BOB GARFIELD:
This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Fifteen years ago this week, riots raged in Los Angeles and across TV screens around the world. The riots began mere hours after the acquittal of three police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King, captured on video and also widely televised. The images of looting, arson and violence were seen as a kind of response to the violence inflicted on King.

Mike Davis, a professor of history at the University of California Irvine, writes that the simplistic tale told by the media around these two sets of images obscured the real story behind the L.A. riots of '92 - the LAPD's oppressive policing program, Operation Hammer, the worst recession since the Great Depression, and mounting tension over incidents like the one involving a black teenager named Latasha Harlins and a Korean-American shop owner, who, after an altercation, shot her as she was leaving the store.
MIKE DAVIS:
And the storeowner killed the teenager and was sentenced, I believe, to several months of community service only. And this was just after an African-American postal worker had been put into the county jail for poisoning a dog.

You talked to teenagers, and they would ignore Rodney King. They wanted to talk about Latasha Harlins, and they wanted to talk about Operation Hammer.

So when the city finally exploded, it exploded in a very complex way – rage against the police, a pogrom of sorts against ethnic storeowners, particularly Korean-Americans. And something that you really have to describe as the kind of post-modern bread riot – just tens of thousands of people taking diapers and foods, shoes, VCRs.

And unfortunately the media tended to mix up cause and effect when, after the riots, food banks went into the neighborhoods and were just overwhelmed by people asking for food. The report was that, well, this was because the supermarkets had been looted. In fact, what we were seeing was the level of preexisting need.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You wrote that when the riots began, the media followed a narrative that had more to do with the Watts riots of 1965 than with the events of 1992.
MIKE DAVIS:
Well, the media is still portraying this in black-and-white terms in a city full of living color, a city in which many of the South Central neighborhoods that would have been, oh, 95 percent African-American in 1965 were now at 60 percent Latino. And so you have these large populations of working-class immigrants who are extremely vulnerable. And the media essentially ignored that story.

The media also, I think, ignored the rising tensions between the black community and the Korean-American business community. And they also, I think, failed to grasp the fact that really on the streets, Rodney King wasn't that important. He was the pretext. He was the thing that detonated it

But such a large percentage of youth in the community had had bad experiences with the LAPD, so there's this big story here, but a complex story, and it could never be portrayed in the infinite repetition of the image of the Rodney King beating.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
But you've also said that the media's shortsightedness in reporting the violence this way fit a narrative that a number of the communities were actually attached to.
MIKE DAVIS:
Well, to put it very bluntly, almost no one was interested in a deep investigation of the riot's causes or its complexity. From the standpoint of the African-American community, and it's quite understandable, they were so desperate to get attention to their long-ignored needs that they weren't happy with the idea of exposing this kind of hidden iceberg of Latino misery in the city. But at the same time, many Chicano politicians were not eager to highlight the fact that the majority of people arrested were not black. They had Latino surnames.

And, above all, the city's major institutions just wanted to get on with business and rebuilding the city. And it became almost unpatriotic to insist that we had to explore and understand better what had happened, or to see that this was a crisis rooted not just in one instance of police abuse, or even in the whole history of bad relations between the police and the community, but also in the structure of an economy that's double the poverty rate of the rest of the country, and the largest number of working poor people of any city. It remains socially the most combustible city in the United States.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In the 15 years since the L.A. riots, we've seen looters in New Orleans, riots in France last summer. Has the way these incidents been covered changed any since 1992?
MIKE DAVIS:
No. You're still getting the off-the-cuff false generalizations without real understanding of the events. In the case of New Orleans, the police chief himself resigned after admitting that the atrocities they claimed were going on hadn't happened. Then, as always, these kind of, you know, disembodied, lurid images then become the defining image of the event, and they tend to replace, you know, any kind of proper conversation.

If anything, riots are shouts. They're the demands to be heard. One of the problems in Los Angeles is that huge sections of the city don't have, any longer, reporters assigned to them. The L.A. Times has abandoned most of its, you know, regional editions.

So much of the city and its life and its problems exist in a kind of permanent shadow, except when they combust and burst into flame.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Mike, thank you so much.
MIKE DAVIS:
My pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz.