The first day of the riots, the Times front-page headline read “‘Get Whitey,’ Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs” (an “eyewitness account”), accompanied by an “expert” analysis (“Racial Unrest Laid to Negro Family Failure”) and the editorial “Anarchy Must End.” A simple comparison of the coverage of the 1965 Watts uprising reveals a great deal. 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. That was not true of the newspaper landscape in Los Angeles. 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. It is a monumental history of rebellion and resistance, a “movement history” of Los Angeles, examining the history of Black, Chicano, LGBT, women’s, and student activism in the city.Ī Quarter of a Million Readers: The LA Free Press (1964–70) in the Sixties, by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, published today by Verso. The following is an excerpt from Set the Night on Fire: L.A.
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