The Arsonists in the Media Say the Fire is Too Hot

Surely the irony on display in the Los Angeles Times is unintentional.

A front-page story in Wednesday’s edition tells of the murder of 12-year-old Alexander Alvaro, who was shot to death while sitting in a car outside an elementary school in Wilmington, near the city’s port. Alvaro’s stepmother was wounded, as was a 9-year-old girl who was on the school playground.

Four Times writers are bylined and a fifth is credited for contributing to the story, which taken alone could be seen as an appeal for more effective policing and prosecution in Los Angeles. Citing another recent murder, the story tells of the recent wave of violent crime taking place across the city. “When philanthropist Jacqueline Avant was shot to death in her Trousdale Estates home last week,” the story reads, “former President Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and Magic Johnson, among others, tweeted their condolences. Avant’s death followed a rash of smash-and-grab robberies at tony boutiques and celebrity home-invasion robberies. Those incidents received national attention and sparked an outcry over rising crime.”

But this is the Los Angeles Times, after all, where you will never read an admission that their editorial policies and news coverage have contributed to the very conditions they now lament. Recall that the paper endorsed “progressive” prosecutor George Gascón for district attorney last year, and upon taking office he set about his stated mission of emptying the state’s prison cells and hamstringing the police in their effort to fight crime.

Note also that it is the L.A. Times’s skewed reporting on the police (see here, here, and here for three of many examples) that shapes public perception of the criminal justice system in California, paving the way for Gascón’s election and the enacting of legislation friendly to criminals and inimical to the interests of crime victims.

The L.A. Times is hardly alone in this. It merely echoes those sentiments first expressed in the sacred text of the left, the New York Times, from which they spread like cancer to nearly every other media outlet in the country. And now, as any rational person would have expected, these progressive prosecutors and criminal-friendly policies so ardently touted in the media have ushered in a crime wave, not just in Los Angeles but across the country.

This is the world our sophisticated betters in the media worked for. We can hope the country soon regains its senses when it comes to issues of crime and punishment, but it will come too late for Alexander Alvaro and thousands of other murder victims.