BROOKE GLADSTONE:
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. Bob Garfield is away this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week, images of fires ravaging Southern California filled the news. The devastation was news, impossible to look away from. But according to Mike Davis, historian at the University of California, Irvine, it wasn't new. What was new was the tone of disaster coverage post-Katrina.

MIKE DAVIS:
For the last couple of days, at least the local TV and newspaper coverage on San Diego has been one long celebration. And, pointedly, it said over and over again, one phrase used was, "We've had a civilized evacuation. This is the opposite of Katrina" -- making the point, here we are in Qualcomm Stadium; you can get a backrub, a yoga lesson or a gourmet sandwich. The governor said everybody's happy.

What you're going to see, I believe, in San Diego County, at least, is a rather extraordinary outpouring of federal relief. And I'm sure people in New Orleans and other areas affected by Katrina, you know, are really wounded by the contrast not only between the response but between the characterization, the images that are being presented here, that we're dealing with two Americas, two different kinds of humanities.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Now, you've also argued that Los Angeles is prone to a whole slew of cyclical disasters and so it's not a question of if, but when, they occur.
MIKE DAVIS:
Well, we live in a classical Mediterranean landscape. Earthquakes and fires and floods are just the normal metabolism of the landscape. But we deliberately, almost, keep putting ourselves in harm's way. What could be more stupid than to keep rebuilding the same mansions in Malibu at the mouth of a canyon out of which blowtorch-like Santa Ana winds carry fire, punctually, every 10 or 20 years?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So, Mike, if these problems are built in, how are they covered in the local media? National reporters might not get L.A., but you looked at the archives of The Los Angeles Times. What did you find?
MIKE DAVIS:
Well, I looked at the archives of The Los Angeles Times and, of course, on the West Coast the primary rule of newspapers, whose proprietors are often major land developers or owners, like the Otis Chandler dynasty of The Times, was to burnish paradise to sell land.

You can find, for instance, that The L.A. Times very frequently either downplayed or simply didn't report disasters. The cure is to get some classical investigative reportage at the strategic links where campaign contributions turn in the right to undertake irresponsible development.

The most important agency in Southern California in terms of land use are the regional planning departments and regional planning commissions of the different county governments. And I once counted how often The L.A. Times covered the L.A. County Regional Planning Commission. And except for one year, when there was a monumental scandal involved, The Times covered this agency less than once a year.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Instead, you found one narrative the local media have had a long and deep attachment to, and that's the story of the arsonist?
MIKE DAVIS:
Well, yes. Certainly there, you know, are arsonists, and anybody who sets a fire with the deliberate goal of killing people and destroying their homes should be in super-max in Pelican Bay.

But this is one of the great hoary myths of the American West. During the First World War, of course, you know, there were German arsonists everywhere; during the Second World War, the Japanese. And my fear today, because there's an FBI arson investigation going on, is we're going to find some convenient link to the war on terrorism or to the immigration issue.

What fire scientists will tell you is that the biggest single cause of big fires like this is probably power lines blowing down, as they always do, during big Santa Ana winds. And even if all the arsonists could be identified genetically and locked up, it probably wouldn't make a bit of difference to the fire pattern.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Los Angeles is, arguably, the entertainment capital of the country, and you've noted that there are many depictions of some of the very real natural disasters of L.A. popping up in cultural portrayals of the city, in films and so on.
MIKE DAVIS:
Fictional or celluloid depictions of the destruction of Los Angeles, which now count, I mean, far more than 100 novels or films, is trimmed from tragedy to farce -- and certainly we can identify with, you know, the comedy of movies like Wilshire Boulevard or Towering Inferno -- but has begun to metamorphosize in the last couple of decades into something more sinister and disturbing, which is if you see one of these movies, the Martians invade and they destroy Fifth Avenue and it's very frightening and horrible, but then they incinerate some screaming hippies or gay men on top of a skyscraper in West Hollywood and suddenly it's okay.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So you're comparing, say, the destruction of people in Washington and in New York, say, in the film Independence Day, with the jokey incineration of counterculture types in L.A. in the same film.
MIKE DAVIS:
Sure. I mean, and on one level, that's just pardonable East Coast humor at the expense of arrogant Hollywood types who everybody in America likes to see destroyed by space villains [BROOKE LAUGHS] or giant insects. But there's a much darker literature out there of novels that blend into the kind of Christian apocalyptic genre where it's the punishment of L.A. for its sins. L.A. is depicted in the way that the Lower East Side of New York or Chicago were depicted at the turn of the century, you know, full of immigrants, full of violent lower classes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What do you think the impact is of all of these fictional depictions of the destruction of L.A. on people who don't live where you live?
MIKE DAVIS:
It is, of course, grist to Hollywood's mill. But it also tends to naturalize totally false images of the city, either the exception that, you know, the Los Angeles area should always be bright sunshine and Gidget at the seashore or the idea that this is a desert supported entirely by stolen water, too dangerous for anybody to live in, so that when disasters do happen, then the blame can be easily shifted to, you know, Mother Nature or to global warming. And it doesn't force us to look at the political and land use decisions over time that increase these hazards and magnify their vulnerability to the ordinary natural forces in our landscape.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And so if you want to translate this into pop culture terms, we should be watching Independence Day less and Chinatown more.
MIKE DAVIS:
Absolutely.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Mike, thank you very much.
MIKE DAVIS:
My pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Mike Davis is the author of Ecology of Fear.