This is an archival story that predates current editorial management.
This archival content was written, edited, and published prior to LAist's acquisition by its current owner, Southern California Public Radio ("SCPR"). Content, such as language choice and subject matter, in archival articles therefore may not align with SCPR's current editorial standards. To learn more about those standards and why we make this distinction, please click here.
First, when we said it was going to rain yesterday, we kind of lied. We got some bad intel. The showers are now not expected until tomorrow. We also should probably apologize to Seattlest for the crack we made about them and rain. This season, we have twice the waterfall as our northern friends so we'll just shut up about all that.
While the aftermath of the Devin Brown shooting is interesting all on its own, today we're most interested in how our two major local papers covered his funeral. Dana Bartholomew's piece for The Daily News reads oddly to us. The story quickly becomes about "the African-American community" responding to the situation which just seems weird as the reaction of the people in South Los Angeles has been far from unified. As Solomon Moore notes in his Los Angeles Times article (which we will get to soon), people in the community are "coming together" but not all with the same agenda or outlook. It also is strange to us that with all the spectacle surrounding the funeral, Bartholomew considers clothing as newsworthy. We can hear the unwritten "tsk tsk" when she (he?) writes "Some came dressed for a funeral; others wore T-shirts emblazoned with the boy's smiling face."
Haven't South LA funerals (not to mention other cities across the country) for young people featured people wearing silk-screened R.I.P tees for at least 20 years?
The Los Angeles Times piece is much more nuanced. Moore notes that this memorial service was the coming together of "Muslims and Christians and Jews, Bloods and Crips" and he finds more newsworthy than the common garb inside the church, the antics outside the building. The Black Riders Liberation Army performed military drills while wearing gas masks and a truck came pulling a trailer with a billboard that read "The Black American Slave Holocaust". Now that seems like true spectacle to us.
Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent papers, we guess.
Quick Notes:
- Topanga can be proud. A local short-haired pointer is one of the finalists at the Westminster Dog Show.
- We caught Mayor Hahn's ad this morning during "Good Day LA" but we didn't pay attention.
- There were some odd charges on our credit cards this week, so this fraud case seems particularly relavent.
- King/Drew finally has some good news.
- Juan Manuel Alvarez plead not guilty yesterday.
- If you are a service worker in the UC system, you're probably underpaid.
- And we were wondering who the current coach of the Lakers was; the Daily Breeze comes through with a profile on Frank Hamblen.
(photo courtesy of Paddy Patterson and flickr.com)
