rganization recently gave an award to a magazine that endorsed the Simi Valley jury's acquittal of Rodney King's tormentors, because, according to the organization, that took courage (Reed 3).
In other words, in the face of the threat or perceived threat from the black community, the white jury showed courage in acquitting a group of armed white police officers in the vicious beating of an unarmed black man even when he was prostrate on the ground. This award, again, was given by a media organization after the riots, implying that the riot was solely the result of the verdict and had nothing to do with long-fermenting socioeconomic issues about which the white members of the Simi Valley knew little or nothing. The award speaks volumes for the attitude of the media toward the riots.
Lisa Baird, in "That Special Perspective They say They Want," from Columbia Journalism Review, writes that the bias demonstrated in the coverage of the riots extended not only to the subjects of that coverage (i.e., the participants in the rioting themselves) but also to the manipulation of those covering the riots as well;
Many blacks who covered the Los Angeles riots found the experience frustrating on many levels: at being sent out on the story only because they're black; at being called on to do the "street reporting" but not to write the analytical stories that followed the breaking news; and at the dearth of black editors in positions to shape the coverage, which many felt led to a focus on the rioting and concern that it be stopped rather than on the verdict and other factors that caused the outbreak (Baird 27).
The charges of bias in media coverage on the reporting side of the equation includes the claim that stories were altered from the black reporters' actual writing to the words and ideas of the editors:
One of only four blacks permanently ass
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