Posted on 04/26/2007 7:33:14 AM PDT by DogByte6RER
Trouble at the L.A. Times: An editor kills a Page One story on Armenian genocide, and charges of bias fly
By Daniel Hernandez
Wednesday, April 25, 2007 - 7:00 pm
Did the Los Angeles Times kill a front-page article about the fight over the recognition of the Armenian genocide because its writer, Mark Arax, is Armenian?
It’s a question L.A. Times managing editor Douglas Frantz would probably prefer not to address.
News broke earlier this week that Frantz killed Arax’s story in a terse email message to the writer because, Frantz said, Arax had “a conflict of interest” and a “position on the issue.” Frantz was referring to a 2005 letter in which Arax, four other Armenian Times staff writers and legal affairs reporter Henry Weinstein reminded the paper’s top editors to refer to the genocide as genocide, in accordance with the paper’s style rules. The 2005 letter had been well-received, acknowledged, and, sources at the paper tell the L.A. Weekly, forgotten.
But in his recent email to Arax, obtained by the Weekly, Frantz characterized the letter as a “petition,” as in some form of activism. He also told Arax that he “went around [the] system” in a bid to land the story assignment, by dealing with an editor in the Times Washington bureau, Robert Ourlian, who is Armenian American.
So Frantz reassigned the story to Washington reporter Rich Simon, who turned around a decorous and somewhat routine take on Turkey’s ongoing mission to block Congress from recognizing the slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkey during World War I, something several Western developed countries - including France and Canada - have already done. The revised Times article ran under the headline, “Genocide Resolution Still Far From Certain” on Saturday, April 21, four days before Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in L.A. Arax was given a consolation tagline at the end of the article for having “contributed” some reporting.
Arax, sounding incensed, sent an email to some of his fellow reporters, which made its way to the Weekly.
Here’s how it started: “Colleagues, You should know that I had a Page One story killed this week by Doug Frantz. His stated rationale for killing the piece had nothing to do with any problems with the story itself. In an email to me, he cited no bias, no factual errors, no contextual mishaps, no glaring holes.”
Arax then spelled out the holes he saw in Frantz’s objections, reiterating that the 2005 letter was not a petition, and that the standard process was used with Ourlian to assign and edit the story. And he pushed the dispute up a notch, going so far as to suggest that the only person in the dustup who has a bias or personal stance is Frantz, who lived in Turkey for years.
Said Arax, in his email: “Because his logic is so illogical, questions must be raised about Frantz’ own objectivity, his past statements to colleagues that he personally opposes an Armenian genocide resolution and his friendship with Turkish government officials, including the consul general in Los Angeles who’s quoted in my story. Frantz is heavily involved and invested in defending the policies of Turkey.”
Arax ended the note by sharing the news that he has filed a discrimination complaint against Frantz inside the paper, and that a Times Human Resources Department inquiry was launched. The reporter, based in Fresno and officially assigned to the paper’s West Sunday magazine, declined to speak to the Weekly, citing the internal investigation. Ourlian, the Washington editor, and Frantz, also declined to comment. Times editor James O’Shea and publisher David Hiller did not reply to interview requests.
But Harut Sassounian, publisher of the local Armenian paper The California Courier, has been more than willing to publicly address the dispute. On Tuesday, Sassounian began circulating a scathing article he penned calling for Frantz’s resignation, accusing Frantz of discriminating against Arax because of his ethnic background.
Sassounian framed the dispute in terms the rest of Los Angeles media can easily digest. “By the same logic, Frantz is implying that Latinos will be barred from writing on illegal immigrants, African-American journalists from covering civil rights, Jewish-American reporters from writing about the Holocaust and Asian-Americans [from] covering issues peculiar to their community,” Sassounian wrote.
Sassounian told the Weekly he learned about the matter from people who had been interviewed by Arax and were waiting for his story to be published. He said Arax never called him. The Courier publisher, based in Glendale, said he had recently met David Hiller at a dinner event and had a cordial conversation with him. So he called the Times publisher directly to find out what happened to Arax’s piece. Within minutes, Sassounian said, he got a call back - from Douglas Frantz.
Sassounian said Frantz was “abrupt” and “evasive,” telling Sassounian that there was “no problem” and that the story needed “depth and balance.” Sassounian said he warned Frantz that if it turned out Arax’s story was axed simply because Arax is Armenian, a confrontation would arise between the paper and the L.A. Armenian community, which happens to be the largest in the world outside Armenia. That’s when Frantz went bonkers, Sassounian said.
“He says to me, ‘I’m going to hang up on you! You’ve threatened me! I said, ‘I didn’t threaten you.’ He said, ‘You threatened me. I’m going to hang up.’”
And Frantz did, he contends. Hiller and O’Shea, Sassounian said, treated him much differently. Sassounian said that in conversations with the Times publisher and editor, they apologized for Frantz’s behavior and said they would not tolerate any bias against the Armenian community in their paper’s pages. “They all apologized for his behavior, for accusing me of threatening him,” Sassounian said.
When the Sassounian piece started making the rounds, Frantz quickly shot back, defending his actions to media blog LAObserved: “I put a hold on a story because of concerns that the reporter had expressed personal views about the topic in a public manner and therefore was not a disinterested party,” Frantz told the blog.
But who’s really the disinterested party here?
Frantz was a longtime correspondent based in Istanbul for both The New York Times and the L.A. Times. As Sassounian noted, Frantz is scheduled to be back in Istanbul next month to moderate a panel for the International Press Institute’s World Congress that is titled, “Turkey: Sharing the Democratic Experience.” Among the panelists is Andrew Mango, who Sassounian describes as a “notorious genocide denialist.”
And then there’s the matter of Frantz’s coverage of the Armenian genocide while at The New York Times. In January 2001 the paper ran corrections on Frantz’s reporting, for downplaying the genocide. A month later, the Armenian National Committee of America put out an action alert again accusing Frantz of downplaying the genocide and casting it as merely an Armenian allegation. The paper never ran a second correction. Frantz joined the L.A. Times as a reporter in Istanbul, brought on by his friend, then-managing editor Dean Baquet, who left the paper in spectacular fashion late last year and then rejoined The New York Times.
The L.A. Times dispute over Arax’s killed story became public on Tuesday, April 24 - the massacre’s traditional remembrance day. All day long, cars and trucks driving in Little Armenia in Hollywood were draped with Armenia’s red, blue and orange flag. A somber march and rally was held on Hobart Street. The few young people the Weekly spoke with after the Unified Young Armenians rally said they had not heard of the controversy at the L.A. Times, but spoke with a refreshing sense of naunce about the imperatives of history.
“It’s politics,” said Sevak Ghazaryan, 19, a student at Glendate Community College. “Turkey and United States are very close. The United States has a military base in Turkey, and businesswise they import a lot of goods from Turkey for cheap price, likewise for oil. So therefore, Turkey plays a big role in business and economy for the U.S. It’s just politics.”
Why would a story about Armenian genocide decades ago, merit front page status on the La Times?
PC Rule #3435 - It is never genocide when Muslims kill Christians - no matter how many are slaughtered...
Now that really makes sense...........Liberals never have such things.........
Conflict of interest? In that case, all liberals must immediately cease reporting on communist matters.
</sarcasm>
ping
God forbid that folks should be reminded of a huge massacre of Christians by Muslims, especially when the Muslims involved are trying to join the EU.
Such a rule would make sense. However, since those are liberal, and all of the Armenians I have met have tended to be conservative, different rules are applied by the media.
“News broke earlier this week that Frantz killed Arax’s story in a terse email message to the writer because, Frantz said, Arax had “a conflict of interest” and a “position on the issue.” “
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I guess if they enforce this rule, they can skip the news bit all together and just publish advertising....
There will be rioting in Glendale!
Strangely, the Armenian cause is one of those traditionally left/lberal causes despite it being the cause of “the first chr*stian nation” (liberals only have trouble with American being chr*stian). It will be interesting seeing pro-moslem liberals and pro-Armenian liberals going at it.
My understanding/experience has been that for the most part Armenians have a hard left orientation. However, if I am wrong I am most delighted to learn it.
The editor thought it was about "Army" genocide...
Could be that the ones I knew weren’t a representative sample. Their primary political orientation was a hatred for Turks. Everything else was secondary to that.
That I can believe (not that it isn't understandable).
I'm not completely sure why (perhaps because of its position and utility in the Cold War), but Turkey has traditionally been the recipient of conservative support. I used to be a member of the JBS and they were very pro-Turkish regarding Cyprus and also very anti-Greek and anti-Armenian (just as they were anti-Israel and pro-Arab).
For another reason for which I have no explanation, Turkish moslems (and their Albanian clients) tend to be classified differently from Arab/Iranian/Pakistani/Indonesian moslems. The Balkan and Armenian chr*stian communities who so despise the Turks have tended to identify with (believe it or not!) the PLO, Saddam's Iraq, and the Kurdish Communists of the PKK, viewing these as (unlike Turks and Albanians) opponents/victims of the US/Israeli "axis" while Turks and Albanians are its allies. So it seems everyone on every side of the issue considers Turks/Albanians different from all the other moslems.
Just a joke, but what is the "Armenian Times"?
All the Armenians I’ve met are staunch conservatives. They have made Fresno a great place to live with their devout faith and enterprising attitudes.
Because they have been trying to get a toothless law passed in Congress that recognizes that this event took place. Furthermore, as the article points out, Canada and another country has already done this (toothless resolution recognizing that the genocide took place).
The larger issue here is the fact that Turkey is not going to be allowed to join the EU unless they admit that they committed these atrocities. But this is not possible for them because the Turks are predominately muslim and it is not possible for a muslim to tell the truth about such events in history. Furthermore, the Turkish government has repeatedly denied that the genocide took place and has thus backed themseleves into a position where they cannot admit it happened without losing face and setting off it’s muslim population.
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