TROUBLE AT THE L.A. TIMES
By Daniel Hernandez
LA Weekly, CA
April 26 2007
An editor kills a Page One story on Armenian genocide, and charges
of bias fly
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
a correction 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 Glendale
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."
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