of a white police officer. It was not an isolated event, but it was galvanizing, and it spoke to centuries of racism in America that started with the enslavement of Black people.

Since then, across America, we’ve engaged in conversations about race and discrimination that have been candid, direct and consequential. They are happening among friends and co-workers, through protests and political debates, at athletic events and in pop culture. And they are happening at the Los Angeles Times.

This news organization can succeed only to the degree it engages, examines and accurately reflects the city and the region. Much of its best work has succeeded because it has done that.

As the country grapples with the role of systemic racism, The Times has committed to examining its past. This project looks at our treatment of people of color — outside and inside the newsroom — throughout our nearly 139-year history.

More stories

But over its history, The Times has also mirrored, and in some cases propagated, the biases and prejudices of the world it covers, reflecting and shaping attitudes that have contributed to social and economic inequity. Today, we are beginning the process of acknowledging those biases of the past and taking positive action to affirm a commitment that our newsroom will not tolerate prejudice.

Since it began publication in the early 1880s, The Times has had blind spots. It has ignored large swaths of the city and its diverse population, or covered them in one-dimensional, sometimes racist ways. In part that is because the paper’s staff has never truly reflected the region. The paper employed no Black staff journalists until the mid-1960s. Latinos have never been represented on the staff in anything like their numbers in the community. The Metro staff didn’t have its first Asian American staff member until the late 1970s.

As the Los Angeles Times’ first nonwhite owners in its nearly 139-year history, my wife, Michele, and I are determined to increase diversity within the organization. We believe that The Times can better represent Los Angeles and California by providing more and better coverage of Black, Latino, Asian and other underrepresented communities in our English- and Spanish-language publications. We have committed to hiring more reporters and editors of color and to building an organizational culture that truly values representation and equity. We will strive to retain, mentor and promote journalists of color. And we will be transparent in this process.

These are issues deeply important to my family and me.

I met Michele when we were both teenagers in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where my father had fled from China during World War II. I was a member of an anti-apartheid student union. Later, as a young, nonwhite doctor in a society predicated on racial prejudice, I received a salary that was 50% that of my peers at a hospital where my first white patient refused to let me touch him.

Michele vividly remembers being told there was no place for her in the entertainment industry, just as I remember being arrested by the police in South Africa for refusing to carry an identity card. We know well the pain of both explicit and unconscious racism, something you cannot fully understand unless you have experienced it yourself. For a person of color, the structural and interpersonal violence that is the legacy of colonialism, slavery and policies designed to disenfranchise human beings based on their race or ethnicity is unmistakable. It is part of everyday life.

Michele and I came to the United States in 1980 for the opportunities it promised and have made Los Angeles our home. We were attracted to Southern California, in part, because of its rich diversity, and we feel deeply rooted in this wonderful city where we have raised our children and made our lives. We have been immensely fortunate, and purchasing the Los Angeles Times in 2018 came from a desire to give back to a city that has given us so much.

Our guiding hope has been to rebuild The Times following years of disinvestment, strengthen the newsroom that plays a critical role in our democracy, and help make the paper a beacon of truth and inspiration. We also feel a deep personal responsibility and duty to fight racism and bias. The national reckoning on race and that within the Los Angeles Times are welcome developments that have already led to productive conversations, concrete plans and accelerated progress for us.

We are committed to change, both because it is just and because it is mission-critical for our business. Only a diverse newsroom can accurately tell this city’s stories. Only a newspaper that holds power to account and uncovers injustice can truly succeed.

The Times has committed to a close examination of its past, beginning with the project we are launching today. It starts with an overview by the editorial board of The Times’ history in covering and employing people of color and an acknowledgment of the paper’s failings. Over the following days, we will run stories by staff reporters and columnists examining in greater depth, and from a personal perspective, aspects of the paper’s coverage of nonwhite communities and treatment of journalists of color.

We eagerly embrace this self-examination because we believe we can move forward only by first understanding what came before. In South Africa, it was truth and reconciliation that led to meaningful change. By confronting the injustices of the past, we can meet this historic moment and make The Times an institution and publication that can serve you, our readers, and the community better.

We invite you along on our journey.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board official issued an apology for being racist:

Editorial: Anexamination of The Times’ failures on race, our apology and a path forward

Headline reads "Marauders from inner city prey on LA's suburbs" at the top of a 1981 Los Angeles Times front page

A story that reinforced harmful stereotypes about Black and Latino Angelenos appeared on the front page on July 12, 1981.(Los Angeles Times)

The headline was stripped across the top of the front page, “Marauders From Inner City Prey on L.A.’s Suburbs.” The story, published by The Times on July 12, 1981, described a “permanent underclass” in the city’s “ghettos and barrios,” fueling a crime wave that was spilling over from South Los Angeles into prosperous — and largely white — communities in Pasadena, Palos Verdes, Beverly Hills and elsewhere.

The article, the first of a two-part series, purported to be an ambitious look at a major social problem, and it cited a lack of education and jobs as underlying causes of inner-city distress. But it also reinforced pernicious stereotypes that Black and Latino Angelenos were thieves, rapists and killers. It sensationalized and pathologized the struggles of poor families and painted residents of South L.A. with a broad brush. It quoted police and prosecutors unskeptically and implied that more aggressive policing and harsher judicial sentencing were the only effective responses to crime.

For the record:

10:18 AM, Sep. 28, 2020An earlier version of this story identified Dean Takahashi as a Metro reporter in 1992. He was a business reporter.

The story lacked nuance and context, neglecting decades of government policies that had led to housing and school segregation and to the creation of ghettos and barrios, which were then provided with inferior public services. And it failed to give any real sense that the vast majority of the area’s residents were ordinary, law-abiding citizens, just trying to raise families and get by.

The series drew prompt and deserved criticism that highlighted an insidious problem that has marred the work of the Los Angeles Times for much of its history: While the paper has done groundbreaking and important work highlighting the issues faced by communities of color, it has also often displayed at best a blind spot, at worst an outright hostility, for the city’s nonwhite population, one both rooted and reflected in a shortage of Indigenous, Black, Latino, Asian and other people of color in its newsroom.

Our reckoning with racism

As the country grapples with the role of systemic racism, The Times has committed to examining its past. This project looks at our treatment of people of color — outside and inside the newsroom — throughout our nearly 139-year history.

More stories

Prompted by a pandemic, an economic crisis and a national debate over policing — all of which have spotlighted racial disparities in the United States — our nation now faces a long-delayed reckoning with systemic racism. We would be remiss, in the autumn of 2020, a season of grief and introspection, if we did not take part in that self-examination. This editorial is one part of that process.

A comprehensive and balanced history of Los Angeles journalism — a people’s history that tells the story of The Times from the perspective of its employees and its readers — has yet to be written. But a deep look at the paper’s pages over time tells part of that story.

Under Harrison Gray Otis, who controlled The Times from 1882 until his death in 1917, the newspaper stood for the raw exercise of industrialists’ and landowners’ power over Los Angeles.

For at least its first 80 years, the Los Angeles Times was an institution deeply rooted in white supremacy and committed to promoting the interests of the city’s industrialists and landowners. No one embodied this aggressive, conservative ideology more than Harrison Gray Otis, the walrus-mustachioed Civil War veteran who controlled The Times from 1882 until his death in 1917.

The modern notion that journalism’s core precepts include uncovering hard truths and exposing inequity would have been foreign to Otis and other press barons of the last Gilded Age. Far from a mission of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” his newspaper stood for the raw exercise of power, and he used it to further a naked agenda of score settling, regional boosterism, economic aggrandizement and union busting.

Otis was a Lincoln Republican who had fought on the side of the Union and opposed slavery. But his Times was a newspaper aimed at the mostly Protestant white settlers who migrated to California from the Midwest and the Plains in the decades after it was seized from Mexico in 1848 and admitted to the Union in 1850.

Again and again, The Times sought to shape and dominate the region instead of merely chronicling it. Using a trade group known as the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Assn., Otis spearheaded a campaign to prevent and impede unionization. He weighed in on the side of San Pedro over Santa Monica in an epic 1890s battle over where to locate a federally funded deepwater port. His family meddled in the politics of Mexico, where they owned a huge ranch, in an attempt to preserve their land rights. He was part of a powerful syndicate that pushed for the acquisition of water rights from farmers in the Owens Valley in 1913 — a decision fictionalized in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film “Chinatown” — and the annexation of the San Fernando Valley in 1915.

And in all of his crusades, he enlisted the powerful voice of his newspaper.

During the early 20th century, as control passed from Otis to his son-in-law Harry Chandler and his heirs, The Times promoted the city’s explosive growth. But even as Dust Bowl migration, the World War II arms industry and a vast movement of Black Americans escaping Jim Crow segregation transformed the city, the newspaper remained nearly entirely white in its staff, its readership and its outlook.

A tragic example of why that was a problem was the newspaper’s support for wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in our nation’s history. (The Times apologized in 2017 for that editorial position.)

Here’s another example: In 1943, sailors on leave from wartime service rampaged lawlessly in downtown Los Angeles, attacking young Mexican Americans fitted in so-called zoot suits — long coats and wide trousers pegged at the ankle. The Times largely ignored the context — the social and economic upheaval brought about by wartime mobilization and the racist trope of threatened white womanhood — and blamed the victims instead of their assailants. When First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt suggested that the rioting might have grown out of racial discrimination toward Mexican Americans, The Times vehemently denied that was possible, asserting in an editorial, “We like Mexicans and we think they like us.”

After the war ended, The Times became an uncritical mouthpiece for Washington as it covered the Eisenhower administration’s Operation Wetback, which used military-style tactics to deport Mexican migrants — some of them U.S. citizens — who had been invited north to perform agricultural labor during the war.

Headlines read "Zoot suiters learn lesson in fights with servicemen" and "Inquiry on Jap activities set"

Coverage of the so-called Zoot Suit Riots and a congressional investigation into Japanese Americans appear in the June 7, 1943, edition of the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper blamed the zoot suit-wearing Mexican American victims of attacks by servicemen and supported the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.(Los Angeles Times)

The most enlightened of the Chandlers was Otis, fourth and last of the patriarchs who controlled The Times for its first century. The Times’ standards and reputation improved under his tenure as publisher, from 1960 to 1980. He plowed what were then vast profits into the hiring of hundreds of journalists and reoriented the paper in a more politically neutral direction. Famously, Chandler authorized the publication, in 1961, of an investigation into the anti-communist John Birch Society, whose members included far-right white supremacists — and members of Chandler’s extended family (though he also presided over the paper’s 1964 presidential endorsement of Barry Goldwater, who strongly opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act).

By the standards of his time, Chandler was a moderate, if not always consistent. He endorsed most goals of the civil rights movement and in 1965, during the Watts uprising, served as an informal mediator between Black protesters and the Police Department. In 1969, The Times endorsed the historic mayoral candidacy of Councilman Tom Bradley, a grandson of slaves who in 1973 would go on to defeat Mayor Sam Yorty, the divisive white incumbent.

But even as The Times moved in a more progressive direction, its newsroom did not come close to representing the city’s demographics. The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the August 1965 civil unrest in Watts, yet the reporters and editors on the story were nearly all white. A 24-year-old Black advertising messenger, Robert Richardson, covered the disturbances, driving to the scene and phoning in his reports. Named a reporter trainee after the riots, he was given next to no support and left the paper the next year.

“The View From Watts,” an in-depth series The Times published in October 1965, chronicled pent-up frustrations in the Black community, and an accompanying editorial recommended summer jobs, improved police-community relations, stronger school nutrition programs and similar reforms. But the project too often took a patronizing view of Black Angelenos, most egregiously in a piece called “Police Brutality: State of Mind?” that used selective examples and unexamined quotes from police officers to heavily imply that police brutality was a thing of the past.

The Kerner Commission, impaneled to study the root causes of 1967 uprisings in Detroit, Newark, N.J., and other cities, was prophetic in calling for the hiring of Black journalists. “The scarcity of Negroes in responsible news jobs intensifies the difficulties of communicating the reality of the contemporary American city to white newspaper and television audiences,” the panel found. That was certainly true at The Times.

It was not just that The Times saw fit to hire white men almost exclusively for its newsroom; the stories it told were largely for and about white people, which meant Angelenos weren’t getting an accurate account of their city, region and state at a time of rapid change.

Typical of the paper’s attitude was a 1978 interview in which Otis Chandler airily dismissed Black and Latino readers: “It’s not their kind of newspaper. It’s too big, it’s too stuffy. If you will, it’s too complicated.”

Chandler later stepped back from that, saying the paper was looking for readers in the “broad middle class” and “upper classes” regardless of race or ethnicity. “We are not a paper that’s sought after in the lower-class areas,” he said.

Around that time, in 1979, The Times was slow to cover the shooting of Eula Love, a 39-year-old Black homemaker who was shot to death by Los Angeles police officers in her South L.A. frontyard in a dispute over an unpaid gas bill. L.A.’s afternoon daily, the Herald Examiner, played the story big, and Black residents were outraged at what they saw as an egregious example of police abuse. After being hammered by other media outlets for underplaying the story, including in an Esquire article headlined “Mr. Otis Regrets,” The Times ran a long story by media writer David Shaw about how it had “muffed” the story, and top editors began rethinking how the paper covered the LAPD.

Eula Love

Eula Love was shot and killed Jan. 3, 1979, by Los Angeles police officers in her frontyard. The Times’ coverage of the killing was lacking.

As has often been the case in history, progress came from the bottom up. After the “marauders” series, Black reporters met with Editor William F. Thomas to register their objections. And in February 1982, a pioneering group of Latino journalists, gathering for pizza and beer in Downey, began conceiving of a staff-led effort to tell a rich and deep narrative of their growing community. “We keep seeing the same damn stories in the paper: about crime, gangs, illegal immigration,” Frank O. Sotomayor, one of the editors on the series, recalls his co-editor, George Ramos, saying. “We want to tell our stories.”

The result was a landmark series, published in 1983, about Latinos and how they were reshaping Southern California. Latino journalists initiated and carried out the project, and presented the Latino community in all its complexity, featuring gang members and wealthy entrepreneurs, priests, police officers, university students and politicians. It examined issues that impeded Latino progress and celebrated improvements. The project was recognized with the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the highest honor in American journalism. The same year, The Times’ parent company, Times-Mirror, established a Minority Editorial Training Program, or MetPro, which continues to this day.

Yet The Times remained a lonely place for journalists of color. In December 1990, Shaw, The Times’ media critic, wrote a series lamenting the dearth of diversity in journalism. He wrote of his own newspaper: “The Times is widely regarded — particularly by blacks, inside the paper and out — as having one of the poorest records for minority advancement of any major paper in the country.”

The police beating of Rodney G. King in 1991, and the unrest that followed the subsequent acquittal of the four LAPD officers charged with assaulting him, exposed once again why that mattered. With 63 people dead, the 1992 uprising was far deadlier than the earlier Watts riots, in which 34 people died.

The Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the disturbances, just as it was after Watts. But in later years academics argued that The Times overemphasized the role of Black Angelenos in the riots (half of those arrested by the LAPD were Latino) and sensationalized Black-Korean conflict (a Korean-born shopkeeper, Soon Ja Du, had killed a Black teenager, Latasha Harlins, the previous year inside her family’s grocery store).

Within The Times, newsroom tensions burst into the open. “When the riot spread and it became apparent that a number of white reporters could not gain access to the scene, minority reporters from the suburbs were shipped into the danger zone,” Dean Takahashi, then a young business reporter and one of few Asian Americans on staff, wrote in a May 1992 article for Editor & Publisher that drew national attention. “A black colleague of mine mockingly called it the ‘Los Angeles Times busing program.’”

As it had a decade earlier, The Times made some commitments to improvements. It hired several journalists of color and established a zoned section known as City Times to cover neighborhoods of South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles that had long been neglected — “the hole in the doughnut,” as editors said at the time. The effort lasted for only three years, folding in 1995.

But even as the editorial staff pushed for broader and better coverage of the city’s diverse communities, the newspaper was being torn by political divisions within the extended Chandler family that still owned the paper, some of whom felt The Times had leaned too far leftward. In 1994, the top business executive, Publisher Richard T. Schlosberg III, directed the editorial board to endorse Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, in his bid for reelection.

Wilson was the chief proponent of Proposition 187, an initiative on the same ballot that would decide his reelection. The measure sought to bar undocumented immigrants from access to state-funded healthcare and education. Staff members, especially Latinos, were disgusted. “Under normal circumstances, I would quietly accept that decision and move on. This time I cannot,” Deputy Editorial Page Editor Frank del Olmo wrote in a dissent that ran in the paper. “Because this is not just another political campaign. And the Wilson endorsement is not — as a senior colleague whom I respect tried to convince me — just another endorsement.”

He continued: “For me, a Mexican American born and reared in California and a journalist here for more than 20 years, this campaign is unprecedented in the harm it does — permanent damage, I fear — to an ethnic community I care deeply about and a state I love.”

Frank del Olmo gestures while sitting at his desk in 1991

Frank del Olmo was the first Latino editor on the masthead of the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper’s 1994 endorsement of Gov. Pete Wilson, who was pushing Proposition 187, drew his vehement dissent in the pages of The Times.(Los Angeles Times)

The summer after voters adopted Proposition 187 (it was later struck down by the courts), Janet Clayton was named editorial page editor, a Black woman and the first person of color to occupy that role. During her nine-year tenure, the opinion pages of The Times evolved to reflect an optimistic, progressive and inclusive political vision. The section won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 2002 for a series on mentally ill people living on the streets, and the other in 2004 for a series on entrenched problems in California state government.

Halfway through Clayton’s tenure, The Times and its sister papers were sold to the Chicago-based Tribune Co. The new owners brought in two nationally esteemed journalists — John S. Carroll, who had overseen newspapers in Baltimore and Lexington, Ky., as editor, and Dean Baquet, the national editor at the New York Times, as managing editor.

With Baquet overseeing the day-to-day operations of the newsroom, Clayton overseeing the opinion pages (before moving to the Metro section) and art director Joseph Hutchinson serving as deputy managing editor for design, the newspaper for a time had three Black editors on its masthead. Del Olmo was the first Latino on the masthead, and the Mexican-born writer Andrés Martinez was later the second, as editorial page editor.

That diversity — a high point — proved short-lived. Del Olmo, 55, died of cardiac arrest after collapsing in his office at The Times in 2004; Baquet, who succeeded Carroll as top editor, was fired in 2006 after refusing to make more cuts; Clayton, Hutchinson and Martinez all left in 2007.

Since Baquet’s departure, The Times has seen a flurry of top editors and business executives come and go. One of them — Davan Maharaj, who joined The Times in 1989 as an intern and oversaw the newsroom from 2011 to 2017 — was of Indian ancestry and an immigrant from Trinidad.

Maharaj, the first Asian American to lead The Times, presided over a depleted newsroom that had spent four years in federal bankruptcy protection, ending in 2012. Newsroom diversity improved, but the staff was shaken by multiple rounds of buyouts. Nonetheless, it continued to do outstanding work, including a Pulitzer-winning expose of corruption in the city of Bell, a story co-written and uncovered by a Guatemalan-born journalist, Ruben Vives.

By the time The Times was sold in 2018, to the physician and pharmaceutical inventor Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper was down to about 400 journalists, less than half of the 940 when Baquet left.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong smiles as he speaks into a microphone in the Los Angeles Times newsroom

Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, left, addresses staffers in 2018 shortly after his purchase of the paper. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Where does The Times go from here?

An organization should not be defined by its failures, but it must acknowledge them if it is to hope for a better future.

The brutal death of a Black man, George Floyd, on May 25 while in the custody of police in Minneapolis shocked the world. It also prompted news organizations like The Times to reflect on how they cover, frame and promote stories at a time when the 24/7 news cycle moves faster than ever. Amid nationwide demonstrations over racial injustice, members of the Los Angeles Times Guild established caucuses for Black and Latino employees. The caucuses have called for improvements in coverage, hiring and career development, a public apology for The Times’ poor record on race, and equal pay. They have insisted, rightly, on reframing and recentering our coverage of communities of color.

The Times in 2020 has new owners, new leaders, a new labor union representing its journalists and a new headquarters in El Segundo. But the shadows of the past loom over our institution.

Newspapers are described as a first rough draft of history. But in truth, the first rough draft written by this newspaper — and those across the country — has been woefully incomplete.

On behalf of this institution, we apologize for The Times’ history of racism. 

BINGO! They admit it! The LA Times is racist!

We owe it to our readers to do better, and we vow to do so. A region as diverse and complex and fascinating as Southern California deserves a newspaper that reflects its communities. Today, 38% of the journalists on our staff are people of color. We know that is not nearly good enough, in a county that is 48% Latino and in a state where Latinos are the largest ethnic group. We know that this acknowledgment must be accompanied by a real commitment to change, a humility of spirit and an openness of mind and heart.

The Times will redouble and refocus its efforts to become an inclusive and inspiring voice of California — a sentinel that employs investigative and accountability reporting to help protect our fragile democracy and chronicles the stories of the Golden State, including stories that historically were neglected by the mainstream press. Being careful stewards of this new company, privately owned but operated for the benefit of the public, is our first obligation. But that stewardship will also require bold and decisive change. If we are to survive as a business, it will be by tapping into a digital, multicultural, multigenerational audience in a way The Times has never fully done.

We make this pledge in recognition of the many journalists who battled over the decades to make The Times a more inclusive workplace and a newspaper that reflected the real Los Angeles in its pages. As we reorient this institution firmly and fully around the multiethnic, interfaith and dazzlingly complex tapestry that is Southern California, we honor their contributions.

The Wrap offered their own commentary on this self-own:

LA TimesApologizes for ‘History of Racism,’ Vows Diversity in Coverage and Staff

Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong vowed to increase diversity in the newspaper’s coverage and staff in a letter published Sunday along with a series of sweeping, introspective reports into the Times’s long history of racism.

“The Times has also mirrored, and in some cases propagated, the biases and prejudices of the world it covers, reflecting and shaping attitudes that have contributed to social and economic inequity,” Soon-Shiong wrote. “Today, we are beginning the process of acknowledging those biases of the past and taking positive action to affirm a commitment that our newsroom will not tolerate prejudice.”

The articles examine the LA Times’ history dating back to its creation in the 1880s and its repeated failure to cover critical issues affecting millions of nonwhite Angelenos. Those issues include racist abuse from law enforcement, redlining practices that segregated Black and Latino residents into environmentally and economically poor neighborhoods, and willful bias on behalf of wealthy interests dating back to the paper’s first major publisher, Harrison Gray Otis.

 Again and again, The Times sought to shape and dominate the region instead of merely chronicling it,” the Times Editorial Board wrote.

The criticisms have continued to today, as reporters of color at the Times have accused executive editor Norman Pearlstine of failing to diversify the Times’ newsroom as well as failing to modernize the paper to meet digital subscription benchmarks. Over the summer, Black and Latino caucuses within the Times have published public statements criticizing the paper’s leadership, noting that its editors remain predominantly white and do not reflect the diversity of Southern California.

“This very much feels like a sink-or-swim moment for the paper. And when the people who are supposed to be guiding the ship, so to speak, don’t seem to be aware of what’s going on — if they’re even around — it’s alarming. It’s very, very alarming,” one reporter told TheWrap in August.

In his letter, Soon-Shiong notes that he and his wife are the first nonwhite owners of the Times, and as such “feel a deep personal responsibility and duty to fight racism and bias.” Along with today’s editorials and introspective reports, Soon-Shiong says that more articles from the Times’ reporters of color will be published in the coming days examining the paper’s coverage of nonwhite communities.

“The national reckoning on race and that within the Los Angeles Times are welcome developments that have already led to productive conversations, concrete plans and accelerated progress for us,” he wrote. “We are committed to change, both because it is just and because it is mission-critical for our business. Only a diverse newsroom can accurately tell this city’s stories. Only a newspaper that holds power to account and uncovers injustice can truly succeed.”

More Winning: Gay Porn Bookstore Closes Down in West Hollywood

Hailey Branson-Potts, the shallow El Segundo Times propagandist with an Anti-Semitic mentor, wrote another glowing article about a trashy dive in West Hollywood. This article was a hagiography of an adult gay bookstore in the Homosexual capital of Southern California.

Is it any surprise that the El Segundo, or rather Los Angeles Times is going bust?

How can anyone look at an adult bookstore and consider it any kind of legacy? A city which awards a porn-star, hard-up slut like Stormy Daniels the Key to the City, the same municipality


These grandparents sold gay porn for decades and almost went to prison. Now, they are calling it quits

For 37 years, the couple — now septuagenarian grandparents — have run Circus of Books, a West Hollywood bookstore that sold gay and straight nudie magazines, hardcore pornographic films and sex toys, as well as international newspapers and classic literary titles.

“I always assumed that we would end up doing something else,” Karen said. “We don’t know anything, really.”

The Santa Monica Boulevard store gained legendary status in Southern California’s LGBTQ community as a place where people could peruse gay erotica or meet other gay people, hanging out in a place free from homophobia.

This is the best that the LA Times can come up with.

Hailey Branson is a narrowminded bigot, she has no real skills as a journalist, and her mentor was a notorious anti-Semite who said "The Jews should get the hell out of Palestine."

Is this really journalism?

And now she takes time to write about a gay bookstore which featured salacious, disturbing material.

I hope that the good doctor from South Africa is not paying this trash reporter.

Over the years, Circus of Books has survived an FBI raid, federal obscenity charges and complaints from law enforcement who said the store attracted prostitution and other criminal elements. It remained open during the AIDS crisis, when numerous employees died.

Does anyone not see the problem with all this LGBT nonsense now? This is beyond unreal.

Look at all the health, all the legal problems associated with this death-stye

But it could not survive Amazon.

Strangled by the internet — where pornography and dating apps abound — Circus of Books will close for good Saturday.

That's a good sign, I guess. It's too bad that innovation is making it even easier to poison their minds, but that's the reality, the outcome which comes with liberty. Allowing people to make choices about what they do with their time, with their money means allowing people to make poor decisions.

“A lot of people are sorry to see it go, grateful it’s been there all this time,” Karen said. “And as we’re closing, people are saying, ‘You know, this store saved my life.’ ”

"A lot of people", like whom?

When the Masons started out in the early 1980s, “Circus of Books and the gay bars were places where people would go to meet, to find each other,” said West Hollywood Mayor John Duran, who is gay. “There was no Grindr or Scruff or Tinder. If you wanted to find community, you had to go out and seek it.”

This is the same mayor slammed with a host of same-sex #MeToo issues. Do we really want this guy talking to us about finding community? This guy undermines community. This is beyond unreal.

For many customers, the gay erotica was revolutionary, he said.

“It’s not like any of us got this through sex ed or at home with Mom and Dad,” Duran said. “We had to learn.”

Learn what? How to destroy your body? How to give into a false sense of entitlement? How to fall for a lie which corrupted the civil rights movement? I cannot believe any mainstream newspaper would print this trash.

Of course, the LA Times is not really that mainstream anymore, is it?

In the 1970s, Barry made a decent living selling accessories he’d invented for dialysis machines until the cost of medical malpractice insurance became too much.

Liberalism at work.

After Karen, who had worked as a journalist, spotted a newspaper ad seeking magazine distributors for Larry Flynt — the publisher of Hustler and Chic — Barry started driving around to liquor stores and newsstands, taking orders.

Ugh. How shameful is this? Someone would sell their soul, their integrity just to make a buck. No wonder the LA Times resorts to writing such a high-profile article for a low-brow business.

Karen did deliveries. She was pregnant at the time, so she hired unemployed musicians — she preferred drummers, who always seemed the most reliable — to help with heavy lifting.

This is another trademark, hallmark, watermark of Branson. She has no real skillset, and she spends time writing 

One West Hollywood store, Book Circus, ordered 600 gay titles, including Blueboy and Honcho, each month and instantly sold out. “I’d have to fill the whole truck up just to fill those titles,” Barry said. Customers were so glad when the magazines arrived, “they would come out front and help me unload it.”

The Masons eventually learned the bookstore’s owner, who had fallen behind on magazine payments, was being evicted. Barry made a deal with the property manager: He’d pay half the man’s $1,400 monthly rent until he was evicted if the Masons could take over the lease afterward.

Interesting. The Gay Bookstore was selling lots of stuff, but the original owner couldn't pay all the bills.

The couple kept the staff and changed the name to Circus of Books. Along with the pornography, they sold obscure novels from LGBTQ authors, as well as science fiction books, foreign newspapers, even Bibles.

They sold Bibles. OK. I wonder how many they actually sold!

Gay-themed magazines played an important role in assuring people they weren’t alone at a time when homosexuality was taboo, said Joseph Hawkins, director of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC.

I think that the fact that this behavior has not been restored as taboo is creating much of the problems in our culture, in our society. Why do local newspapers want to continue promoting this "gay ideal", anyway?  Who are the editors of the LA Times trying to help out here?

For decades, gay magazines — including ONE, the non-pornographic magazine for which the archive is named — that were sold at newsstands in big cities were obscured behind a tarp or curtain and sold alongside bawdy straight magazines, even if the gay periodicals had no nude pictures.

The whole thing is illicit.

“There was just enough space to edge in and look, and there were porn magazines for the straight men and the gay men. Everybody was in there,” Hawkins said. “Sometimes the men in there looking at straight erotica would see you looking at a gay-oriented magazine and get upset.

This is what happens when social justice warriors turn into so-called "journalists." This stuff is a flaming crock on so many levels, I have no idea where to start in exposing this stuff. Do these university "educated" types really think that they are going to change the world, change its perceptions about the uneven drudgery that is liberal ideology?

They are pleasing themselves, but they are educating no one and they are not really changing minds. This insanity must be pushed aside at all costs. I cannot wait to see the El Segundo Times crash and burn. This is unreal.

“You never had a sense of safety. You’d worry there was a vice officer in there who would arrest you for looking at the magazines. ... The place was selling the magazine, but you weren’t allowed to look at it.”

Rachel Mason said that when she was growing up, her parents were much more strict than her friends’. She and her two brothers had to get straight A’s. They weren’t allowed to watch TV. They had to go to synagogue with their mother.

Oh boy! Make sure the kids go to schul and synagogue, and don't let them read the smut that the parents were peddling. Wow! The hypocrisy should have gotten more coverage than the actual sale of the trash itself.

“I was this little rebel, and what I didn’t know was that they were outlaws in their own way,” she said. “They were just so good at this balancing act that we had no clue about it. I was fighting with my mom about my hair color … and they were actually dealing in hardcore videos.”

Rachel, 40, an artist and musician, is making a documentary about her parents’ shop, which will debut on the film festival circuit this spring. It wasn’t until she started making the film that she realized how revered Karen and Barry were in the LGBTQ community.

"Revered", a term which implies divine respect and autthority.

Oh, since the owners of this adult bookstore were Jewish, I wonder if Hailey bothered to reveal that her mentor hated Jews and hated Israel? I wonder if her subjects would have consented to an interview and article expose?

“This store represents a time capsule of a different era … when being queer was really underground,” she said. “It was truly a hidden culture.”

Let's Make Queer Underground Again!

Rachel and her brothers sometimes sneaked into the pornography section to giggle at the movie covers until their mom yelled at them to get out. In the 1980s, young Rachel noticed that her parents’ clerks kept disappearing.

They were dying of AIDS.

That above paragraph is so poorly written. So, we go from reading about the kids' sneaking into the pornography section to learn that the bookstore clerks were dying. Huh?

“Somebody I just met would be dead the next week, then another person and another person … as a kid, I didn’t have any perception that that was unusual.

“They were extraordinary young guys who I looked up to.”

Seriously? Why?

If employees felt well enough to work, the Masons encouraged them to come in so they could have some normalcy. If they needed public assistance to pay for expensive medication, the couple would pay them off the books in cash so they could keep unemployment benefits. It was the only time, Karen said, she ever broke the rules.

Wow! So these bookstore owners were thieves and frauds, and they were helping homosexuals steal and defraud the government of the state of California!

“They were just so young,” Karen said, sighing. “It just — um — they shouldn’t have died.”

They wouldn't have died if these old fools were not promoting the very lifestyle which killed them. This is a sickening report, to say the least.

The Masons by that time had bought the building, which had several apartments upstairs, and their tenants were dying, too. Many were estranged from their families.

“A lot of parents wouldn’t come to get their things or come to their funerals,” Barry said.

“And sometimes,” Karen said, “I would get a call from a mother. ‘Tell me about my son.’ Where were you, lady? I had nothing to say to parents like that.”

At its peak, Circus of Books had three locations. A short-lived Sherman Oaks store closed in the late 1990s after the city ordered it to stop selling porn because it was too close to an elementary school. The Silver Lake shop closed in 2016 amid declining sales.

How about that? These awful parents, the owners of this perverse book store, were trying to sell their garish goods near elementary school children. That is hideous!

The West Hollywood store had its share of drama. The alleyway behind it was a well-known gay cruising spot, and residents and sheriff’s deputies said the 24-hour bookstore attracted prostitutes and drug dealers.

Oh, more lawlessness. And of course, Hailey Branson celebrates it.

In 1989, the city ordered the store to close daily from 2 to 6 a.m. Karen told The Times then that they were being used as a scapegoat for a problem they didn’t create.

"The hustlers are around the building like roaches,” she said at the time, “and we've tried to get rid of them.”

No you didn't! Karen and her corrupt crew depended on their business. They helped it to thrive!

In the early 1990s, an employee shipped several gay and straight pornographic VHS tapes — including “Licorice Twists,” “Latex Slaves Discipline” and “The Best of Bruce Seven, Vol. 1” — to a customer in Pennsylvania’s Lebanon County.

But it was a sting. The Masons were indicted on federal charges of interstate transportation of obscene materials, and the FBI raided their warehouse, carrying guns.

“They were looking for a copy of what was shipped,” Barry said, “a girly title, and all of them, every time they’d pull out a box they’d laugh at the titles.”

After years of litigation, the Masons avoided jail time by agreeing to a pretrial diversion program and a $20,000 fine. For about a year, Barry had to report to federal court once a month to show he was still working and not committing any crimes. Federal investigators, he said, later mailed back the tapes they’d taken as evidence.

Lol!

Karen, who gets a bit embarrassed when talking about the pornography, said she’d never watched any of the films. It all seems kind of boring, she said with a shrug.

How would she know? Why would she stay mired in the business for so long if she was so embarrassed by all of it?

In her spare basement office, Karen still keeps contacts on a Rolodex. She also keeps two sketches done by her children hanging above her desk.

One is a portrait of Mother Teresa. The other is a drawing of a frail man with an oxygen tube in his nose. They’re a reminder, she said, that everything in life is finite.

Huh?

Final Reflection

It's a good thing that the gay porn bookstore "Circus of Books" is gone. It's sad, however, that the LA Times, or El Segundo Times, or whatever anyone wants to call them, resorted to a second-rate propagandist to write such a telling, glowing report about this trashy store.

Notice that they broke a number of laws, and notice also that they spent more time promoting illicit materials for the public while shaming and steering away their children from the very smut they were pushing onto the general public.

Someone please explain to me why anyone would glory in this sad, sordid tale?

We have Hailey Branson-Potts, a veiled Anti-Semite (Since she refuses to disavow her bigoted mentor Helen Thomas) who routinely reports nice things about LGBT everything, while the real news is ignored or skipped over. She has a problem with conservatives, and with minorities who support President Trump.

She also has issues with anything that has to do with facts and pro-family interests. She went to great lengths to point out that MassResistance has been unjustly smeared as a "hate group" because of the discredited SPLC.

When does this nonsense end?

But back to this story ...

Isn't it incredible how all the reporting about the homosexuals who died because of AIDS is treated almost as an afterthought? The reporter refuses to draw the line between the high-risk behaviors and the higher incidence of disease, dysfunction, death. What kind of journalism is this?

It's gotcha, clickbait journalism, nothing more. Incidentally enough, this tragic-comic reporting is good news in some sense, since one more smutty bookstore is out of business, and the most left-wing reporter out there could not dress it up nicely.