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Good Blog: The Times Tracks Death
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2446 Reads
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Daniel Martinez, 16, shot 1/31 in a drive-by on his way home from school:
(image via LATimes.com) |
Someone had to do this: A weekly report on every single homicide in Los Angeles County.
Reporter Jill Leovy emails us (and everyone else, it appears) to say that the Times is embarking on the Homicide Report as a way of acknowledging something the paper has failed to cover for far too long: the untimely death of hundreds of Angelenos every year at each other's hands:
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Overwhelmed by the sheer volume, the Los Angeles Times, like other major media organizations, covers only a fraction of the more than 1,000 murders in Los Angeles County each year. Many violent deaths become, in essence, private homicides -- catastrophic on a small scale, invisible on a broader one. I think we grow numb to the easily compartmentalized facts of murder in L.A. - the sound bites, the pat metaphors, the "gang-related" tag that lets us forget promising 16-year-olds forever because they were murdered on some shitty block of some shitty street that most privileged Angelenos know nothing about.
The overblown TV-team coverage of "tragedy" pales in comparison with the blunt, forehead-pounding reality of the faces and names of people who were murdered almost every day this month - sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters erased from Los Angeles by hate, anger and jealousy.
Dunno how this stacks up against Times Innovation Editor Russ Stanton's moratorium on new blogs, declared last week, but this is easily one of the most bluntly local-minded things the L.A. Times has done in years.
Good. About time. Do more.
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Monday, February 05, 2007 - 11:11 PM
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