THE BEST OF TIMES AND THE WORST OF TIMES : AUTHOR'S NEW STUDY FOR A MEDIA WATCH GROUP FOUND THE L.A. TIMES CLUELESS IN UNDERSTANDING ITS ROLE IN CITY LIFE.

Byline: Barbara Bliss Osborn

IN my journalism classes at Cal State Northridge, I give students a cartoon that shows a tree falling. The blurb above it reads: If a tree fell in the woods, and nobody from The New York Times was there to cover it, would it make a sound?

The joke, of course, is that if newspapers don't tell us, we don't hear about what's happening. That's exactly what I'm afraid of with the city's largest newspaper, the Los Angeles Times.

City newspapers are like social glue. They link communities, focus issues and foster debate. It's a way for community members who don't run into each other on the street to run into each other's concerns.

But the L.A. Times isn't filling that function very well these days. In fact, according to a recent study I conducted for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media watch group, the Times seems to have little sense of the paper's vital role in city life. Without that vision, the Times perpetuates, if not compounds, the city's many problems.

Let me give you an example of what concerns me. During the entire month of February, Richard Riordan's name or the word mayor appeared in the headlines of the Times' Metro section three times, and only once on the front page, when the mayor appeared with late-night TV host Jay Leno. Coverage of the City Council didn't fare much better, making its way into the headlines four times.

At first, I thought perhaps February was a slow news month at City Hall, but a look at the Daily News suggested otherwise.

On Feb. 1, the Daily News covered six stories involving City Hall, while Times Metro covered two. That same week, the Times ignored a story about the American Civil Liberties Union's effort to integrate or close L.A. special education schools, while the Daily News gave the LAUSD controversy extended and front page coverage.

The Times-News comparison also suggested some differences in priorities. On Feb. 6, for instance, the News ran stories about city misuse of office space, record enrollment at the LAUSD, four high schools adopting year round schedules, and a controversial candidate being considered to head the LAUSD TV station.

Meanwhile, the Times' Metro front page stories focused on a City Council recommendation regarding the LAPD officer screening process, Liz Taylor's divorce, a doctor doing penile surgery, and a family with quintuplets.

The comparison became even more perturbing when I looked at the Times' Valley edition. Times' Valley readers, it turns out, get more extensive city coverage than Metro readers.

The Times' Valley edition includes Metro coverage (often recast with a Valley focus), Valley-specific news, and sometimes, additional city coverage.

Given Valley's additional reporting, it's not surprising that the Valley section is consistently larger than Metro.

Every day in the first week of February, Valley ran at least two pages larger than Metro and sometimes considerably more. On Feb. 3, Valley ran 16 pages, while Metro ran eight. The following day, Valley ran 16 pages, while Metro ran four.

The only way to make sense of this page difference is in light of the competition the Times faces in the Valley. If ever there was an argument for multiple newspapers in a city, this seems dramatic evidence.

Unfortunately, for many Angelenos, myself included, the L.A. Times is the only daily paper. The Daily News doesn't deliver on my side of the city so Angelenos like me have a choice between the Times and no daily paper at all.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not holding up the Daily News as the model for metropolitan dailies, but the News is clearly providing more consistent, forthright coverage of city politics than the Times, particularly the Times' Metro section.

The Times' priorities for city coverage appear to be not with City Hall or reporting the concerns of L.A.'s many ecommunities, but with crime and light features.

During February, crime made it onto Metro's front page nearly every day. In addition, Times' editors frequently used celebrity crime as filler, and the criminal-justice system, particularly if the story involved affluent Westside suspects or victims, consumed a great deal of page space. (The O.J. Simpson, Menendez brothers and Linda Sobek trials made up 40 percent - 15 of 37 - of Metro's front page crime stories that month.)

Admittedly, there's enough crime in Los Angeles to fill the entire paper, let alone Metro's pages. But there are other things going on in the city and those issues - the school system, the LAPD, the MTA, labor, health care, local politics, community relations, among them - received considerably less attention.

The Times also appears to be putting a premium on ``Metro-lite'' material: snippets of local humor (``Only in L.A.''), first-person essays by Times staff writers about their favorite places in the region (``My Place''), profiles of cultural groups and events (``Cityscapes''), a daily full-page weather map and generously proportioned photos and colorful illustrations.

With ever greater frequency, it's difficult to know where the Times' Life & Style section ends and Metro begins. While this lighter fare is often given elaborate full-color layouts, the bulk of the news coverage concerning city neighborhoods is squeezed onto a one- to two-page, black and white collage called ``Inside Metro.''

As Angelenos grapple with the immensely important and complex issues facing the city (not the least of which are the Valley secession debate and the upcoming mayoral race), we need consistent, insightful reporting. Too often, the tree falls, the Times isn't there and Angelenos don't hear it.

MEMO: Barbara Bliss Osborn is an instructor in the journalism department at Cal State Northridge and is the author of ``What's Happening in the City of Angels?'' - a new study by the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media watch groupe.