Fresno Bee, CA
May 5 2007
Fresno journalist in battle at L.A. TimesBy John Ellis / The Fresno
Bee05/05/07 04:43:12
A well-known Fresno author and journalist is waging a heated battle
with his boss at the Los Angeles Times — a very public struggle that
has outraged many in Southern California’s large Armenian community.
It’s also reverberating in Fresno, not only because of the sizable
local Armenian population, but because Times staffer Mark Arax lives
here and is of Armenian descent.
"People I talked to locally are really upset," said Varoujan Der
Simonian, executive director of the Armenian Technology Group, a
Fresno-based nonprofit that provides support for Armenian farmers.
The dispute revolves around an article Arax wrote — but the paper
refused to publish — to mark April 24, the 92nd anniversary of the
Armenian genocide. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between
1915 and 1923 at the hands of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
The modern Turkish republic contends that no genocide occurred, but
for Armenians — and many Armenian-Americans — the issue remains
critically important.
Hygo Ohannessian, who chairs the local chapter of the Armenian
National Committee of America, said the Arax family has deep ties to
Fresno and has long shown loyalty to its Armenian community.
"We all want to come to [Arax’s] aid, not just because he is
Armenian, but because he has good values," she said. "… I stand
behind him 100%."
The latest twist in the controversy came late Tuesday, when the
Armenian National Committee of America urged members to call for the
resignation of Times Managing Editor Douglas Frantz, whom Arax blames
for killing his story.
Harut Sassounian, a Southern California Armenian leader, and others
say thousands of e-mails have flooded the Times — and they plan to
continue pressing the matter.
The dispute erupted in early April after Arax completed a story on
the Armenian genocide resolution in Congress.
According to Sassounian and accounts in the online political journal
LAObserved.com, Arax’s article looked at how the resolution battle
was dividing not only Turks and Armenians, but also the Jewish
community. Some Jews feel a kinship with Armenians because both were
victims of genocide, while others don’t want to damage Israel’s
alliance with Turkey.
Frantz declined to comment on why he halted publication of the story.
But LAObserved.com has published several internal Times memos on the
issue, as well as a comment by Frantz.
"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, which is required by our
ethics guidelines, and because the reporter and an editor had gone
outside the normal procedures for compiling and editing articles," he
wrote in an e-mail to LAObserved.com.
Frantz said he was concerned about bias because the writer, along
with several other staff members, had signed a memo in the fall of
2005 to top Times editors. The memo pointed out that the paper wasn’t
adhering to its written policy of unequivocally referring to the
Armenian genocide as a historic fact.
Arax, a longtime Times staffer who currently is assigned to the
paper’s Sunday magazine West, declined to comment on the dispute.
However, he wrote a lengthy memo to his Times colleagues on Monday
that was posted on LAObserved.com in which he defended himself and
said he deserved a public apology from Frantz.
In the memo, Arax said an internal investigation found the reasons
cited by Frantz to be baseless. He offered no evidence of this
finding, however.
After Frantz stopped the story, a Times reporter in the Washington
bureau used some of Arax’s reporting to fashion a different story
that appeared on the paper’s front page April 21.
An April 26 memo by Editor James O’Shea to the staff that also was
posted on LAObserved.com said the published story "was the best one."
O’Shea noted that Arax’s story was not killed but had been sent back
for additional reporting. Arax could have had a double byline but
rejected it, O’Shea wrote.
Bill Erysian, coordinator of grants and international projects for
the Armenian Agribusiness Education Fund, a nonprofit based at
California State University, Fresno, said he has known Arax since
college. Arax has always been unbiased — even on Armenian issues —
Erysian said.
"The whole irony to this situation is Mark Arax is not an activist,
not a ‘professional Armenian,’ " Erysian said.
Arax, however, has taken public stances on other issues. Last year,
he tangled publicly with Fresno County Supervisor Bob Waterston at a
meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission, and also criticized
the LAFCO board for its failure to discuss urban sprawl.
Arax also wrote a letter to the editor criticizing The Bee after it
offered its Fresno Unified school board endorsements. The Bee had not
endorsed his sister, Michelle Asadoorian, who later went on to win
one of the trustee seats.
Local Armenians maintain that Frantz’s logic in the matter is flawed.
If his claim that Arax’s signature on a memo showed he has a
pro-Armenian bias, then the same claim could apply to other ethnic
minorities.
"Are you saying no Jewish people can write about the Holocaust?"
asked Barlow Der Mugrdechian, a lecturer in Armenian studies at
Fresno State. "That seems a little ludicrous."
Some Armenian activists believe Frantz has his own bias on the issue.
Before becoming managing editor of the Times, he was a longtime
correspondent in Istanbul, Turkey, and is scheduled to moderate a
panel discussion this month in Istanbul titled "Turkey: Sharing the
Democratic Experience."
In the end, many in the Armenian community say, something has to give
in the dispute.
Said Sassounian, the Armenian leader who first rallied a defense for
Arax: "There’s no way Douglas Frantz and Mark Arax can exist in the
same newsroom after what has happened. One of them has to go, and
hopefully not the one who is innocent, but the one who is guilty."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
