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The LA Times is Not your Friend

The rubble of the Los Angeles Times Building after the 1910 bombing by labor activists

Imagine yourself in the following situation.

Let's say that you’re a small business owner, a restaurant. One day, one of you customers comes in complaining of corruption in the police force. They tell you tales of how the police aren’t just protecting but actually running ‘houses of ill repute’ and they are shaking down other businesses for protection money.

Naturally, you’re appalled. You complain to city hall, only to find your complaints fall on the deaf ears of the mayor’s office, which is in fact at the very top of the chain of corruption that goes from his office all the way down to the beat cop. Now, who do you turn to right this injustice if the justice system itself is corrupt? Who else can you turn to complain? Why yes!

Of course you would turn to “the media”. Why once they hear of it, the muckraking journalists of the local newspaper will broadcast the criminality of the Mayors office for all to see.

If this tale were to follow the mythology set in our current post-Watergate culture, that’s exactly what people would expect to happen.

Only, what happens if the town newspaper is also part of the corruption? What do you do then?

But some of you are saying to yourselves “ oh that could never happen”.

But it did. The story I related is a true story. It’s the story Clifford Clinton, Mayor Frank L. Shaw and the Los Angeles Times.

In 1933, Frank L. Shaw was elected Mayor of the city Los Angeles. The LA Times was against his first candidacy, but after Shaw won the office He curried favor with the LA Times by reappointing a favorite of the Chandler family to be the police chief. And who was this favorite of the LA Times? He was a man named James Edwin "Two-Gun" Davis. What he did for the LA Times was to help protect the Times from labor strife, but for the mayor he was given the job of "enforcement" and that is to say he provided protection for the mayors gambling interests, prostitution, and the narcotics trade.

Mayor Shaw also placed his brother Joe on the city payroll as his personal secretary. His brother was allowed to impose his authority over the police and fire departments and served as the mayor’s personal conduit for shady backroom dealings with various offices of the city, including the Police Department.

In four short years, Mayor Shaw had managed to place the Police, Fire and the office of the assessor within the hands of a dictatorial and totally corrupt government.

But what about the free press oversight? Well, by the time of his re-election campaign, the LA Times became a solid supporter of Frank Shaw and endorsed him for a second term for Mayor. Seeing as how he did such a fine job protecting the interests at 'the Times' thats exactly what you might expect.

After Mayor Shaw was re-elected in a bitter and contentious campaign, ‘The Mayor’ decided to deflect some of the accusations of corruption by appointing a grand jury of his own making to investigate claims of corruption. Operating in Los Angeles at the time was a citizens committee called C.I.V.I.C. (Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Commitee). Mayor Shaw then asked the head of that committee to sit on the grand jury.

And who was that man?

The son of Salvation Army soldiers Edmond and Gertrude Clinton. Their son Clifford, founder of Clifton’s Cafeterias was already well known to Angelinos for his cafeteria policy of “Dine Free Unless Delighted." This was done during the Great Depression! That’s right, he offered free food to people at the height of the Great Depression. Why?, because it was the right thing to do. Clifford Clinton lived and breathed the 'golden rule'. Its too bad for Mayor Shaw that he didnt do is research before he appointed Clifford Clinton to the job of Grand Jury Foreman. There are some who think that Mayor Shaw assumed that Clifford Clinton would intimidate easily and this "pupetteering" would serve as good cover for the mayors manipulation of the Grand Jury. This, would turn out to be a serious misreading of the character of Mr. Clifford Clinton. Instead of getting a mouse in his pocket, Frank Shaw found a tiger.

Clifford Clinton took his role seriously and began to quickly form a case against the Mayors office from the evidence brought before the C.I.V.I.C committee. Mr. Clinton then hired Harry Raymond, the former police chief of Venice And San Diego as a private investigator to the Grand Jury. Mr. Raymond had proven himself to be incorruptible in the past. In very short order Clifford Clinton and Harry Raymond were able to show a web of corruption that had the police protecting gangsters and shaking down business owners for money, and stopping the judiciary from taking action against protected business interests that had paid Mayor Shaw for his influence.

Mayor Shaw, who had hoped to deflect the charges, had instead brought more attention than he had ever attracted before with his ham handed actions. Mayor Shaw then decided to stop funding the Grand Jury so as to slow and possibly stop the Grand Jury from possibly indicting former associates and family members.

He used of the city office of the assessor to increase the taxes on Mr. Clintons cafeteria and began a campaign of intimidation against the restaurant that included denial of a business license. The LAPD had Mr. Clintons home bugged and his home was under constant surveillance. Witnesses that Mr. Clinton brought before the Grand Jury were arrested and beaten. The LA Times ran scandalous pieces on the state of restaurants in the LA area, making it appear to their readers that Mr. Clintons business had to be the very example of a slum soupline.

Then Mayor Shaw went one step too far. On October 27, 1937, Clinton's home on the corner of Western and Los Feliz was bombed by the LAPD. The blast destroyed the basement and ground floor but left his family upstairs unharmed. Afterwards Mr. Clinton commented, "I'll never stop now." Shaw had now gone too far and in the end it would either be Clinton or Shaw left standing.

Its too bad Shaw didn’t stop there, but then he went even further. The private investigator Harry Raymond, who was used to being under surveillance by the police awoke one day to notice that the normal police presence around his house was suddenly missing. The next thing that he noticed was his car exploding into flame as he started it in the driveway. A bomb had been planted by officers of the LAPD on the order of the mayor. Harry Raymond was supposed to be dead, and for all at the scene, thats exactly what happenend.

When the Mayor hears of the bombing, he gives this statement to the press: “I know instances where men have been killed or injured by dynamite charge they had set themselves."

Now imagine the Mayors surprise when it was later revealed that Harry Raymond had in fact survived the attack and was now in a hurry to testify to the grand jury as soon as possible. Harry testified from his wheelchair, and his neighbors provided evidence supporting him despite acts of intimidation of fear by the LAPD to ensure that they remained quiet.

At this point the District Attorney, Mr. Burton Fitts, could no longer look the other way and appointed a Special Prosecutor to the case presented to him by the Grand Jury. The Special Prosecutor then took the prudent step of placing his family on a slow cruise to Hawaii while the case was underway so as to relieve himself of the burden of death threats made by members of the Mayors office. Such was the depth of fear in the world of LA politics in the 1930's.

The case of attempted murder on Harry Raymond resulted in the convictions of LAPD Lieutenant Roy Allen and Captain Earl Kynette for 10 years imprisonment for the attempted murder of Harry Raymond. While Harry Raymond recovered from his wounds, C.I.V.I.C launched a Recall campaign.

By the time of the Recall election occured, several other court cases against members of the Shaw administration were well underway. And what did do you think the LA Times would have to say in this matter, that oh-so-important link to a democracy being a free press.

The best example of the LA Times not just taking a neutral view, which would be bad enough, but taking a position of outright advocacy for this corrupt administration is this:

From the LA Times Editorial:

"Mayor Shaw was re-elected less than a year ago and by an emphatic majority of L.A. voters. If, as the present recall petitions allege, his successful candidacy was supported by underworld racketeers, then, and not now, was the time to act on the charge. If anything has happened since to justify so sweeping a reversal of that popular verdict as this recall seeks, it has not become public."

Incredible. Two bombings, one man nearly dead, witness intimidation and the L.A. Times was the only newspaper in Los Angeles not to condemn Mayor Shaw's administration. Moreover, they endorse him! Harry Chandler, the publisher of the LA Times and its interests in the family real-estate holdings required someone in charge who would do their bidding. That was far more important to the LA Times than justice and all that jazz that journalist students like to talk about in between classes.

“ I want to change the world ” they say. Well, we see how that went now don’t we…

Less than a year after his re-election, Frank L. Shaw was recalled from office, the first mayor in the history of the US to undergo this shameful act. Several members of his administration and his family went to prison for crimes committed during his reign as mayor. This was after being endorsed and re-endorsed repeatedly by the LA Times. Frank Shaw wasn’t as well known as Huey P. "Kingfish" Long, But he was equally as corrupt and given the opportunity to run the state of California, there is no doubt what might have occurred with access to that power and the protection of the media like the LA Times would have certainly provided.

Journalists have long enjoyed referring to themselves as “the fourth estate” and actually presume to be a part of the functioning government of the Democracy in which we live. But this is where the whole thing falls apart. Journalists work for companies. Companies have interests, interests that they will inevitably wish to protect. Journalists are not ‘private eyes’ working for the little man against the machine. No matter how they rationalize it, their deepest desire is not to see justice done, but revenue and influence produced.

And this is where blogs come in. For some reason that I can’t fathom, people actually trust the press despite their repeated demonstrated cases of malfeasance such as the Clifford Clinton story and the recent Dan Rather/Bush Guard documents clearly demonstrate. There are people in my acquaintance who actually look at the LA Times or the New York Times as the ‘arbiter of truth’, rather than just a corporate entity out to protect its interests. The LA Times is the "arbiter of the LA Times" Nothing more. The New York Times doesn’t tell the truth when it impacts their business and social interests, and neither does the LA Times. try to remember that when you think the press is naturally looking out for your interests.

The press wants to live within the fiction that it’s ‘looking out for the little guy’ but the truth is, there’s only one person looking out for the little guy, and that’s the little guy. Blogs are little guys. They write from passion and knowledge and when they have an agenda, they put it on their masthead. Journalism stopped being effective when Journalists started learning their craft from schools rather than being reporters on the streets looking for stories and learning how to write for real people.

I read blogs for news analysis for no other reason than I can get a much more accurate read on the situation from a sampling of individuals who blog on the issue than I can from 'central committee journalism' that is edited and revised to fit the party line view from a corporate entity like ‘the Times’.

William F. Buckley once said he would rather be ruled by a government formed out of the people found randomly in the Boston Phone book than by the graduates of Harvard University.

I say that I'd much rather get my journalism and news from people who write their own blog for free than someone who gets a paycheck from the LA Times. I think history will eventually back me up on that stand.

(Epilogue: More information on the fascinating and inspirational tale of Clifford Clinton can be found here:

Meals for millions
His Online Archive

If you are in the LA area, you can visit one of the Cliftons Cafeterias still in existence, with the Dine free unless delighted" policy intact.

Can one man make a difference? Clifford did...

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