THE MEDIA MISS THE MESSAGE : PUBLIC POLICY.

Byline: Amy Alexander

FIVE years ago this week, hundreds of journalists landed in Los Angeles to cover a civil disturbance that erupted after four white police officers were acquitted of beating an unarmed black man named Rodney King.

This week, with many news organizations returning their lenses to South Central for a spate of ``five years later'' stories, it's only fair that the media examine their own role in that momentous week - and ask themselves what lessons, if any, it learned from covering the mother-of-all late 20th century civil disturbances.

By many accounts, the lessons are few and fleeting.

Five years after Americans watched immense chunks of Los Angeles burn for hours on end across their television screens, and more than 30 years since the riots of the mid-1960s, some journalists and media observers say they doubt that a similar disturbance would be covered any more comprehensively today than it was in 1992.

``The only attention these neighborhoods usually get is when there is a riot or some other sort of major disruption,'' says media scholar and veteran journalist Ben Bagdikian. ``I'm afraid that hasn't changed in the five years since Los Angeles went up.''

In the weeks immediately following the Los Angeles riots - which began April 29, 1992 - scores of newspapers and broadcast outlets produced volumes of words and images describing the looting and burning that left much of downtown and South Central Los Angeles a burned-out hulk.

But, as Bagdikian sees it, coverage of South Central Los Angeles and other low-income urban neighborhoods by mainstream news organizations follows an inadequate cycle of fixate-and-ignore: When an especially heinous murder happens or a string of drive-by shootings or a civil disturbance racks ``the 'hood,'' news organizations order up stories about crime and despair in the inner cities.

When the furor dies down, these neighborhoods slide off the radar once again, warranting scant attention from most editors. ``I'm sorry to say I've been though this before,'' says Bagdikian, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.

In the months immediately following the 1992 disturbance, some of the follow-up coverage was introspective. A few mainstream news organizations held in-house discussions for the first time on matters of race, class and power in their workplaces.

Some pledged to increase their coverage of neighborhoods that had largely gone uncovered prior to April 29.

It was inspired rhetoric from industry management's glass offices, says Bagdikian, but not much more than that.

``After Watts and Detroit in the 1960s, it was the same: much hand-wringing from white editors in the immediate aftermath, lots of language about doing a better job, and nothing really changes.''

The Los Angeles riots took many editors by surprise. Moreover, despite the epic nature of that week's events five years ago, consistent coverage of South Central and neighborhoods like it around the nation has been scarce to nonexistent.

``From what I can see, there has been almost no follow-up, from the media or the public at large,'' said Frank Wykoff, an economics professor at Pomona College.

``For a while, there were stories about rebuilding efforts, some stories about federal funding, and a local fight to keep liquor stores from reopening in South Central. But even that seems to have dropped off,'' Wykoff said.

Few news organizations have remained vigilant about covering the day-to-day story of America's inner cities.

News crews are more likely to show up at the trial of a hip-hop singer than they are at the umpteenth funeral of an adolescent Latino gang member in East Los Angeles.

Some journalism scholars say the mainstream media continue operating at status quo because, in part, the public does not demand more of them.

``It's not just a media problem, it's a public policy problem,'' says Erna Smith, chair of the Journalism Department at San Francisco State University and author of a comprehensive study on how television media covered the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

``No one wants to deal with deep-seated issues of racial, social, and economic inequities that resulted in the rioting in Los Angeles,'' says Smith. Her 1994 study for the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard found that local and national television media had overwhelmingly framed the riots as a ``black-white'' issue - despite the fact that the majority of those who were killed and arrested in Los Angeles that week were Hispanic.

Racial nuances, including the growing importance of relations between blacks and Hispanics, and the burgeoning of multiracial cultures throughout the United States, are often overlooked or dismissed as too complicated by some editors of mainstream news organizations, Smith says.

``I think there is less leadership, and less public will, to (deal with these issues) today than there was in the 1960s, when Watts rioted. . . . I wouldn't beat up on the media too much for what's happened after L.A.,'' says Smith. ``No one got it - period.''

For example, when a black youth was shot and killed by a white police officer in St. Petersburg, Fla., in October, a local task force found that joblessness, poverty and poor educational opportunities helped fuel the night of rioting that had erupted in that Southern city following the shooting.

``News''

Some newspapers in Florida, including The Miami Herald, dispatched white reporters to the scene. (In contrast to the Los Angeles riots, where many black and Hispanic journalists were ``called up'' from second- or third-tier assignments to cover the unrest, according to an August 1992 post-riot report by the National Association of Black Journalist's print task force.)

Most of the stories from St. Petersburg describing conditions in that predominantly black neighborhood read as if they were written by scribes who were seeing them for the first time. To be sure, the conditions were not ``news'' to those who lived there.

But a civil disturbance such as the one that claimed more than 50 lives in Los Angeles and resulted in almost a billion dollars in property damage will always be a surprise to editors at the nation's mainstream news organizations - as long as those editors remain hidebound in the middle-class and given to seeing racial issues as ``black-and-white.''

Representation

Caryl Rivers, a Boston University journalism professor and author of ``Slick Spins and Fractured Facts: How Cultural Myths Distort the News,'' traces this dearth of interest in minority concerns to the lengthening gap between the nation's demographics (increasingly female and nonwhite), and the demographics of our newsrooms (predominantly male and white).

Annual figures from the American Society of Newspaper Editors showed recently that the number of ethnic minorities in the nation's newsrooms did not increase last year, after 20 years of small but steady growth. Right now, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and Native Americans make up 11.4 percent of the nation's total newsroom work force of more than 54,000 journalists.

Among top editors and newsroom managers - individuals who on a daily basis choose which stories will be covered, how and where they will appear - minority representation is less than 5 percent, and was less than 3 percent in 1992.

All of which contributes to the poor follow-through coverage of South Central and other low-income neighborhoods, said Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. ``Until the editors know enough about the underlying pressures which lead to rioting, they'll probably continue to cover them as abnormal, irrational acts,'' says Kovach. ``Instead of as logical responses to a certain set of conditions.''

Where are we now?

So we arrive at a place in our postmodern journalism history where many news organizations keep detailed strategic plans at the ready for covering natural disasters, elections, and international crises.

In Los Angeles of 1992, hundreds of journalists parachuted into the fray equipped with bulletproof vests, laptop computers and cellular phones.

How many are willing to maintain detailed plans for covering long-term the ongoing disasters in many American cities?