I have great respect for the resilience of NYC journalists. If the New York Times were consumed in a great conflagration, I have no doubt that the survivors would crawl from the wreckage, mix their blood with ashes for ink, and scrawl out an op-ed on how bad things are in Los Angeles.
Here are some tweets I posted Sunday.
I live in the City of LA. Last night a curfew warning popped up on my phone last night. Other than that, it was normal lockdown-quiet in my part of town. No shouting, no helicopters, no sirens. https://t.co/7JY6YMAaeF— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) May 31, 2020
[Should have been more clear, but the next part refers mainly to the national situation.]The situation is analogous to wildfires. It's a serious problem (particularly with respect to air quality) so people here are reluctant to push back against exaggerations, even when the national media suggests LA is engulfed in flames.— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) May 31, 2020
Later that evening things got more intense, but not in a way that disproved my point.
Important to note that the footage we're seeing of (largely peaceful) LA protests is from all over the county, but as far as I can tell, almost all of the looting footage is coming from two places, Long Beach and Santa Monica.— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 1, 2020
Here's where the old city/county question reappears. When people talk about NYC , they are referring to a city comprised of various counties. When people talk about LA, they are usually referring to a county comprised of different cities. The city/county distinction is important because, while the city is very big, the county is huge, with over 10,000,000 residents and land area of over 4,000 square miles.
In this case, almost all of the footage of riots and looting came from the cities of Long Beach and especially Santa Monica. This is clearly a county level story. Therefore it is essential to remember that the scenes that dominated the news were largely limited to two neighborhoods in a place with considerably more residents than NYC.
This is not to downplay the anger here or its causes or the damage it can do to innocent bystanders when it gets out of control, but when the media focuses all its attention on a tiny sliver of a town, the rest of the country gets a false impression, particularly when some people use the misinformation as disinformation.
Also Trump: " I have a friend lives in Los Angeles — they say all the storefronts are gone." https://t.co/y1yasnRymx via @CBSPolitics— Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org (@froomkin) June 1, 2020
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