KCRW DJ — icon! dame! — Anne Litt said in an on-air promo the other day that she has been hosting her music show on the station for 8 million years and as I heard it, it didn’t seem an exaggeration.
What easily seems 8 million years ago, Los Angeles First Amendment attorney Susan Seager and I worked as copy messengers in the massive newsrooms of the L.A. Times. After responding to the growls of stogie-chomping police reporters literally yelling “Copy!” as they pulled sheets of paper off their platens and handed them to obliging us, Susan went on to become a real reporter at the old Herald Examiner and at UPI. And then she went to Yale Law. And now she’s a “media law litigator at Davis Wright Tremaine in Los Angeles, defending journalists from lawsuits and unsealing court records and government records,” one of her bios goes.
She’s aces, in other words, to those of us in the L.A. press corps. She protects us, protects our rights, and the fact that she’s a superb journalist herself informs her legal work so much, as you can’t really know what it’s like to be a reporter unless you’ve done it (though the same would go for plumbers).
So last week, when this Opinion page ran an unsigned editorial headlined “L.A. city attorney to press: drop dead,” we had to include a comment from Susan, who represents the Los Angeles Press Club in a suit that led to a successful decision by a judge against the policies of the LAPD and City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. The judge quite rightly ruled that the Los Angeles Police Department ought not shoot journalists with their “non-lethal” guns that fire projectiles at 200 mph and cause a lot of pain.
Tuesday, Susan dropped me a note: “The City has cited no evidence of anyone trying to impersonate a reporter to get behind LAPD lines. If the LAPD is really worried about identifying journalists, it could send one of its 23 Media Relations officers ($4.7 million budget in 2024) to the scene of these public protests to help identify reporters. But it refuses to do so because it wants to keep *all* reporters away from filming the police. The LAPD doesn’t like being watched. Period. The injunction is easy to understand: cops are banned from shooting non-violent people with deadly projectiles — whether they’re protesters or journalists. Because it’s illegal.”
The chief and the city attorney haven’t been nearly chagrined enough about how egregious the many police assaults on reporters were during the demonstrations. Dozens of journos were shot.
While we all have short memories, and the news cycle is so overwhelming as this annus horribilis grinds on, it’s well to remember that video we all saw just a few months ago of police literally aiming at, and then literally shooting, a young woman TV news reporter from Australia as she was in the middle of a live stand-up in an intersection in downtown L.A.
In a rebuttal published Tuesday on this page, Feldstein Soto continues to go off on this weird tangent about how she just had to continue to appeal the judge’s ruling that our police shouldn’t target journos. She acts as if it’s just common sense, using the absurd argument that, since the press doesn’t wear uniforms — does she want, like, government-issued ones? — it’s impossible for police to tell who is a journalist and who is a mere rioter.
What was the hard part to tell about what that Aussie reporter was doing? While she appeared to be speaking into a large mike while being filmed by her cameraman, was she really just Antifa trying to sneak behind police lines for nefarious terrorist purposes?
In her piece, which acts throughout as if our editorial’s logic-flow was the height of eccentric nonsense that just gets her argument all wrong, she also completely neglects to note that her City Council voted 12-0 to also tell her she’s wrong, and that she shouldn’t appeal the judge’s ruling.
It is true — and a good thing, given the diminished size of the traditional local press corps — that many people covering the demos were from small, untraditional media. But American reporters have never had to register with the government to become official, as in so many other countries. We don’t need a license. The First Amendment doesn’t just protect those of us in the mainstream media. It enshrines “the freedom of … the press.” I simply agree with the judge, and disagree with the city attorney, that this means we should not be intentionally shot by police for doing our job.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com